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    The B2B SaaS Marketing Blog

    5 Awesome Ways to Figure Out Your Audience Demographics

    Last updated: August 28th, 2014

    Marketing without without carefully targeting your prospects is basically just guesswork. If you’re speaking to the wrong people, you’re just wasting your marketing budget. Don’t get lost in the dark, here’s how to figure out your audience demographics:

     

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    Video Transcription

    Hi, this is Karrin Huynh from Powered by Search, and I’m about to show you five awesome ways to figure out your audience demographics. So one of the most important things for you to do for your business is to know who your target market is. Now, once you know this information, one of the best things you can do with this information is create targeted ads. Now, my area of expertise is in social media marketing, and I know from experience that one of the best things that you can do for your Facebook page and Twitter page, but also for your website is creating very targeted ads. And by doing this, you’ll see an increase in traffic to both your social accounts as well as your website.

    So when it comes to Facebook ads, what we can specify when it comes to demographics is location, age, gender, what languages the people speak that you want to target, their interests, and their behavior. Twitter specifies the same types of things, but a few extra ones including key words, and what devices they use, and what platforms they use, and so on.

    So we need to figure out who our demographic is, and we need to be able to figure out how our demographic fits into these categories. So one of the tools is Facebook Audience Insights, and this allows us to create our own audience to target ads for. Now, you don’t have to know everything about your demographic, you just have to know a few things, and then Facebook Audience will take that information and find more information about those people. So for example, let’s say your business is an organic health food store. So we can type in the type of interest that you think those people have, so fitness and wellness, food and drink, and sports and outdoors. We can put that information in, target both genders and age, and then we can put that information in, and then Facebook Audience Insights will give us a lot more information back. So the age range of the most of the people are between 18 and 34, and will let us know whether or not there’s more males or females who are interested about these topics. And we can look at other information such as location, activity, and household. So let’s continue. Again, so we can look at the location for the people interested in these topics, and we can see where in the United States these people are from. We can also look at their activity on Facebook, so how active they are on Facebook, how they engage, what type of engagement they do. We can also look at what type of device they’re using, whether they’re on only mobile, or on desktop, and so on. It also provides a lot deep information, such as relationship status and education level, and what type of jobs they might have as well as household income, which is pretty interesting.

    Another cool thing you can do with Facebook Audience Insight is you can purchase a list. So let’s say, you want to… You know your… The only thing you know about your demographic is you want to target H.R. professionals, so you can purchase a list of Facebook I.D.’s for H.R. professionals, and we can put this into Facebook Audience Insights, and it will give us a lot of information back. So again, it will tell us the age and gender for these H.R. professionals, where they are in the country, or whatever, or city, and we can see how they act on Facebook, and we can see their relationship status and their education level. So that’s a cool thing to be able to do.

    The second tool is Google Analytics. Here’s where you can see the demographics for the people who are visiting your website. Now, you can use this information again to target Facebook and Twitter ads. Because if these type of people are interested in visiting your website, then we want to use this information and target the same type of people on Facebook and Twitter, and get them back to your website because we know these are the type of people who have already been to your website and are interested in your niche. So with Google Analytics, we can look at information such as age, and we can look at gender. We can also see where in the world they’re coming from, and which countries most of your traffic’s coming from. So we can see here United States and Canada for this, and we can also see what other interests they have. And we can see how they’re visiting your page, whether it’s through their mobile, or a tablet, or their desktop.

    The third tool is Alexa. Now, this is great for people who are just starting out who want to learn more about their demographics, because they can put their competitor’s U.R.L. in and learn about how their competitor’s websites rank. But also, we can learn about the competitor’s demographics. So if you have a very successful competitor, and you want to figure out about their demographics, we can type in their U.R.L. and see, “Oh, okay. Well, this competitor, they have a lot more men than women visiting their website, and they’re doing really, really well. So when we target ads, we may want to target more men than women.” So this is very useful information. We can also learn about their education level as well as where they’re browsing. Are they visiting when they’re at home, work, or at school? And again, we can see the location, so where they’re coming from in the world. Now, a really, really cool feature… Oh, sorry, and we can also see what keywords they rank for. So as I was saying, a really cool feature that Alexa has is we can compare two different websites. So if you know who your two top competitors are, we can put both their U.R.L.s in and see how well they rank. And when we figure out who ranks better, maybe we can look at their demographics, and then target those people more than the other competitor.

    Okay, the fourth tool is called Demographics Pro. And this is provides very, very detailed information about Twitter audiences. So whether you’re going to put in your Twitter account or a competitor’s Twitter account, Demographics Pro will throw at you a lot of information, a lot of useful information. So we can see gender of the followers. We can see the family status. We can see age, personal income. We can also look at other things, such as ethnicity. We can look at their location, so where they are, by country, by city, by U.S. state. And we can also look at occupation, what they do for a living. So this is really, really interesting information, and this is also really, really helpful for figuring out who your demographics are.

    Now, the final tool I’m going to talk about is Google AdWords. The cool thing about Google AdWords is that this is a particularly good tool for people who are just starting out. So maybe your website is young, and it doesn’t provide enough substantial information about your demographics, or maybe your Facebook page or Twitter account doesn’t do that either, what we can do is that as long as you know what keywords you rank for or want to rank for, you can put that information into Google AdWords and they will tell you the type of people, so the demographics of the people searching for those keywords.

    So here, the keyword I put in is “children’s stories.” So we can see who are the people looking for or typing in this keyword. So we can see it’s mainly younger people, and both male and female. And we can see that most of the time, they’re typing this in through a mobile device. Let’s say, we typed in another keyword, so “Coffee & Espresso Maker,” we can see it’s a little bit different. Now, we see that there are more females than male, but again, still looking on their mobile. We can also see what their interests are. So once we know this, and we know, “Okay, there are slightly more females than there are male,” and look at they’re interested in home and gardening or home appliances, then we can go back to Facebook or Twitter when we make these targeted ads, and target more towards females and people who are interested in home and gardening and home appliances if you have a business of coffee and espresso makers.

    We can also look at other keywords using Google AdWords. We can see what other keywords come up for the demographics who use coffee and espresso makers, and we can use this information whether or not it’s to figure out what other keywords we should be ranking for, or if we want to find out about the demographics of the people who are searching these keywords.

    So again, knowing your demographics is one of the most important things you can do for your business. And if you implement even some of these tips, I’m sure that you’ll see an improvement in your traffic back to your website, but as well as your social accounts, so both Facebook and Twitter.

    So if you like this video, please share with your friends. And if you have any questions or comments, share them with us in the comments below. This is Karrin from Powered by Search. Be sure to subscribe for more awesome marketing tips. I hope you have a fantastic day.

    Video transcription by Speechpad.com.

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