Demographic Questions Every Survey Should Include
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Surveys are an extremely valuable tool for getting information directly from the source – namely, consumers who might engage with your product or service. The input you get from a survey can help you shape your product design, marketing tactics, and even your company brand.
It’s important that a survey always includes some kind of demographic questions. Not only does doing so allow you to discover how certain audiences might respond to your questions in different ways, but it also lets you zone in on a particular group of people you want as your target consumer to understand what really makes them tick.
With Suzy, demographic targeting is built right into our consumer insights platform so that you can start asking more meaningful questions right away and prevent survey fatigue among your respondents. Here are some key demographic parameters that we already have on our audience, and how you can best leverage it to gather insights on your target consumers.
1. Age
A person’s birth year will always set them apart from others younger or older than them. Each generation goes through one or more formative changes compared to the ones that came before them – like the widespread adoption of technology during the Millennial era, for example.
A person’s age can have a major influence on what a person needs, wants, and how they see things. Gathering data on the age of your respondents allows you to understand the similarities and differences between the age groups in what they look for in products, services, their attitudes, experiences, values, and much more.
2. Race and Ethnicity
Like age, race and ethnicity can have an impact on how a person lives and what kinds of expectations they have about their environment. Capturing your respondents’ race and ethnicity would allow you to get some contextual understanding behind your respondents’ attitudes and behaviors.
3. Relationship Status
A person’s relationship status can have an impact on their priorities and their behaviors as a consumer. While there are a lot of deeply complex labels and emotions surrounding how people define their relationships, it can still be useful to collect this data if you’re looking to target a specific demographic – for example, if you’re choosing to target a product to married couples.
4. Highest Level of Education You’ve Received
This is more relevant in some cases than others, but education level almost always has an impact on how much a person earns, the field they work in, and so on. In turn, these things can often have a direct impact on their buying behaviors.
5. Annual Household Income
How much a person earns directly translates into availability of disposable income and willingness to spend more money, even on necessities like toilet paper and food. This data in and of itself can help you determine pricing strategy for a new product. Lower income households typically prioritize affordability, while higher income households are willing to spend more on quality.
6. Employment Status
Obviously this is tied to household income, but it’s useful to understand what kind of employment a person has, if any. How much a person works isn’t just tied to how much disposable income they have; it also impacts their free time and energy levels. Someone who works a busy full-time job or multiple part-time jobs in strenuous fields might value convenience much more than someone with more leisure time built into their schedule.
7. Geography
Location information allow you to dive deeply into consumer interests and behaviors. For instance, you can segment audiences based on how close they are to your nearest retail location. It can also reflect how likely they are to use or purchase your product; someone who lives in landlocked Arizona might be less likely to buy fishing equipment than someone who lives in coastal Maine or in lake-filled Minnesota, for example.
Suzy Can Help
Most market research tools recommend that you ask demographic questions within your survey. This can increase the length of your survey, and the likelihood that a respondent will get bored or frustrated and stop taking your survey before they’re finished.
With Suzy, you’ll never have that problem. Our platform collects 14 different demographic data points from our proprietary respondent database, so all you have to do is click from a dropdown menu and select the types of filters you want to apply. This ensures that audiences aren’t fatigued with demographic questions, before they get to the questions that matter the most to you. Best of all, using Suzy is much faster than traditional methods – on average, you can get more than 300 responses in less than an hour, allowing you to put that data to work as soon as possible.
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