Audience Analysis: Demographics Enable Effective Targeting
Every marketer knows that understanding the audience is the foundation of a successful campaign. Audience analysis provides a data-driven understanding of what compels consumers to make a purchase or stay loyal to a brand. With information gained from audience analysis, marketers can craft targeted messaging that drives action, identify the most-effective channels and platforms to advertise on, discover ways to increase average order value, and more. In audience analysis, which we examine in this article, demographics plays a key role. We also look at the best sources for collecting data to perform audience analysis.
Types of Audience Analysis
Holistic audience analysis involves researching various characteristics of a group. While demographic information is an essential aspect of audience analysis, it’s not the only one. Audience analysis also includes psychographic analysis, behavioral analysis, situational analysis, and multicultural analysis. Before we dive deeper into demographic audience analysis, let’s glance at each of these aspects for a broader context.
- Demographic analysis focuses on statistical data about a population, such as age, geographic location, education level, and so on.
- Psychographic analysis looks at the internal landscape of a group, including values, beliefs, attitudes, and interests.
- Behavioral analysis examines an audience’s behavior related to the buyers’ journeys, such as what social media platforms they engage with, what type of content they consume, where they look for product recommendations, and so on.
- Situational analysis takes into account the fact that variable factors influence an audience. For example, the season of year heavily influences the purchasing behavior of an audience.
- Multicultural analysis seeks to understand the differences within a group and how those differences may impact a marketing initiative.
What Is Demographic Audience Analysis?
Demographic audience analysis defines and examines an audience by its demographics such as age, geography, gender, education, income, and other statistical data. Understanding these characteristics offers insights into an audience’s expectations, the context in which they’re making purchasing decisions, and the cultural influences that should be accounted for. Additionally, it is one of the most accessible types of audience analysis because this information is readily available.
Components of demographic data for audience analysis
To see how demographic analysis influences the effectiveness of marketing initiatives, consider these common demographic data components of audience analysis.
Age: The age range of a market segment can offer clues into stage-of-life events that the audience may be experiencing, such as raising a family or preparing for retirement. Age can also indicate particular preferences and perceptions. Knowing the age range of your audience can also tell you which channels, platforms, websites, and publications to focus on.
Geographic location: A variety of information, from cultural influences to weather events, can be gleaned from knowing the geographic location of your audience. Retailers especially benefit from geographic data.
Socioeconomic status: Understanding socioeconomic status will tell you what price point to target and what product types are likely to perform well for a given audience.
Gender identity: The gender identity of an audience can also provide important clues into its needs and desires. Beyond the obvious, gender may have subtle influences on demand for various product types.
Industry: For B2B companies, knowing the industry or industries an audience operates within will improve the ability to target pain points and choose the appropriate terminology and examples.
While these are just a few of the many components of audience demographics, this list reveals the impact of having this information at your fingertips when crafting a marketing campaign.
Use Cases for Audience Analysis
Marketers across industries are using audience analysis to improve the results of their initiatives in many different ways. Here are a few examples.
Media companies track advertising metrics
With robust audience analysis, media companies and publishers can provide effectiveness metrics and insights into what content resonates best with various audiences. This data allows companies to assist advertisers in making their campaigns more successful, retaining existing advertisers and attracting new ones.
Retailers hone retargeting strategies
Retailers can overlay demographic and purchasing behavior data to identify which segments are most likely to purchase at any given time. With this information, they can improve their ad retargeting effectiveness.
More-effective targeting reduces ad costs
Marketers in all industries are able to use audience analysis to better understand the desires and pain points of their audiences. With these insights, marketers can craft highly specific messages and target segments on the platforms and channels most likely to reach them.
Better insights increase customer engagement
Armed with demographic, psychographic, behavioral, and situational data, marketers can more effectively create content that resonates with each market segment they serve and deliver it at the most appropriate time based on each buyer’s journey and situational factors.
How to Collect Data for Audience Analysis
Audience data can be found in a variety of places, and most organizations have a wealth of internal data waiting to be mined for audience-related business insights. Here are five sources you shouldn’t overlook.
Brand mentions online: Look at who’s talking about your company or products on forums, reviews sites, and social media, and see what they’re saying.
Your social media accounts: Gather information about the people engaging with your brand on Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram, and other social media pages.
Your SaaS tools: Marketing platforms, CRM systems, customer service platforms, and chat tools all hold valuable audience insights data.
Your website: Your website is an excellent source of audience insights. Track behavioral patterns and content consumption patterns, and identify paths to purchase.
Third-party data: You’re not limited to using only data that you own to glean audience insights. Open and commercial data sets, such as those in Snowflake Marketplace, are available.
Snowflake for Audience Analysis
Snowflake makes audience analysis simple for marketers and media companies. The Snowflake Data Cloud virtually eliminates data silos to create a single repository for a single copy of your audience data. As a result, marketing teams can more easily extract insights and deliver timely, relevant, and consistent customer messaging and offers. Snowflake makes it simple to create 360-degree views of customer behavior for a more thorough understanding of the buyer’s journey. And thanks to Snowflake’s robust governance and security features, marketers and media companies can share live customer data with partners while complying with consumer privacy regulations, such as California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) and GDPR.
To see Snowflake’s audience data capabilities firsthand, sign up for a free trial.