Webwindows on the Necessity of Demographics in Advertising

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This week Webwindows is taking the time to remind you that you always identify your demographic before you go ahead with any ad campaign. Here’s why.

Advertise to the Gap in the Market

No matter the budget, platform or creativity of your advertising campaign, if it’s targeted at the wrong demographic, it’ll ultimately prove useless. This a basic advertising truth that has been known since the dawn of modern media.

Here’s the thing. There is no product, service, business model etc. that applies to absolutely everybody. If such a thing existed, there would never be a gap in the market for you to move into. It would already be filled.

A Case Study of the Effects of Demographics.

Look at it like this. Say you’re the CEO of a renewable energy company. The advantages of renewable energy are obvious, so you have the bare bones of an ad campaign. Then you proceed to craft a brilliant commercial targeted at the upper middleclass household.

You’ve completely miss-fired. Any demographics study will tell you that upper middle class households are comprised of high income earners. High income earners generally fall into the above 40 age range, due to the fact that employers value experience, so a new graduate wouldn’t have the necessary knowledge base required to convince an employer to hire them for a high income position.

How does this relate? Well Pew Survey back in 2011 found that whilst 71% of millennials support the development of alternative, eco-friendly sources of fuel, only 69% of Gen Xer’s and 60% of Baby Boomers said the same. Therefore, your target market is the younger set and you’ve wasted money by targeting the wrong demographic.

How Can You Target the Right Demographic?

So how can you target the right demographic? In the development of your business you should have already identified the gap in the market for your service, and you need to continue to conduct extensive market research to identify how your key demographic may react to your advertising strategy.

Let WebWindows finish with this. You need to know your consumer. Demographics are key to determining the tone, voice and content of your advertising strategy, so that it reaches the right people, convinces the consumer to come to you, and has the desired effect of lifting your profit margins.