Developing a strong and accurate understanding of your audience is an extremely important part of creating and executing a successful marketing campaign for both traditional and digital media. People have a wide array of identifying characteristics, and to ensure you’re reaching the right group, you have to be sure that you’re targeting individuals with the most relevant traits to your business goals.
In other words: You can be saying the right thing, but if you’re speaking to the wrong people… it won’t matter!
An important piece of this puzzle is utilizing something called market segmentation. Market segmentation includes four overarching categories: demographics, psychographics, geographics, and behavioral characteristics. Let’s break these categories down further to understand what each includes.
Demographics
Demographics are simply defined as the characteristics of a certain population used to study the attributes of that group. This includes identifiers such as age, gender, income, marital status, and ethnic background.
Psychographics
Psychographics are defined as “the study and classification of people according to their attitudes, aspirations, and other psychological criteria, especially in market research.” This includes the activities, personalities, lifestyles, interests, opinions, values, and beliefs of the audience.
Geographics
According to Qualtrics, Geographics are defined as “a marketing strategy used to target products or services at people who live in, or shop at, a particular location. It works on the principle that people in that location have similar needs, wants, and cultural considerations.” Depending on who you are trying to reach, this can be broken down to target local, regional, national, and international audiences.
Behavioral
Behavioral segmentation focuses on when and how a consumer chooses to spend money on a product or service. By studying the consumers’ shopping behavior, marketers are able to leverage information such as what factors they consider while making decisions, what is important when they are choosing between one product over another, and how they feel about a product, service, company, or industry.
If you’re curious about how to apply these areas of market segmentation to your current marketing strategy, we’re here to help! Our team of marketing professionals can help you understand and implement tools to effectively understand your audience. Schedule a free consultation with us today by contacting us at stacie@otmadv.com.
