What Is Demographics?

Demographics is defined in Wikipedia as “the statistical study of human populations”
Or, from Oxford Dictionaries: “the study of statistics…which illustrate the changing structure of human populations.”
In market research or opinion polling, ‘demographic’ questions usually refer to information collected on age, gender, income, education, etc.

Why Conduct Demographic Analysis?

Quite simply, asking demographic questions enables us to understand how differences in people affect their behaviors and attitudes. For example, a market researcher may want to understand whether the behavior or opinions of females differ from those of males, or if people feel differently about particular issues based on their age, their education, or their income.
Understanding the demographics of your target audience or customer is critical in order to better serve up the right content, products or services. Let’s say we want to understand how to best target our marketing messages for a new online service. First, we may simply want confirm that our suspected target group is even interested in our new service and what features resonate with them. To do this, we would run an online survey to gauge the level of interest in our service. We would invite a representative cross section of the demographic groups (e.g., age, gender, income) on our site to take the survey and ensure validity of the results. Through demographic analysis we can then validate the level of interest among our specific target groups (e.g., females aged 25-44 years with household incomes of $75,000 or more) and adjust the service or message accordingly, if needed.
Once we’ve used demographic questions to validate the target group, the next step would be to use our findings to better articulate our marketing message to better reach the target demographics most interested in our offer. For example, let’s say there’s a consumer product designed to be used both males and females, but our survey research reveals that they have very different attitudes that motivate them to use that product. Collecting attitudinal information about the product and its use, and then examining these by demographic group help us to understand which product benefits to emphasize and which audiences to address.
To illustrate, a particular automobile could be appealing to one demographic group because of its superior road handling, or to another group because of its safety record. If advertising were placed on a website that primarily attracts only one of these demographic groups, having the right message is critical…otherwise we could completely miss the mark — wasting critical marketing resources and losing out on market share!
Using demographic questions and conducting demographic analysis to understand and communicating the appropriate messages to your intended audience goes a long way in getting noticed and resonating with the right people.
Click here learn more about Crowd Science demographics and methodology.
Disclaimer: “What is Demographics?” isn’t grammatically correct; it should be “What Are Demographics?” However, for SEO purposes, people use “what is” more often that “what are”. Silly web searchers!