How Well Do You Know Your Audience?

It’s a key marketing commandment, “know thy audience.” Combining demographic and psychographic analysis will help us obey this basic rule and to build a more effective marketing strategy focused on the ideal target.

Especially in the tech sector, demographic and psychographic dimensions affect customer adoption paths. Stakeholders are influenced by different channels at different adoption phases. Who is the target, what kind of information do they want, when do they want it – these are the basic questions this data can help us determine.

Demographics, a look at the tangible characteristics of a target audience, is sometimes the only area that a BtoB marketer will examine. Combining demographic data with psychographics – the attitudes, interests and opinions of prospective buyers – will help to reveal your best targets.

Demographics statistically measure the non-psychological attributes of a sector. In our BtoB segment these typically include:

• Company size/sales volume
• Geographic location
• Job title and function
• Age and gender
• Number of employees
• Number of locations/branches
• Primary business activity
• Budget estimate for a particular product/service
• Primary ways of conducting business

You can develop an online survey that encompasses these attributes, but most of these are reliably “buyable.” Industry trade associations, list brokers, trade magazines (print, Web & e-mail), and vertical & industry search engines have already done this work in depth. And you can’t forget the demographics information available on your in-house database and CRM systems. So mine whatever combination of these resources you can to give you the best demographic target base.

Psychographics marketing puts people/customers in behavioral categories, but for BtoB it should really focus on measuring customer perceptions of how well the company delivers on the critical success factors of the business. These would include customer and prospect views on:

• Service promptness
• How well the product/service meets needs
• Staff responsiveness
• Understanding of the customer’s problem
• Product preferences and the importance of different features
• Buying habits
• Website usability
• Opinions of the marketplace in general
• Top pain points
• Industry publications/blogs regularly read

Gathering this data can come in the form of in-person interviews, focus groups, questionnaires and industry councils. Some of the best information for developing psychographic data can come from customer satisfaction and loyalty surveys. It’s not as easy as the buyable demographics, but it will be worth it when it comes to finding out the customer’s real mindset.

One of the ways to tackle in-person interviews is through a third-party team that specializes in your product sector. An example in the tech sector is Point of Reference, an interviewing firm made up of former IT sales reps.

When it comes to defining your market segments, combining demographic and psychographic information will provide a sound basis for your marketing strategy.