Knowing your audience is essential for any business. This is why a demographic survey template can be useful. It’s an easy way to get to know your audience through an interactive experience. Use a demographic survey to obtain all the info you need about your buyer persona.
Why Conduct Demographic Surveys?
Collecting demographic information is about understanding your audience and buyers better. This is important because the more you know about them, the better your chances are of reaching them with relevant messages. Similarly, a buyer persona based on demographic information can help you optimize your product or services.
Information regarding their gender, age, income, location, and more, can be useful in more than one way. From product development to advertising, having some basic knowledge about your customers will greatly increase your chances of success.
How to Collect Demographic Information?
The easiest way to collect this type of data is through a demographic survey. These types of surveys include demographic questions pertaining to different characteristics, including age, gender, income, ethnicity, education, employment, etc.
The answers to these questions will give you a clear picture of what most of your audience have in common, allowing you to categorize them accordingly. However, keep in mind that some people may be reluctant to answer personal questions. You can mitigate this by phrasing them correctly and providing a range of answers.
Most Common Demographic Survey Questions (and Some Tips)
Asking About Age
Perhaps the most common question on any survey looking to segment the respondents. Knowing the average customer’s age will allow you to target your audience more efficiently. When asking for a person’s age within a survey, it’s important to provide them with several mutually exclusive categories that cover the age groups relevant to your product or service.
Asking About Ethnicity
Considering it is a very sensitive topic, it may be best to avoid this question altogether. However, if it is necessary to ask it, your best course of action would be to allow respondents to select multiple or provide their own answers. Another tip is to leave your audience with the option to withhold this information if they prefer.
Asking About Gender
Another sensitive question nowadays that could offend some of your respondents if ill-phrased. Much like with ethnicity, you should always provide several options (male, female, other), with the ability to self-declare or refuse to answer this demographic survey question.
Asking About Education
The highest obtained level of education is another criterion for segmenting your audience and gaining important insight. These questions should include several answers ranging from “No formal education” to “Doctorate” to encompass all possibilities.
Asking About Employment
The answers to this type of question tend to have the most variety and are the hardest to cover exhaustively. However, they may save you the trouble of having to ask about your respondents’ income if you leave them the option to state their job titles. Make sure you cover all employment (or unemployment) options, such as full-time, part-time, looking for work, not looking for work, self-employed, unable to work, etc.
Asking About Income
Although it may be considered invasive, your customers’ income is one of the most important demographic survey questions. It will give you a solid basis to estimate how affordable your product is for your average buyer. Again, you should offer a range of answers, and could even opt to ask about their household income instead.
Making Your Own Demographic Survey
Now that we’ve touched on the most common demographic questions it’s time for you to start experimenting with your own demographic survey. You can use our template as it is, adjust it as you please, or start from scratch with our survey maker.
Whichever option you choose, we highly recommend monitoring the responses on your survey’s results dashboard. By doing so you’ll be able to see what’s working and what isn’t, and adjust your survey as you go.
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