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The Enormous Impact of Age & Gender Detection
Marketers must not ignore the enormous impact delivered by the new Age & Gender detection tools. Yes it’s back to basics ie demographics. Knowing ‘Who?’ is your customer is one of 3 critical questions alongside ‘Why’ (they buy/visit/bounce) & also ‘How’ (they buy). All marketers answer these questions. Good news: It’s getting easier to identify your customer demographics which, in turn allows some marketers to create competitive advantage by getting closer to their customers and helping them with more and more relevant information.
Here’s some tools that help detect age and gender of your audiences:
- Facial recognition software*: uses rules similar to those rules we use when identifying if someone is male or female and whether they are old or young
- Microsoft: App How Old Do I Look
- Google Analytics: Free customer analytics
- Facebook insights: Free customer insights
- DOTS Name Validation 2 determines gender from your name
- Commercial Analytics like Japan’s NEC (deliver age, gender, behaviour & more for $900 p.m.)
* Facial Recognition Software will improve. However, it currently has some flaws. I used ‘How Old Do I Look?’ called How-Old.net and inserted the photo on the left below. I promise you I am not 64 (thanks ‘How Old’ robot)!
What can we do with these new demographic analytics?
- see who’s buying your product
- see who’s visiting but not buying
- create tailored pages for different genders/ages (This is part of my magic marketing formula: IRD)
- create tailored email for different genders/ages (IRD ditto)
- other suggestions are welcome (please post a comment/suggestion – below)
The Magic Marketing Formula (IRD)
Many years ago it dawned upon me that there is a simple, yet powerful magic marketing formula. I call it IRD: Identify needs, Reflect them & then Deliver a reasonable product or service. We can apply it here by identifying ‘Who’ and then helping them with much more relevant content/messages/products/services. See how IRD works in: Shock TV Ad Uses Magic Formula & Goes Viral .
Use Demographics & Be At The Forefront Of Digital Marketing
As Alexis Ternoy says in his excellent post* ‘Someday, using demographic data in your marketing strategy will be non-negotiable, just as having an online presence has become today. Start collecting it, tweak your analytics software to make use of it, and you’ll be putting yourself at the forefront of online marketing.’ Temoy, A. (2015) The Marketer’s Latest Tool: Age And Gender Detection, Digital Doughnut 30 July.
You might also like:
Shock TV Ad Uses Magic Formula & Goes Viral to see the Magic marketing Formula being used to change behaviour and save lives by stopping speeding driver.
How To Target Very Very Specific Audiences On Facebook – the power of facebook profiling
You can get a detailed list of customer analytical tools (many of them are free) in the SOSTAC ® Guide To Your Perfect Digital Marketing Plan (paperback or ebook).
Facial Recognition App
Snaptivity app delivers all photos, that you happen to be in, directly to your smartphone in real time. Discover yourself in real time photos taken by friends AND STRANGERS around you. Also it allows you to share photos with people in them, regardless of whether you know them or not. Snaptivity
Put Much More Emphasis on Demographics
Peter Drucker (2000) – just found this Drucker comment
Q: One of the seminal books that you wrote was The Age of Discontinuity. If you were to revisit that today, in this age of accelerated change, what would you write?
Drucker: I don’t know, because I haven’t read that book for 30 years. I don’t read my old books, I write new ones. But I would put much more emphasis on demographics, much more emphasis on globalization.
Interview with Peter Drucker, by James Daly, in Business 0.2 (www.business2.com) 22/08/2000
Thanks for sharing this tool. And the information you have given about these tools.
And the important thing was that you described the things why and how.nicely.
It was a nice post.
It’s funny how almost all of the new breakthroughs in marketing tools are actually going back to basic principles of marketing : ‘Know Thy Customer’ and an in particular age and gender.
I think it’s just a matter of time before the default Google Analytics code starts automatically grabbing Gender & Age from logged in G+ users. It would be nice to eventually see a “Gender” and “Age” menu item under the Demographics tab in GA instead of having to use CustomVars for this.