*Generalising demographics is a thing of the past. It’s all about the detail. Superdream Media Buying expert, Aaron Jones tells us his view on better targeting your demographic.*
I recently completed a large audience profiling project for a major client. We’ve worked together for some time, so we thought we had a pretty good picture of who their target audience is – ABC1 women aged 35+.
But the client operates nationwide and splits into regions. When we think about how different people are across the UK – from the way they speak and the food they eat, to what they do for fun and how they get their news – all of a sudden, that ABC1 woman aged 35+ isn’t looking like such a clear portrait, after all.
We needed some science to turn our generalisations into facts. And to check our target audience was who we thought it was. (You should never assume your audience is the same as it was five years ago. Things change.)
We started profiling with data we already had, which came from customers’ postcodes. Then we used third-party data from a supplier to analyse each postcode sector by the types of households in them, including areas like income, age and number of children. Similar households get grouped into types.
By cross-referencing our data with data from our supplier, we learned the types of households most of our customers live in.
Step one: complete.
But by going deeper into our data, we could identify other areas of our audiences’ lives including the likelihood of them having children under five, their internet use, their job, marital status, if they have pets or not, whether or not they are an early tech adopter, and what supermarkets they shop in.
All things we’ve had to generalise before, we can now be very specific about.
This depth of information and knowledge lets us take actions like small tweaks to Facebook targeting pretty much straight away. But moving forward, armed with this new data, we can tailor entire creative messages based on people, not blurry demographics. And on where they actually are – not on broad UK averages. We can be more precise with the media we choose and where we use it – or don’t. Because thanks to data, we can see where our target market isn’t, as well as where it is.
It means we can manage our clients’ budgets extremely efficiently, and help them get a better return on their investment.
There’s a famous saying: ‘The wise man knows he knows nothing, the fool thinks he knows all.’ It’s pertinent to data and demographics. There’s always more you can learn about your target market. Collect competent data and analyse it correctly, and what you learn can be invaluable to planning your advertising.
But never stop looking for more information, in even more detail.