Target Demographic

We once asked a client who was selling higher end food products, who is your target demographic? She replied, “Well, anyone who eats food.”

We looked at each other and knew an in-depth discussion about target demographics was on the horizon.

The same applies for Human Resources marketing.

When you have open positions you need to advertise, how often do you think about the person who will take over that open position.

For example, your open position may be for an operator or technician. When you go through your past employees in that job, you can start to see trends. Maybe the people who have had that job in the last couple of years have been men, ages 18-35.

That’s a start, but you need to drill down even further to begin to see habits, likes and lifestyle preferences.

What do they do in their spare time? Do they like to hunt, fish, work on cars? What kind of music do they like, country or perhaps hard rock?

These are all indicators of where they can be reached so you can make sure your advertising has the greatest chance of hitting your target demographic.

Back when we used to work in television news, virtually every station we worked for employed professional consulting firms to determine the target demographic we were going after as a news organization.

They determined that in order to win the television news ratings war every year, you had to win one group of people. That was a woman 25-54 years old. But more than that, they drilled down. They found that our target demographic was a woman 25-54 years old who had two kids, generally two years of college, had lived in the area more than six years, held a full time job, owned a home and had a preference for bacon.

Now I made that part up about the bacon, but you can see how far down you need to delve into your target demographic in order to be successful.

And that’s all driven by spending. If you’re facing spending $5000 or more per acquisition, or per person who’s hired, you had better make sure you’re maximizing your advertising budget and you’re seeing results.

If you need help with human resource marketing, talent acquisition or target demographic identification, contact us today.

Stokes and her husband Chris Herzog, who are both former WEAU television news anchors, started Stokes+HERZOG, an advertising and public relations agency in 2014. The agency assists both local and global clients with all of their corporate business consulting, advertising, public relations, and marketing needs including video production, website management, graphic design, social media management and overall marketing and advertising strategy.