What is Demographic Targeting and Why You Should Be Using It
Demographic targeting is the ability to target new patients based on characteristics like their age, gender, income-bracket, level of education etc. Instead of showing your ads to everything, it’s helpful and more cost effective to narrow-in on groups of people that are more likely to convert. Demographic targeting in addition to other kinds of targeting like location targeting and interest-based targeting allow us to do this.
The process for applying demographic data to your marketing campaigns involves:
- Capturing demographic data on your website.
- Analyzing the captured data to isolate demographic trends that should be applied to your marketing campaigns.
- Applying the demographic trends to your marketing campaigns.
- Measuring results.
When to Use Demographic Targeting?
Not to sound too over-eager but you should use it whenever you can get away with it. Some marketing and advertising platforms limit the extent to which businesses in the “medical or health industry” can apply demographic targeting. You’re allowed to capture it, it’s just the application (so step number three above) that’s sometimes limited. Still, in this application, it’s worth at least trying to apply demographic targeting.
Where to Find Your Practices Demographic Targeting?
No matter which marketing and advertising channel you want to apply the data to – Google Analytics is the place to capture all data regarding your digital properties (website traffic, social media traffic etc.). Once you’ve got the data pooling in Google Analytics you can dig into the data to isolate who your audience really is. In the ‘Demographics’ and ‘Behaviors’ tabs you’ll be able to isolate their age, gender, affinities and interests. You can then use this data in advertising platforms like Google AdWords.
How to Apply Demographic Targeting to Your Digital Marketing?
The application process looks different depending on which marketing and advertising platform we’re talking about. In Google AdWords you’ll be applying the demographic data from Google Analytics in your ‘Display Network’ campaigns. In Facebook, you’ll be cross-referencing the demographic data from Google Analytics with the targeting options available in the Facebook Ad Manager. From an organic stand point you’ll use the demographic data to shape the content on your website. Populations will find different kinds of content interesting based on their interests, age, gender etc. Once you know which group of people converts most effectively for your business, you’ll want to appeal to them as much as possible by say, writing blog posts about topics they’ve shown interest in, tailoring your content to their age bracket, or even shaping your pricing policies to their income-brackets.
