The 11 Best Demographic Survey Questions for Quality Surveys

Understanding your audience is key to making a profit, building your brand, and establishing relationships with your loyal customers. Important information about your audience you need to consider is the demographic data. You might wonder why you need it and why you should include demographic survey questions when picking data. But when you know your customer’s age, you understand the marketing channels, triggers, insights, and many other subtleties. For example, only 11% of people who are 50 years old or older use TikTok, Statista states. This means that you won’t get many results from this channel if your products are for people who are 60 years old. 

It is not hard to include several questions in your survey, which might save you plenty of time and money. Here you’ll find demographic question examples that you can add to your next survey. 

What Are Demographic Survey Questions?

There is a saying, “If you sell your products to all people, you’ll sell them to no one.” This means that there is no chance you’ll make a profit if you try to please everyone. It’s not possible. So, don’t even try to fool yourself: you always have a target audience, and you always have competitors. 

When you understand your market segment and audience, you know exactly what to say, how to say it, and when to say it. Sample demographic survey questions might help you with that. You’ll find customers’ age, gender, income level, country of origin, etc., which will be helpful for your segments and upcoming promotion campaigns. When you create such audience segments, you have a chance to understand their behavior, insights, trends, pain points, and ways to achieve their desires. 

Why Use Demographic Survey Questions

It doesn’t matter what your business niche is. In any case, you need to know your customers from A to Z and walk a mile in their shoes. Even the smallest bit of such information can affect your business incredibly and be the key to your success. 

As both you and your marketing team find out the necessary information, you’ll have the knowledge that helps build strategies, plan campaigns, and be more sure about your future steps. As it is known, marketing doesn’t give you a 100% chance that you’ll make a profit. It reduces uncertainty. And the more information you obtain, the closer you’ll be to your strategic goal. The following sample demographic survey questions might help you with that. 

Later, you can upload this information to your CRM and use it for various goals and business predictions. You can easily find out tons of information about your customer, but it won’t be worth a dime. Isn’t that great? So make sure to include demographic survey questions next time you do questionnaires for your customers. 

11 Demographic Survey Questions Every Quality Survey Needs to Contain and Examples

The following demographic questions are examples that should come up in every survey. They will provide you with general data that you can use to learn more about your audience. Usually, marketing teams place them at the end of the survey. Some teams mark them as mandatory, and some as optional. 

Here are 11 demographic survey questions you should include in your demographic survey template.

1. Customer’s Gender

This is one of the most popular questions as it divides people into several categories and helps you understand which gender uses your products or services the most. Based on that, as we said before, you can be more creative with promotion channels.

2. Customer’s Age

It might be news for you, but even politicians segment their target audience by age. Different age groups listen to different pop music, which is not only limited to the sound but also to the faces. It means that if you want to connect with 30-year-old girls, you might check brand ambassadors like Britney Spears, Pink, and Beyonce, as Pepsi did back in the day.

However, many people are quite sensitive about some demographic questions, and the age question is one of them. That’s why it is better not to ask them directly but specify the age groups. This information will be enough for your marketing success. 

3. Customer’s Ethnicity

If you want to avoid this topic, you may do it. However, it can be important for your business or necessary for a specific occasion.

There’s always a chance that people might want to pick several answers to this question as they might have a vast ethnic background, so think about placing tick boxes. This is how users can pick several answers to one question if necessary. 

We also suggest you leave an option as “prefer not to answer” or make the question optional.  

4. Customer’s Location

Depending on your survey goal, you might ask your customer about different locations. For international companies, a country name will be enough. But if you run a local business, you might get down to the street names, ZIP codes, districts, etc. 

Many business owners ask for locations in the form of drop-down lists where people can pick the existing place. 

5. Education

You can also segment your customers based on their academic degrees. If you run a business that is focused on different kinds of education processes, additional classes or involves any academic information, such a question might be helpful to see what kind of people use it. This question is not very personal, so people will most likely answer it. 

6. Marital Status

This information might be important for creating targeted campaigns for people who have kids or are married. There are plenty of goods that married people buy for presents or for their home. In general, the behavior and shopping carts of married and unmarried people can differ significantly. 

7. Disability Status

If your business helps people make their life better, then consider adding this question. Besides working on your content, services, and product, you might need to adjust your website. Many create websites that are inclusive, and it doesn’t require much work — several lines of code are enough to be more user-friendly. 

However, we advise you not to push people to answer this question if they don’t feel comfortable with it. 

This is a general sample of the demographic questionnaires. But also, you may add something more specific for your business based on your niche. For example, if you are a bank or some financial institution, you might need information on people’s income or employment status. 

8. Employment and Income

Employment status and income questions will provide you with information about clients’ ability to purchase your goods or services. It will also help understand the job function, years of experience, etc., which can be useful if you run SaaS businesses that help people find jobs. 

9. Political Choice

Such views might be important if you are planning on creating a new product. These answers will give you an understanding of whether your audience is ready for new goods and how strict they are based on their opinion. 

Having such information will help you understand where your audience stays and how your new ideas might be received. 

10. Family Questions

Have you ever wondered about the realities of your target audience? Families with many kids have different priorities compared to newlyweds. So, questions about marital status, like the one we’ve mentioned before, and questions about kids can make a big difference.

Based on such answers, you can offer specific discounts, freebies, etc., to your customers if most of them have kids.

11. Language

It is more than just a language. It's a code that people use to communicate with each other. So, when you sell your products and services in a particular region, it is necessary to know which language your target audience speaks. More than this simple knowledge, you will be able to find trends and relative jokes to connect with your audience on a deeper level. 

4 Tips on How to Use Demographic Survey Questions

Anonymity must be an option. When you are studying your customers and not collecting leads, you should have the option to remain anonymous during the demographic survey questions. Many people don’t like sharing their personal information and prefer staying anonymous. If you are fine with that, make sure people understand that you are gathering anonymous information. 

Inform about your survey. Take some time to write a brief introduction where you describe why you ask people these questions and why you need their answers. When you tell people why you need such information and what you are planning to do with it, you boost your chances of getting the desired data.

Make sure it’s user-friendly. There are plenty of services that allow for the creation of a well-designed demographic questionnaire sample. Even a Google survey is a nice choice if you want something simple and easy to understand. Besides, you can create a survey using pop-up windows. You can read more on that in our Pop-Up Surveys: Everything You Need to Know article.

Be brief. The less you ask, the more answers you’ll get. Notify your customers of the number of questions you want them to ask. 

Conclusion

When you get your customers’ demographic data, you’ll understand your marketing goals better and see a broader picture. Such data helps adjust your goals and revisit your business’s important points to check if they align with your future intentions. 

Start asking your loyal customers the above-mentioned demographic survey questions to see if you understand your customers right. If you feel that you need extra help or someone to work on your questions, you can always contact Claspo.