If you want to effectively communicate with customers in your market, you have to know who they are. Think about this statement in terms of a public speaker. If the speaker doesn’t know their audience, they risk choosing a topic the audience doesn’t care about, using language they won’t understand, and struggling to motivate them to take desired follow-up actions.
On the other hand, a speaker with a clear understanding of their audience can speak directly, clearly, and persuasively. So, here’s the question: how do you get to know your audience?
In a marketing context, analyzing website demographics is one way to develop a clearer view of who you’re talking to. Unpacking the data can improve your marketing strategy by allowing you to communicate more effectively with potential customers, increase audience reach, and inspire the action you desire.
What exactly are Website Demographics?
Broadly speaking, demographics are the characteristics of people within a group. The group of people could be as large as an entire nation or city, or as small as a school, company, or even a marketing team.
By looking at characteristics within a group, you can generate demographic data that allows you to better understand the group’s makeup.
In the case of your website, visitor demographics are the characteristics of the people who come to your site. Some common website audience demographics include:
- Age
- Gender
- Geographic location
- Mode of access (mobile vs. desktop)
- Channels of access (social media vs. search engine vs. direct)
- Buying patterns
Let’s say we’re working for a cosmetics company and one of our main competitors is Sephora.com. If we wanted to gather demographics data for our own website, we’d go straight to Google Analytics. But if we wanted demographic data about Sephora and others in the industry, we could use Semrush’s Market Explorer tool to look at the age and gender breakdown of visitors to competitor’s sites and the market as a whole.
From these graphs, we can see that 61.2% of Sephora.com site visitors are female, while 38.8% are male. These numbers remain pretty close to the market as a whole, though we might be surprised to see such a large number of men visiting a site that sells cosmetics. This insight is useful since it lets us know we may want to consider men in our target audience for our own marketing campaigns.
We can also see that the largest demographic of visitors to Sephora.com are 25-34 years old. Along with this information, the graph shows they are capturing a slightly larger portion of the market when it comes to visitors who are 18-24, and slightly less with visitors over the age of 45. Even though the margins are small, it’s clear that their brand tends to skew younger. Knowing this information, we can make informed decisions about who we need to target in our own marketing efforts.
