Demographic data provides statistical information about a specific population, including age, gender, race, and location. Companies leverage it to learn about demographic trends and build demographic profiles to help with create more accurate customer segmentation, driving better decision making around lead generation and sales campaigns.
This data comes from a large variety of data sources. Surveys are considered as a primary source. Governmental organizations, private organizations, or industry analysts regularly conduct surveys across industries and populations to collect relevant information on demographic characteristics. Surveys need to adhere to privacy compliance, which may lead to lower responses or incomplete information. Survey information may quickly get outdated if conducted on large sample sets. Surveys can be expensive, considering the efforts required for information gathering and the subsequent analysis.
Modern technologies provide a better alternative, gathering information from location, preferred language, self-reported profile information, and other online activities. Technological tools deliver data quickly and can also provide deeper insights. You can further enrich demographic data with event tracking or the use of cookies. You can manage privacy compliance and scalability more effectively when you collect data with such tools.
It is also available from public records, such as census information from the U.S. Census Bureau (www.census.gov) and publicly accessible administrative records. This method can be challenging, as the information may be incomplete or not recently updated. For example, the decennial census only occurs every ten years.
Demographic data provides characteristics of a specific population sample (subsets of populations) as statistics and offers the following attributes:
Testing the quality of demographic data involves validating the credibility of the data sources. Databases supplying the data are either reliable or currently updated, but rarely both. Surveys are usually manual, and the information collected may not be complete or current. Addresses, income, or life-stage information can quickly change, and surveys may still provide obsolete information. Online tools deliver updated information, but they derive data from self-reported information or online activity that may not be reliable.
Consider the following aspects to decide the relevance, accuracy, and recency of data to your use case.
To test the quality of the data:
You can compare the geographical spread and attributes different vendors deliver and evaluate if they meet your requirements.
All types and sizes of organizations use the data for customer segmentation, which can help with market research, marketing strategies, lead generation, and marketing campaigns.
You can also use demographic data to identify your key audience segments and track audience sentiments. Insights generated by demographic data can determine the idea for new products and uncover new markets.
For more accurate customer segmentation, you can augment demographic data with other types of marketing data.
The biggest challenge in buying demographic data is ascertaining the sources. While a primary and reliable source, surveys provide information that may not be recent or complete. Other sources can deliver more current information, but it may not be accurate. Demographic data powers customer segmentation, and it needs to be accurate, timely, and as complete as possible.
Demographic data is similar to firmographic and technographic data.
You can find a variety of examples of demographic data in the Explorium Data Gallery.
Sign-up for Explorium’s 14-day free trial to access the data available on the platform.
Demographic data is used primarily for customer segmentation to offer personalized messaging and targeted sales campaigns. It can also contribute to other marketing use cases in retail and financial services.
You can use demographic data to enrich other types of company data or B2B data for strategizing marketing and advertising campaigns.
Customer Segmentation: Dividing the customers and prospects into distinct segments, where each segment has customers with similar profiles, helps companies customize offerings. Customer segmentation provides opportunities for companies to offer personalized experiences and maximize the value each customer generates. Companies use customer segmentation to focus on the segments aligning with their products. They also use the segmentation insights to develop new products targeted for specific segments. Demographic data contributes to customer segmentation by providing a wide range of attributes.
Demographic data gets used across all types of industries, notably retail, eCommerce, and consumer goods or CPG companies. Other industries that use this data include manufacturing, hi-tech, banks, insurance, and financial services.
The quality of vendors supplying demographic data depends on the quality of their sources and the methods used in data collection. You can use the following indicators for assessing vendor quality.
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