Modified Behavior: Going Beyond Demographics

Effective marketing today seeks to reach people not just based on their age, gender, and other demographics but based on their behavior, interests, etc.

#tribalmarketing #digitalmarketing #contentmarketing #socialmediamarketing

As I mentioned earlier, businesses today, big and small must come up with new ways to reach new customers and form deeper connections with existing ones. This is the essence of building a brand. This is the whole point.

One must do so while maintaining profitability. This goal however lofty can be accomplished in many ways. Effective marketing today seeks to reach people not just based on their age, gender, and other demographics but based on their behavior, interests, etc.

For the purpose of this book, I shall focus on ways through which you can sustain profitability and growth through strategic marketing. Modern methods of marketing. Going beyond old ways of doing things and reaching a level of connectivity with your customers and users that allows you to help shape their view of your brand and more.

Reaching folks with your brand message. Letting them know that you've got what they need and giving them reasons to believe that your products and/or services will help solve some problem they have or provide some level of enjoyment.

We, as marketers, must constantly work to reach folks and tell a compelling story about our brand. Compelling enough to make them want to whip that credit card out and spend their hard-earned money with us. Although successfully completing this task relies on many factors, there are ways through which you can streamline your entire sales and marketing process.

Tried and tested

In the old days, and by "old" I mean just a few years ago, before Facebook, LinkedIn, Insta, etc. Businesses and marketers alike were able to reach out to folks based on the little bit of information they could glean from public sources and surveys.

The way businesses would do it and by it, I mean customer segmentation and demographics, was that they ( Brands) would conduct surveys with existing customers and general members of the community to try to determine which types of customers were more open to buying their products or using their services.

Companies would then use these demographics to create segment models to help them determine how to improve their products and more importantly, where to deploy their marketing dollars. Over time, there were public sources available for smaller brands to be able to build these segments without incurring the high costs of conducting focus groups and customer surveys.

Companies like Experian and Sales Genie emerged to be two of the premier sources to go to when looking for demographic data on millions of Americans and folks around the world.

With segmentation, we, as entrepreneurs could make the decision to send out mailers, take out radio ads, conduct sales calls, etc. Based on what we know about a person's age, gender, ethnicity, location, etc. This was a tried and tested method of customer segmentation.

Segmentation and customer demographics..

Worked, or should I say has worked for quite some time now. I mean, don't get me wrong. Being able to determine some basic identifiable data about which folks are most likely to buy your stuff is still very helpful in building a robust marketing system. And even beyond that.

Consumer demographic data is great at helping you segment your users and customers into identifiable groups. Doing so can help you for one, create different versions of your products to reach out to the various segments of customers you may have and want to reach out to.

The Makeup industry, for example, went for years creating products that completely neglected the fact that women of color with dark tones were a big part of their customers. Supermodel Iman's cosmetic company was one of the first beauty lines to launch to specifically target women of color of all shades.

Having a clear picture, even at the most basic level of who your prospective customers are and knowing little details about your current ones will go a long way to help you build the kind of marketing and product development systems that will keep your brand front and center in the minds of the types of customers you target.

Then Social Media happened

The popularization of apps like Facebook and Instagram has helped provide marketers and entrepreneurs with a whole new world of data about consumers. With the help of platforms like Linkedin, folks like you and I can now go beyond basic consumer demographics.

We can extract all kinds of consumer behavior, interests, affinity to brands and products, etc. From these social media apps. Facebook, in my opinion, is the premier platform to spend your marketing dollars with when looking to build or reach a tribe of potential customers based mostly on the types of behavior characteristics they themselves have clearly stated they display.

Controversies aside, the social media giant has worked over the last ten or so years to build up a wealth of reliable data about their billions of global users. Data that you and I can tap into to help uncover various tribes of potential users and customers. Not to mention, help us understand our customer base on a much deeper level

Brands, in the 21st century, have quickly evolved to come to view their customers and users as not just names and numbers but as dynamic humans with depth and complexity. Today's customer will let you know when you have strayed from your mission as a company.

She will not hesitate to tell all your friends and family about your company. And thanks to these same platforms, she has the power and the voice to do so. As business folk, we must work hard to bring our customers and would-be customers in to join the process by which we create products and solutions and also help us shape the way we communicate with them and others like them.