It is fair to say that most businesses tend to use customer demographics to hone their online marketing campaigns. After all, this is a great way to attract your target audience and present them with advertising or promotions that appeal to their interests.
Recent research however, has found that the traditional demographic groups that we generally target are changing, meaning that business owners need to take another look at how they target their customers. It appears market groups could be better targeted by understanding customer attitudes, rather than straight demographics.
Benefits of targeting customer attitudes rather than demographics
With the continual growth of the internet, it is no longer the domain of the very young. Now everyone from young children to great-grandparents are online, searching for products or services, blogging, making new friends and generally using the internet in their daily lives.
This means that targeting your audience simply by their age is no longer as relevant as it used to be, say five years ago. Using age as a targeting demographic can actually alienate many potential customers, meaning that you lose out on traffic, sales and profits.
Targeting attitudes, rather than age groups or social strata helps you to identify groups of potential customers that were previously hidden to you. For example, research has shown that a large group of people over 65 years of age and those between 25 and 34 years of age are worried about online security.
If you run a business that targets people who are concerned about online security and you ignored consumer attitudes, you would have most probably focused on targeting the younger age group and missed a huge opportunity to market to the over 65s.
This type of traditional targeting using demographics is still used by many businesses today, but sooner or later there will be a big move to including consumer attitudes as foci for marketing campaigns, as well as traditional demographics.
It is fair to say that one size does not fit all and we don’t want to ignore our customer’s demographics. What we need to do is to look further afield, streamlining our marketing efforts and achieving a higher ROI than previously achievable, when we simply focused on standard demographic data.
If you want help with online marketing or social media marketing, call GO Creative on (07) 3333 2932 or request a free quote online.
