• by Doug Randall , Columnist, January 16, 2018

How does a 54 year old make a decision about which non-profit to support? How does an Hispanic man choose a favorite coffee brand? Making sweeping generalizations about the way that people make buying decisions based on age, race, or gender seems ineffective, but for years, it’s been all that marketers had to go on.

In today’s technologically advanced world, that’s no longer the case. Consumers are increasingly being served personalized ads and unique engagements and shifting their expectations accordingly. So why are marketers still making general campaigns based on traditional demographics?

The simple answer is bandwidth. We may know more about our customers, but marketing resources are still limited and companies still need unified messaging, leaving only so much opportunity for broad-scale campaigns with little to no personalization. If you’re marketing to an enterprise-scale audience in an age of intolerance for unwanted marketing, you need to both keep messaging informative and make it resonate at a deep level. You need to build empathy at scale. You can do that by reimagining your marketing demographics around beliefs, in addition to general implicit and explicit data.

1.Uncover common threads in people that love your brand. You have a ready base of avid customers; it’s time to get to know them as people. If you have a good-sized customer base, it’s more likely than not that there are subgroups with common values and beliefs, and appealing to those is the best way to win loyalty. If you’re looking for ways to divide your marketing resources, breaking your audience down into value groups makes a lot of sense. Retailers should segment gamers from mountain bikers, not men from women.

We recently did a comprehensive analysis of all the public information about Nike (media posts, social media, blogs, forums, etc.), and revealed that positive feelings about the brand are rooted in three very different areas: its athletic leadership, its emphasis on diversity, and its design. These are very different narratives. Some may overlap; however, more than likely, each narrative deserves its own campaign to connect with the beliefs of each customer. Your customers are basically groups or communities of like-minded people, and understanding those beliefs that resonate with them is the only way to market to them effectively.

2.Give depth to pre-existing demographics. Let’s say your demographics are more than a means of dividing your budget, they’re also markets you’re tasked with tapping into. If you need more millennials or SMBs in your pipeline, you will still get better results if you enhance the data on those demographics. Consumers have lost their patience for irrelevant marketing.

According to Hubspot’s “State of Inbound” marketing report, 91% of people consider ads obtrusive. Yet, in the same report, 77% said they’d rather ad filter than completely ad block. It seems incongruous, but this example shows consumers are still open to marketing, as long as it feels personal.

Contrary to what you might have read, that doesn’t necessarily mean tailoring every communication to each individual customer with expensive (and occasionally invasive) activity tracking software, though those platforms can have their place. It can also mean nailing your demographics down to harder, more actionable characteristics like “millennials who love travel” or “SMBs that struggle with hiring.” Messages at scale can feel personal if they tap into a commonly shared belief within that group.

3.Expose a new audience. Traditional demographics alone can be artificially limiting, because they ignore smaller, but potentially much more dedicated buying communities. These people might not already be your existing customer base, but they could be if given the right message. In the Nike example above, it’s likely that people who value athleticism would have bought Nike products already. However, with a message or campaign emphasis on the importance of equality, you may have won over an entirely new community. 

Each of these use cases boils down to this: Marketers have access to more information about consumer behavior than ever. You need to use that information, not just to inform one-off campaigns but to think critically about how you relate to your customers. Empathy at scale is possible and will be a game-changer for the modern marketers and brands that utilize it.