What are Demographics, Target Audiences and Personas? How do they effect my social marketing campaigns? How do I know who my consumers are?
Demographics or demographic data refers to selected population characteristics as used in government, marketing or opinion research, or the demographic profiles used in such research. Note the distinction from the term "demography" (see below.) Commonly-used demographics include race, age, income, disabilities, mobility (in terms of travel time to work or number of vehicles available), educational attainment, home ownership, employment status, and even location. Distributions of values within a demographic variable, and across households, are both of interest, as well as trends over time. Demographics are frequently used in economic and marketing research.
Demographic trends describes the changes in demographics in a population over time. For example, the average age of a population may increase. It may decrease as well as certain restrictions may be in place, for instance like in China if the population is high.
The term demographics as a noun is often used erroneously in place of demography, the study of human population, its structure and change. Although there is no absolute delineation, demography focuses on population structure, processes and dynamics, whereas demographics is most often used in the fields of media studies, advertising, marketing, and polling, and should not be used interchangeably with the term "demography" or (more broadly) "population studies".
The following post is from: Pronet Advertising
Reaching Your Target Audience through Social Media
Reaching your target customer is a difficult task in marketing because of the lack of information about public preference. The more information you have, the better job you can do establishing who you target market is and how you can reach them. Before the Internet consumer preference was largely evaluated by polls and surveys, but the accuracy of these methods is inherently limited because of their invasive nature. To truly evaluate consumer preference, it must be done in an unbiased, natural setting.
Today, people are searching, buying, rating, interacting, and using social media in a pressure-free environment. This is creating a large amount of raw, yet accurate data about consumer preference and by digesting this information you can sift through to the people who are interested in your product or service.
For example, 43 things is a community that allows people to interact about what they want to do with their life. One thing that 1033 people want to do is scuba dive. When you're on the scuba dive page, these are the advertisements that show up.
From a marketing perspective, if you're the company offering scuba lessons or equipment, what better audience would you want then people who are coming out and saying they want to scuba dive. From the consumer's perspective, if there are going to be advertisements, the more relevant they are, the better. Personally, I would much rather see ads that are interesting and relevant to me than random and untargeted ones. It seems to be a win-win situation.
As more niche communities are developed, the public's preferences will become more transparent. With this, the information needed to figure out who your target market is, and how you can reach them will become available. Then the infrastructure will be in place for you to reach your target customer with ease.