The success of every piece of marketing material you create depends on how well you know the audiences you’re marketing to. Landing page copy written for millennials won’t be able to persuade boomers to click the CTA button. An offer catered for C-level executives won’t apply to independent contractors.
Why? Because one marketing campaign isn’t likely to appeal to everyone. A single, 18-year-old college freshman has different wants, needs, and desires than a 45-year-old attorney who’s married with children.
Understanding these similarities and differences between different audience segments allows you to isolate the market into individual categories and create specific selling points accordingly. This makes your campaigns more precise because you can focus solely on serving smaller, more refined segments—a concept known as demographic segmentation.
What is demographic segmentation?
Demographic segmentation is a precise form of audience identification based on data points like age, gender, marital status, family size, income, education, race, occupation, nationality, and/or religion. It’s among the four main types of marketing segmentation and perhaps the most commonly used method.
Think of demographic segmentation as splitting your vast audience market into more manageable, targeted chunks. Instead of reaching an entire market or broad customer base, your brand can use demographic segmentation to speak directly to a defined market subset.
When audiences are divided into neat little segments you can use your time and resources more efficiently because you better understand the similarities between individuals in the audience to determine what messages they are likely to respond to. Brands can then use advertising personalization to fulfill the defined group’s needs.
Let’s look at demographic segmentation in action. NetSuite is an accounting platform that targets large enterprises, small businesses, startups, and other businesses. It even dissects its audiences by role. The platform uses different messaging for all these segments, making sure the features it advertises match their individual needs.
Why is demographic segmentation in marketing so important?
Demographic segmentation is used to target specific audiences. You cannot effectively communicate with an audience when you know nothing about them, and a personalized, targeted approach is essential to managing your advertising spending effectively—this is why demographic segmentation is so important and has several advantages.
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Build long-lasting customer relationships
Reaching your customers on a more human level with targeted, personalized marketing creates deeper customer loyalty. It allows them to identify with your brand and feel like you are an advocate for their needs, which makes them more likely to do business with you for longer.
Improve your products and services
Loyal customer relationships encourage you to look at your products and services differently. When you have a deeper understanding of your target audience, you can put yourself in their shoes to better serve them.
For example, QuickBooks is accounting software targeted specifically at contractors, solopreneurs, small businesses, and agency owners. The landing page copy addresses concerns of these audience segments, such as due date reminder emails, invoices with tax, discounts, and shipping costs calculated for them. It sends invoices from anywhere in the world. Their pricing plans start at $18/month, which suits this segment. The image with the $150 invoice also relates to contractors and small businesses.
Optimize your marketing strategies
Demographic segmentation allows you to be more specific with your marketing strategies. It helps clarify your vision, gives you more direction with future advertising plans, and optimizes your resources, time, and budget.
If 85% of your clients are 20-35 years old, this is the segment you’ll need to target. You’ll want to ensure any cultural references in your advertising make sense to this age group. You wouldn’t want to spend your time and money making sure your campaigns make sense to seniors—that would be a waste.
Skinny Confidential features UGC content from young users, and their copy uses vocabulary geared towards young females.
Demographic segmentation variables and examples
1. Age
Age is the most basic variable, albeit the most important, because consumer preferences continually change with age. Almost all marketing campaigns target age-specific audiences.
This variable can be viewed regarding specific age ranges or life cycle stages: babies, children, adolescents, adults, middle-aged, and seniors. For example, many famous fashion designers have different collections to target other age groups. They aim for certain clothing lines at specific age ranges, such as a chic fashion line for younger prospects and a more formal and elegant line for older individuals.
Age segmentation is also generation-based: baby boomers, Gen X, millennials, etc. Since members within these groups were born around the same time and grew up with similar experiences, they often share similar characteristics and thought processes. Targeting baby boomers and Gen X with the same offer and marketing strategy will likely produce undesirable results because they think and act differently.
Not only do age groups and generations differ in buying habits, but also in how they respond to advertising. They tend to have distinct ways of speaking and often spend their time on separate platforms. For example, millennials may spend most of their time on Instagram and Facebook, while seniors prefer email inboxes.
Chamberlain Coffee is geared towards younger audiences. They reference that they are “TikTok’s favorite cold brew,” feature user-generated content made by younger customers, and have messaging on the page made for younger females.
2. Gender
Men and women generally have different likes, dislikes, needs, and thought processes. When segmenting based on gender, be careful not to assume gender stereotypes, such as considering pink a feminine color and blue a masculine color. Advertising with gender stereotypes like this could easily make your brand look sexist and cause you to miss out on or anger your target audience.
Let’s look at the differences between skincare brands for men and women.
War Paint is a skincare brand that has a masculine audience.
While SkinPharm is made for women.
War Paint has darker brand colors and simple, succinct language, while Skinpharm has lighter colors and more detailed product descriptions.
3. Income and occupation
If people can’t afford your product or service, there is no point in targeting them. After all, you wouldn’t promote a Mercedes or Ferrari to someone who can’t afford a used vehicle with more than 100,000 miles.
Income targeting lets you measure your audience’s buying power. When you know consumers’ income range, you can usually find data supporting how people spend money on both the higher and lower end of the spectrum. Many companies use this data to sell different tiers of the same product based on income level. For instance, airlines have three classes: economy, business, and first class.
Occupation targeting is also essential since specific resources are aimed at different industries and job titles. This Salesforce page is segmented for professionals affiliated with the education industry.
Job titles are essential in an account-based advertising campaign. Unlike traditional demand gen, account-based marketing is often described as a flipped funnel approach because it inverts the process. Rather than targeting individual leads, it targets the account level.
The intent is to reach highly relevant accounts with the most revenue potential, so knowing the occupation is integral.
5. Family
Family makeup can be instrumental in segmentation because when a family’s dynamic changes, its needs and desires often do. This strongly affects their buying habits and your sales process.
Single individuals tend to prioritize themselves, while newly married couples are likely to prioritize each other and their homes. Couples with several children have different needs than those who just had their first child. Large families might be more interested in low-cost household products than couples with the same income but without children.
Ruggable, is a machine-washable rug brand that caterers to families with children and pets, and homes that are prone to regular messes.
6. Location
Your audience’s location affects their needs, preferences, and buying behaviors. Weather patterns, local traditions, resource availability, and regional trends all play essential roles in influencing these.
JetPet Resort segments its offers based on location to offer personalized services to audiences in these locations.
Get personal with your campaigns with demographic segmentation
You can’t please all consumers, but you can divide the larger market into unique demographic segments and cater to each one’s needs individually—doing this increases your chances of converting these audiences on your landing pages.
If you want to increase ROAS, the best approach is to create multiple offers and personalize them for your audience sub-sets. Don’t know how to scale landing pages for your campaigns?
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Instapage’s Personalization feature lets you delight your visitors with dynamically delivered personalized, conversion-optimized landing page experiences to every audience.
The platform makes it easier than ever to:
- Create any number of unique audience experiences for each landing page
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- Dynamically pair visitor intent to a relevant landing page experience for each ad
- Match copy to visitor-level data like keywords, firmographics, and demographics
- Generated copy variations for headlines, paragraphs, and CTAs with AI
Experience the power of demographic segmentation and landing page personalization by signing up for an Instapage 14-day free trial today.
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