The Role of Demographics in B2B Digital Marketing
Time to Read: 4m 0s
Whether you are a B2B or B2C business, connecting with prospective businesses (or customers) should be a foundational goal. After all, it would be near impossible to grow a business without people to build relationships with. This is true regardless of B2B or B2C designation. In the realm of digital marketing, those connections can be reflected in goal conversion rates and goal completions. What those look like will be specific to the business, but should reflect things such as contact us forms, RFQs, calls, etc. Who you are connecting with should be just as important as how you are connecting with them. It can often be an afterthought because any activity is good activity, right? Not exactly.
We can see that the age groups of 25-34 and 45-54 are the top two age demos for this business, combining for over almost half of their overall sessions. These demo blocs also account for 47% of their new users, with year over year gains for each segment. These are ways in which they have positively affected the demographics report. Taking a look further, you can also see where this bloc contributes to a steep decline in year over year goal conversions and goal completions. If these two age demos are part of their target audience, it is clear that they are not reaching them in meaningful ways: goal conversion rates and goal completions. So while they are attracting them to the site, there is a disconnect between converting those users into customers.
Who are you trying to reach?
As a B2B company, you may not think demographics matter to you because you are not trying to connect with a consumer, you are trying to reach another business. While this may be true, there is still an individual representing the business that you are trying to reach. In fact, with B2B there are most likely multiple stakeholders making decisions which makes understanding your target audience incredibly important. Those individuals can fall into multiple demographic categories like age or gender that can give you insight into your target audience, but also make it difficult to decipher just who your target audience is. The reality is that it could be a combination of several different demographics which requires you to think beyond the individual scope of demographics. For example, take a look at the data set below. We can see that the age groups of 25-34 and 45-54 are the top two age demos for this business, combining for over almost half of their overall sessions. These demo blocs also account for 47% of their new users, with year over year gains for each segment. These are ways in which they have positively affected the demographics report. Taking a look further, you can also see where this bloc contributes to a steep decline in year over year goal conversions and goal completions. If these two age demos are part of their target audience, it is clear that they are not reaching them in meaningful ways: goal conversion rates and goal completions. So while they are attracting them to the site, there is a disconnect between converting those users into customers.
Psychographics and Your Target Audience
Along with demographics, psychographics can provide additional insight into your audience--who you are reaching and who you aren’t reaching. While psychographics are not going to paint the whole picture, they can give you a better perspective as to who your target audience is. Depending on the information provided by psychographics, they can also give you insight as to who your audience should be. Let’s say you are a company that sells tools and supplies to manufacturing businesses. By looking at the data set below, it would be clear that you are missing the mark with a large swath of potential customers. While you have seen an increase and YOY gains with business professionals, you have lost a large part of your audience in other respective segments. While each segment may seem to have incremental decreases, those losses can add up. Think about how much of an impact it would make to have an increase of 21 goal completions YOY versus a decrease.
