I want to talk about customer demographics. They are key to connecting with your current and potential customers and making your product or service more appealing to them.
I hope you know what customer demographics are. If not, you should. They’re incredibly important to your business.
These are the basic pieces of information you need to know about your current and potential customers. Simple stuff, like:
- Age
- Gender
- Work
- Position
- Income
- Homeowner or renter?
- Married or single?
- Do they have kids and if so, how many?
- Do they have pets and if so, what kinds?
- Where do they live?
- Do they live in a house, an apartment or other dwelling?
The list goes on and on.
You may wonder why it’s important to know this information. Let’s face it. You just want to sell your products and services. You don’t want to become their BFF. (Well, you do, but more about that later.)
You need to know this information because it affects how you speak to these people in your marketing.
The way you’d talk to a Millennial working as a programmer at a startup and living in a hi-rise in the downtown area of a major metropolitan area is completely different from the way you’d talk to a suburban housewife and mother of 3 who owns her own home and runs a successful blog on the side.
Understanding who you’re talking to and knowing the most basic information about them gives you an edge over the competition. It lets you appeal directly to those people, clearly identifying them as your audience, so you can say, “Hey, I get you. I understand your problem. I can help.”
When you have this information, you can use it to influence everything from the images and language you in your marketing use to the platforms and methods you choose to get your message out there.
Doing this research is fairly easy. Look at your current customers and take a baseline from them. Then you expand out to see who else is interested in your product or service and include those demographics in your audience as well.
You may already know some of this information because your product or service may be designed for a specific group of people. If you sell in-person, you’ll literally know the faces of your customers and will probably have had conversations with them.
If you don’t have this information, you can do a few things to collect it:
- Send out a survey to your current customers, asking some basic demographics questions.
- Add some “getting to know you” questions to your website in the form of popups.
- Ask new customers to fill out your survey as part of your purchase confirmation email.
- Set up a Meta pixel on your website.
This last one is particularly important. Facebook and Instagram do an excellent job of tracking visitors to your website, whether you pay them to run ads or not.
When you add a Meta pixel to your site, anyone who visits your site will be tagged. Facebook and Instagram will gather this information and collect demographics on everyone who has visited your website over the last 28 days.
This is a great way to learn about people who have not purchased from you yet but may in the future. Knowing who they are and what they like will make it easier to target them in future Facebook ads, posts and elsewhere in your marketing.
Please Note: Meta doesn’t let you see a lot of this demographic information anymore, as they have changed their platform and rule since this post was originally written. However, the pixel is still very useful to target your audience on Facebook and Instagram.
Here are instructions, from Meta, on how to create a Meta pixel for your website. Once you’ve created it, you’ll need to add it to your site. Where and how it is added will depend on the platform you use, such as WordPress, Wix, SquareSpace, Shopify, etc. Your website platform provider should have instructions on how to do that.
Once you have this information, you’ll be able to do a much better job of segmenting your potential customers and customizing your marketing to each group.
Now That You Know Your Customer Demographics, Get Inside Their Heads.
Next, you need to understand your customers’ psychographics.
These are the activities your potential customers participate in, the books and magazines they read, the websites they visit, the television shows and movies they watch, as well as their personal beliefs.
Why does all of this matter?
It shows you a lot about the way they think.
People buy from companies they trust. Trust is built around shared values and beliefs. Knowing how your current and potential customers think can help you shape your messaging around those thoughts and beliefs.
For instance, let’s say your product or service appeals to suburban women with 3 kids who are in middle management positions in major corporations and they drive SUVs. But it also appeals to urban men who are single, have mid-level production positions (like developers) in small start-ups and take public transportation everywhere. (Yes, this is a stretch, but stranger things have happened, like My Little Pony and the Bronies.)
Knowing what appeals to both groups will help you speak more clearly to each of them. And it will prevent you from generalizing your marketing messages so they fail to appeal to either group.
It also gives you cultural reference points that you can refer to in your marketing, which can make it feel more human and relatable. For example, I did that a while ago with all my references to Star Wars when I was talking about the buyer’s journey.
You can use the same, or similar methods to research your potential customers’ psychographics to their demographics. You can also look at online forums and social media groups that are related to your product or service to find this information.
Knowing how your potential customers think will give you the edge when it comes to attracting them to your product or service and convincing them to buy.
Customer Demographics + Psychographics = How They Feel
Now it’s time to talk about your potential customers’ emotional states.
“Okay, why should I care about how my potential customers feel about anything?” I hear you ask.
Easy.
If you understand what makes them happy, sad, angry, or scared. If you know their most fervent hopes and deepest desires, you can show how your product or service can contribute to achieving those hopes and desires.
Plus, you can empathize with their anger and fear and demonstrate how your product or service can save them from a fate they may consider worse than death. (Okay, I may be exaggerating a little here, but to them, it may feel that way.)
Are you playing on your potential customers’ emotions?
Yes.
Don’t worry, marketers do this all the time. You probably get at least 50 marketing messages a day that do their best to trigger an emotional response in you. (Just scroll through your social media feeds or watch about 5 TV commercials if you don’t believe me.)
Why do we marketers do this?
Because it works.
We humans are emotional creatures and having those emotions validated by others makes us feel better about ourselves and think positively of those who validate us. And it causes us to trust and buy from them.
So, yes, you should definitely pay attention to your potential customers’ emotions.
How do you figure this out?
Listen to them.
Read the comments in some of those social media posts related to your business or industry. Look in those business-related forums for long, heart-rending threads about peoples’ problems. They’re out there. It’s amazing what people will spill to total strangers, especially when they would never dare share the same information with their nearest and dearest.
Ask your current customers how they felt before they found your company and how they feel now that your product or service is helping them.
This is also a great way to get testimonials, but please ask your customers if you can use their words as a testimonial before slapping it up on your website, especially if you didn’t specifically request one.
Once you understand your potential customers’ emotions, you can use those emotional triggers in your messaging and show how your product or service will fulfill those deepest wants and desires. This is what causes a person to say “yes” and click on that buy button or hand over their hard-earned money.
“Okay, How Do I Use This Customer Information?”
Simple.
You use your customer demographics, psychographics and emotional triggers to tell your current and potential customers their own story.
“Well that seems a very round-about way to do things.” I hear you say.
It’s not and here’s why.
We all relate to stories. It’s ingrained in us from childhood. Stories are a profoundly human form of communication and they’ve been used for eons to share information.
More importantly, we all relate to stories where we can see ourselves as the main character. (Yes, we are back to my Star Wars analogy with the Buyer’s Journey again, after a fashion.)
Now that you know your current and potential customers intimately and understand their hopes and fears.
Now that you understand their pain points and see the dreams they want to achieve, you can tell them their story, with them as the main character.
Show them the life they will have, once they have found the solution to their problem. Show them how much better their lives will be once they have conquered their challenges, claimed their treasure and returned victorious to their communities.
Of course, your product or service is the solution to their problem.
The challenge they will overcome is discovering how your product or service has changed their lives.
The treasure is a better, happier life, now that they’ve overcome this challenge. And they’ll tell their family and friends all about it, giving you more customers.
See how nicely this works out?
Happy endings for everyone involved.
In addition, you can tell a potential customer’s story through case studies of current customers.
Pick a few customers who have raved about your product or service to you or to their friends and family. They’re usually the ones who have given you a glowing testimonial or who keep referring new customers to you.
Ask them if you can do a case study on their before and after story.
That’s what a case study is. A picture of a person’s situation before they found your product or service, and again after they achieved their hopes and dreams by using your product or service.
It’s another way to use storytelling to show a potential customer how much better their life can be if they purchase your product or service.
In this case, they’re seeing real-life results of someone who has been where they are and has radically changed their own life for the better after finding your solution to their problem.
When they see how effective your product and service has been for others, they have a much easier time seeing themselves in that lead, “hero” role of success and fulfillment. An empathetic story that basically mirrors their own can be very convincing.
Go Collect and Use Your Customer Demographics to Make Your Marketing More Persuasive
Now that you know how powerful customer demographics, psychographics, and emotional triggers can be, use them!
Yes, having this information is to your advantage.
Remember, you’re helping your customers by giving them exactly what they want, a solution to their problems.
To help you out, I’m including my Customer Persona Sheet here for you to download and use as a central point for all of this information. It lists out all the traits I’ve discussed here and gives you space to record them for your ideal client.
Click on the button below to get your copy now.