Knowing your market is essential to your business success. Understanding demographics enables you to do incredibly targeted marketing.
The demographics of your market are their geographic location, age, gender, family status, income, buying behavior, buying preferences, etc. Analyzing the demographics of your market helps you understand their behavior. Here are some essential questions for gathering demographics:
What is their age group?
What is their gender?
What is their family structure (number of children, extended family, etc.)?
What is their lifestyle like - active, sedentary, family-oriented, spiritual?
Where do they live?
What do they do for a living?
What keeps them awake at night?
How do they like to spend their spare time?
What motivates them?
What do they invest in specific to your offerings?
What are they likely to spend money on?
What is their annual income?
What methods do they prefer for online payment?
What types of websites, forums, and social networks do they visit?
How do they want their product delivered?
How many people make up this market?
Gathering Market and Customer Information
Obtaining customer demographics does not have to be difficult or costly. You can determine what your market wants by studying your own existing market or by studying a competitor's market and product. Gather information from places your market congregates:
· Social networks
· Online and offline media reports and stories
· Blogs concerned with market trends
· Conduct surveys of your market
Market Segmentation
As you develop your marketing strategy, keep in mind that you should market in different ways to different segments of your market. You cannot be all things to all people. Instead of marketing a product in one way to everyone, you may need to market differently to markets with different demographics. Regardless of your product, divide your total market into segments according to what is important to each demographic group.
A couple of years ago I developed an information program that taught how to develop information products. When I launched my product-creation course, I started by offering a free video series on how to develop profitable products. I did the same thing when I developed a list-building program; I offered a free video series on list-building. Each free offer attracted thousands of new subscribers. Some people got on both lists, while a great many did not.
With two very different product offerings, it was essential to segment the subscriber list. Market segmentation enables you to target different categories of customers who perceive the value of certain products differently from one another. I divided the list into list-building contacts and product-creation contacts according to what people opted in for, and maximized my marketing efforts by fully customizing follow-up messages for each segment of my main list. When you don't segment your market, you experience more opt-outs.
Take time upfront to understand your market in order to benefit in the long run. You will be glad you did.
Kathleen Gage is the author of: Power Up for Profits - The Smart Woman's Guide to Online Marketing scheduled for release in July, 2013. Get a sneak peek of the book with two FREE chapters at http://www.kathleengagetrains.com/freechapter
Kathleen works with consciously focused speakers, authors, coaches and consultants helping them to build six figure businesses by packaging their knowledge so they can reach more of their market, impact positive change and create multiple streams of revenue.