Demographics in online marketing are less reliable than ever

Last week, I was really excited to realign my brand, after going through all the mindset shifts in 2024 and 2025 that led to me launching this very newsletter.

I have to admit, though: my excitement dimmed a bit when I realized that my first task would be to work on Client Personas. 😆 Yes, Client Personas can be pretty un-sexy work, but there’s a good reason why every brand and business expert tells you to dive into those deeper details.

The fact is, whether you’re building a business strategy, or just choosing what social media platform to use, demographics simply aren’t enough to find your audience.

Demographics in online marketing don’t hold up, and could be harmful

Marketers, especially the old-school suit guys, love to throw around demographics. They’ll plan a campaign targeting “women in their 30s,” or talk about how TikTok is the place to be for the 18-35 demographic. It doesn’t hurt to have that data, but it’s also worth noting: we’re in an era where the things we know about how standard demographics behave are being turned on their head. 

For instance: are folks in their 30s are looking for a realtor? That might’ve been true 10 or 20 years ago. But now, when nearly half of 18-29-year-olds are living with their parents, and home prices are nearly twice as expensive as they were for Boomers, that’s a lot less likely than it used to be.

Additionally, as our culture moves away from a strict gender binary, any marketer who’s paying attention is already moving towards a more nuanced approach to gender as a demographic. Including nonbinary options when gathering data is becoming common practice for many organizations. 

While it’s tempting to try and draw conclusions based on gender, I’d venture that this misses the point of departing from the gender binary. The concept of gender as a spectrum naturally pulls us away from thinking of characteristics as “belonging” to a particular gender–it’s meant to give us space to explore our relationship with all of those characteristics. If we assume a set of interests and behaviors based on gender, that could just reinforce the gender binary many of us want to move away from.

Knowing more about your audience’s behavior leads to better decisions

From the most practical standpoint, it comes down to this: why would we build our understanding based on demographics, when so many people fall outside of those supposed norms? And, what happens to you and your business when those people are left out of your audience?

Instead of simply relying on statistical data, look more closely for the context around it:

• What’s happening in your ideal client’s life?
• What do they do in their day-to-day? 
• What roles do they play? 
• When they do engage with an online space, why are they there?

When you know these types of things, you can draw more reliable conclusions about how they might behave–and get a clearer idea about what online marketing channels they’ll be using.

I recently recommended LinkedIn to a client who offers career coaching, and I based that on a key commonality among all of their clients: they want to make a career change. If there’s any time when you’d fire up your LinkedIn account, it’s when you’re looking to make a career change! That’s a place where their audience will spend their time.

Similarly, I often get more traction through email marketing. This may sound strange, since social media is one of my core offerings, but a lot of the people I want to reach are frustrated with social media. When you’re in that state of mind as a business owner, you simply check out from social media altogether, or only show up there sporadically, because you don’t want to deal with it.

Basically, remind yourself that your audience is full of human beings who do human things. They’re making the choices that are right for them, whether they’re 25 or 65.