Skip to Main Content

Accounting & Taxation Resources

Importance of Demographics Research

Demographics help you identify the individual members of your audience by key characteristics, wants, andvariety of media types represented by a smartphone needs. Before conducting demographics research, you must determine if your customers are individuals or businesses. This will guide variable selection and information gathering. For example, if the customers are individuals, variables such as gender, age, income, etc. will guide information gathering. However, if companies form your customer base, variables such as the industry, sales, and the number of employees become important. Here are some benefits of doing effective demographics research and analysis:

  • Demographics explain who makes up your audience and help you to segment your customers by individual characteristics and needs.
  • You can use demographics to refine your marketing budget and make more targeted investment decisions about how to engage your audience.
  • Demographic data can help brands narrow the scope of their marketing efforts so that their time and money aren't spent pursuing people who are unlikely to become customers.

Importance of Market/Customer Segmentation

Image of a person teachingCustomer segmentation is the process of dividing a target market into smaller groups, based on shared characteristics including demography, psychography, geography, behavior. Your ability to identify and group your target market by lifestyle, hobbies, location, habits, etc., will help to inform your promotional and marketing strategies. Market segmentation will help you customize your product/service, distribution channel, pricing, and marketing message and channel, to grab the attention and meet the specific needs of a narrowly defined customer group.

Psychographics data is just as important as demographics data. Coupled together, they will help you get a clearer picture of your customers’ needs and what moves them to take action to satisfy those needs. Simply put, demographics defines WHO your buyers are, while psychographics explains WHY they buy.

Demographic Data Sources

The following databases are good places to start finding consumer research data including but not limited to demographics and psychographics data:

Other Online Resources

While you will find a lot of demographic information through the libraries' databases, you may need to look to other resources online for additional information. The following resources will help you with this research: