Why demographics are important

The importance of demographics Demographics are important so that you can understand how customers search for information and purchase products and services online. Share this post.

Demographics are important so that you can understand how customers search for information and purchase products and services online. Think about the last significant purchase you made and your demographic characteristics of gender, age, physical location, education level, employment status, marital status, income, and cultural background.

Discuss how your demographic profile may assist the seller of the product to attract you to their business. Want to keep learning? See other articles from this course.

This article is from the online course:. Join Now. News categories. Other top stories on FutureLearn. We explore the current business landscape in India, identity the 5 best startup opportunities and …. You can gather demographic information on a large group and then break it down into smaller subsets for deeper dive into your research.

Most large companies conduct demographic research to determine how to market their product or service and best market to the target audience.

It is valuable to know the current customer and where the potential customer may come from in the future. Demographic trends are also significant since the size of different demographic groups changes over time due to economic, cultural, and political circumstances. This information helps the company decide how much capital to allocate to production and advertising. For example, the aging U. Each market segment can be analyzed for its consumer spending patterns.

Older demographic groups spend more on healthcare products and pharmaceuticals, and communicating with these customers differs from that of their younger counterparts. Demographics refers to the description or distribution of characteristics of some target audience, customer base, or population.

Governments use socioeconomic information to understand the age, racial makeup, and income distribution among several other variables in neighborhoods, cities, states, and nations in order to make better public policy decisions. Companies look to demographics to craft more effective marketing and advertising campaigns and to understand patterns among different audiences.

The U. Census Bureau collects demographic data on the American population every year through the American Community Survey ACS and every years via an in-depth count of every American household. Companies use marketing departments or outsource to specialized marketing firms to collect demographics on users, customers, or prospective client groups. Academic researchers also collect demographic data for research purposes using various survey instruments.

Political parties and campaigns also collect demographics in order to target messaging for political candidates. Demographics are key to businesses today. They help identify the individual members of an audience by selecting key characteristics, wants, and needs. This allows companies to tailor their efforts based on particular segments of their customer base.

Online advertising and marketing have made enormous headway over the past decade in using algorithms and big data analysis to micro-target ads on social media to very specific demographics. Economists recognize that one of the major drivers of economic growth is population growth. The more people around, the more available workers there are in the labor force, and also more people to consume items like food, energy, cars, and clothes.

There are also demographic problems that lie on the horizon, such as an increasing number of retirees who, while no longer in the workforce, are nonetheless expected to live longer lives. Unfortunately, the number of new births seems to be too low to replace those retirees in the workforce. United States Census Bureau. Marketing Essentials. Behavioral Economics.

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If you need help reaching the right target audience, you can rely on a service that will get you enough respondents to conduct a successful survey with the right demographic mix. SurveyMonkey Audience not only makes it easy to find people who will take your survey, it also eliminates the need for them to even answer demographic questions. Well, you can send your questionnaire to a selected group of respondents based on the demographic targets you want to reach.

SurveyMonkey Audience knows who is taking the survey and therefore it can automatically pipe in five types of demographic information gender, age, household income, device used to take the survey, and location directly into your results. Using the Filter and Compare tools in SurveyMonkey Analyze, you can easily compare and contrast how different demographic groups answer your questions. This makes demographic segmentation and data analysis with SurveyMonkey Audience even easier.

Products Surveys. Specialized products. View all products. Survey Types. People Powered Data for business. Solutions for teams. Explore more survey types. Curiosity at Work.

Help Center. Log in Sign up. Gathering demographic information from surveys. Get started. What are demographic questions?

How do you collect demographic information? Why you should collect demographic information. What demographic information is good for. Question examples for gathering demographic information.

What is your gender? Female Male Other specify. Marital status. Married Widowed Divorced Separated Never married. Less than high school degree High school degree or equivalent e. Employed, working hours per week Employed, working 40 or more hours per week Not employed, looking for work Not employed, NOT looking for work Retired Disabled, not able to work.

Household income. Some demographic survey templates you can use. Employment template. Education demographics template.