Understanding the buying habits and demographic information of your company’s customers can often be interesting information to pore over. For those who are statistically-minded, watching seasonal, demographic, and geographical shifts in buying patterns can provide insight on the type of customers your product or service appeal to. However, knowing who buys or is considering buying from your company is more than just an interesting side-note; it can (and should) shape the direction of your company long-term. It is an unfortunate reality that far too many CMOs neglect this information; healthcare digital marketing in particular is plagued by campaigns that are often tone-deaf and ignore important demographic trends. In this new age of tighter budgets, particularly marketing budgets, it is absolutely essential that you maximize every available dollar.

It has never been easier to learn detailed information about your customers

One of the biggest reasons neglecting your buying demographics is such a glaring mistake is because it is so easy to do. Digital marketing in general and healthcare digital marketing in particular has a vast array of analytics tools available, often for free.

For example, Google Analytics offers a free back-end service for your website that allows you to see exactly who is visiting your website, how they got there, how long they stayed, and what web pages they accessed while there. Information such as age, gender, geographic location, search query, etc., are all available on a minute-by-minute basis through Google Analytics.

Digital marketing allows companies to hyper-focus their marketing campaign

In addition to being able to easily find out who is buying and considering buying from your company, you can also use the very same demographics information to target your ads to each individual. One great example of this is Facebook’s advertising service.

Facebook allows companies to create individual marketing campaigns that can be targeted as widely or as narrowly as is necessary. Once again geographic, age, and gender information comes into play. However, where Facebook really earns their competitive advantage is through the vast wealth of information they retain about their users. All of a user’s interests, from music to hobbies, as well as their career history, political and religious affiliations, etc., are all usable as data points for targeted digital campaigns. This means that you will only pay for impressions or clicks that appear directly to your target audience.

With ever-shrinking marketing budgets, knowing where best to spend your resources is absolutely crucial to increasing cost-effectiveness and producing results. If you know the demographic trends of your most consistent customers, you can generate marketing campaigns that reach them and only them, while producing marketing copy that will resonate with that specific group.

The most successful companies leverage customer buying information

There is no shortage of examples in which large companies utilize buyer information to maximize sales opportunities and profits. Perhaps the best example of this is Amazon.com. Amazon has grown from its roots as an online bookstore from the mid-90s into an international ecommerce juggernaut with almost $75 billion in revenue in 2013. Amazon founder and CEO Jeff Bezos is on record stating that his intention from the outset was to sell books at a steep discount in order to learn the interests and buying habits of his customers. As Amazon grew into an online retailer of countless thousands of products, this information was leveraged to create highly targeted marketing campaigns and “suggested item” e-mails to Amazon customers.

While not every company can be or wants to be as all-encompassing as Amazon, there is a great deal that marketers can learn from Amazon’s success. In today’s age of highly detailed consumer information, access to real-time traffic and conversion rates, and hyper-targetable marketing campaigns, it is absolutely essential for healthcare digital marketing campaigns to be based on customer information and buying habits.