If you are new to business and marketing—or just trying to learn more about the hows and whys of understanding your market or industry—it might help you to understand market demographics by paying attention to what I call the “Big Three”: age, gender, and salary.
I have written before about ways to figure out your target audience and potential market for your product or service, but I have made an assumption that we all know and understand what market demographics actually are. Demographics can actually get rather complicated and can be as detailed and intricate as you want to make them. However, understanding your market can also be as simple as concentrating on what the age, gender and salary range of your target market or audience actually is.
You can find this out by doing your own research of your current customer base—or you can always hire professionals to help you conduct market surveys, focus groups and other expensive activities that will pinpoint your market. You can also just do an informal comparison and look at who is buying your product or service and who you THINK will buy your product or service. How old are they? Are they males or females or both? And what sorts of jobs do they do (including salary, where they live, what they spend their money on, etc.)? Once you’ve determined the answer to these three basic demographic categories, you can learn other things about your market—whether they are likely to have families, be traveling, have health care concerns, etc. A lot of those secondary demographic questions can be answered by looking at the age, gender and salary of your market.
Using and understanding marketing demographics doesn’t have to be daunting or complicated. Just keep your focus on the “big three” of age, gender and salary and you should be able to get a pretty good picture of what market segment you are working with.
See Also: Understanding Integrated Marketing