Marketing Trend: Demographic Segmentation

To effectively market your product or service, you need to create content that truly speaks to your defined target market.

However, your target market may be so diverse that your marketing doesn’t hit home to anybody in it. There’s one way to change that, and this technique is called “Demographic Segmentation”

Demographic segmentation groups your target market into specific groups of people based on attributes like location, age, education, occupation, and income bracket. By using information from demographic segmentation, you can create personalized marketing campaigns for each part of your target market.

These more personalized approaches can lead to a better distribution of resources and more conversions because the specific messages resonate more than a non-direct generic message to your whole audience might.

There are 5 main demographics most businesses segment their audience with. This is how to leverage each one. 

Age

Harkening back to Generational Profiling, segmenting by age allows you to change a campaign so it resonates with who you need it to. The thing about generational segmentation is that each age group, from Baby Boomers to Gen Z, have unique experiences and references that tie them together. Music, celebrities, movies and other pop culture references can help campaigns with the nostalgia factor for each generation.

Education

Segmenting by education lets you divide your target market by school, area of study, and degree. Successful campaigns that have done this generally play into the loyalty many have for their alma mater.

Occupation

Certain types of professionals have more value to certain marketing campaigns and occupations segmentation can separate your target market by job function, job title, and job seniority. This is particularly useful for B2B brands, as occupation segmentation makes it easy to target individuals with buying power at a company.

Location/Geography

Geographic location is an easy way to split your target market based on what they need and what they’re interested in. Landscape, distance from locations and climate can impact the messages you send. Advertising shorts or sandals in the middle of a Minnesota winter just doesn’t work for us here.

Income Bracket

Income segmentation divides your target market by income. Knowing how much discretionary income your base has, allows you to market to those that can afford your product or service, help you to set or your prices in accordance to how much is realistic to expect your target market to spend, and may inspire pricing levels for each segment of your target market.

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Looking Back: 30 Years of the World Wide Web

Today marks the thirtieth anniversary of the birth of the World Wide Web. 30 years ago, Tim Berners-Lee submitted his proposal titled “Information Management” to CERN, a European physics lab.

The proposal asks the reader how scientists would manage increasingly large projects in the future. The proposal outlines the answer to that question. Which is what, in just a couple of years, would become what we know as the World Wide Web: a connected system for sharing information that would lead us into a communication revolution.

Thirty years ago, computer network systems had already been running and growing for years. Emails, message boards, shared files, and emoticons were not a strange concept to many, but the internet as it is today didn’t begin to take shape until the World Wide Web was introduced.

Open source code made it possible for anyone to create websites or browsers, and these web pages, browsers, and hyperlinks made the information available easy to find and easy to navigate.

The internet has reshaped itself in the last 30 years, but there are some really great memories of the World Wide Web of the past that we still are amused at, influenced by and have learned from.

This is just a short list of some of the influential sites and tech that has put us where we are today.

LiveJournal

One of the first variances of a social network was LiveJournal, a blog site where users could debate in comments as well as post original content, from writing pieces like fiction and poetry to visual art. LiveJournal still exists but is now owned by a Russian media company, with most of its original users scattering to Facebook, Tumblr, Twitter, and other social platforms.

Flickr

Photo sharing site Flickr was one of the web’s first forays into photo sharing since platforms like Friendster and MySpace were not photo-focused. The simple online gallery was a great platform for both pros and amateurs without the noise of other platforms that was the typical fare for sites in the early 2000s.

Amazon

Originally an online bookstore, Amazon was not always the giant retail/tech/entertainment conglomerate that it is today. Though it did take down some major bookstore chains early on, it was hard to predict that Amazon would become the phenomenon it is today.

CSS

Cascading Style Sheets or CSS made it easy to learn how to create usable and attractive webpages, separating HTML from how a page looks. CSS also allows you to inspect a site’s code, and with that function, you’re able to change just about anything with a small edit to the code.

Yahoo

Yahoo is one of the longest surviving search engines, and even with a dwindling influence, to this day remains a top visited website. Search engines really built the web, and Yahoo was a major player, bringing users news, sports, market reports, and email all in the same space.

eBay

eBay lingers in the strange space between a free-for-all like Craigslist and the more organized Amazon storefront. eBay is the go-to place for buying just about anything you could want (most of the time used) online, and the mass of items in the site’s catalog is still as obscure, useful to just about anyone, but also just as downright weird as it was at its inception.

Internet Archive

Internet Archive is exactly what it sounds like, an archive of the internet itself. Take a trip back in time to see just what the web looked like in years past. In Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine you can check out the 349 billion web pages that the archive has stored, and reminisce about internet days-gone-by.

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Your Next Pitch: 5 Pitch Deck Slides To Hook Potential Investors [INFOGRAPHIC]

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