Understanding & Utilizing Psychographics in Marketing
Understanding who your customers are is important in any business. Typically, we put a lot of stock into demographics like age, gender, and socio-economic status. However, this information doesn’t exactly tell the whole story. To really understand your customers, you need to dig deeper, which is where psychographics comes into play. Psychographics provide a more complete picture of your audience’s opinions, behaviors, and attitudes. Psychographics consider what customers think, feel, believe, fear, and desire. They help brands to build buyer personas to drive their marketing strategies.
Where demographics focus more on sociological aspects of your customer base, psychographics focus on the reasoning behind why your customers act a certain way. Demographics fall short by not giving the entire picture. Psychographics provide more personal insight into the customer’s state of mind. Many businesses are utilizing psychographics to improve conversion rates and venture into new markets. Developing psychographic profiles of your customer base allow you know who to market each of your products or services to. It can also help you run segmented campaigns to target audiences you might not have considered before.
Types of Psychographic Segmentation
The different types of psychographic segmentation help to identify customers who are interested in learning more about your company, those who are uninterested, and those who might become influencers. Psychographic segmentation can help you better understand who your customers are, what they like, how they think, and what drives them to ultimately make a purchase. Psychographic segmentation divides prospective customers into segments based on physiological traits that impact buying behavior, such as:
Lifestyle- Each of our different lifestyles help to shape our wants and needs. Lifestyle patterns exist that put people at similar life stages to be linked by their interests in products or services. When implementing psychographic marketing, it is important to position your product or service as a solution to an issue your audience is facing.
Personality- Some people possess strong personality traits that shape how they buy products. With this aspect in mind, your brand must mirror those traits in order to get these types of individuals interested in doing business with you. Brands must ensure that, whatever traits their products represent, they stay authentic to those, or they risk losing their following.
Social Status- The social status of people primarily decides the products they use and their preferences. Each social class has its choice of clothes, shoes, food, cars, electronics, etc. This segmentation type can be helpful for brands that have a niche product/service to offer which will not be helpful to all social classes.
Interests- This is the most important type as it includes the political views that we hold, our opinions on social issues, and the activities one does to share how they feel. This psychographic segmentation is based on activities consumers participate in and what triggers their interest. This can include; hobbies, preferred means to consume media, preferred social media platforms, favorite television shows, and aspirations. Brands can build marketing strategies and use language that appeals to individuals with varied interests.
Equipping yourself with the above information about your customers and having the means to collect it, will enable you to build a great psychographic marketing campaign to increase sales, engagement, and customer loyalty.
Using Psychographics in Marketing
Step 1: Gather Psychographic Data: Demographic data gives insight into who your key audiences are. There are plenty of analytics tools to gain quantitative date regarding who is most interested in your products and services. When it comes to gathering psychographic data, it is a bit more challenging Aspects such as motivations and desires are much more personal than what an analytics tool can tell you. Psychographics are based on qualitative data which is primarily gathered through talking directly to your consumers.
Interviews tend to be the best approach, but they can be time-consuming and challenging to arrange. A scalable method to gather psychographic data is via online surveys and quizzes. Creating a measure with the right questions can be the biggest challenge of an effective survey. To get started, look at some examples. Make sure you tailor your content to your specific business and audience. To increase data collection, consider offering discounts or a freebie to those who complete the survey. Once you have a big enough sample, it’s time to sort through all that data.
Step 2: Create Psychographic Profiles: As you start to sift through the data, you will start to see some patterns. When it comes to psychographic data, your goal is to find recurring themes and group them to create multiple profiles. Start by discarding any responses from outside your target audience, this allows you to focus on “good” data and create more accurate profiles. While looking at the data, note if there are any questions where a significant number of customers had similar views. These groups of similar responses form your profiles.
Step 3: Use Profiles in Marketing Campaigns: Psychographic profiles provide you with clear insights into what your customers want, which is pure gold when it comes to marketing. How you decide to use this information depends on how you approach marketing. There are several options: run a highly targeted social media ad campaign, refocus your brand image to appeal to a key psychographic profile, develop new products to better fit the needs of your customers, and/or create promotional videos that depict lifestyle aspirations of one of your psychographic profiles. After completing the first two steps, you have all the information you need to develop marketing campaigns to target your primary demographic and their needs. Now you just need to decide how best to make use of the data to meet your needs.
Creating psychographic profiles will undoubtably benefit your business. The better you understand your audience, the stronger your marketing campaigns will be. Obviously, collecting psychographic data is crucial, but ultimately how you decide to apply it to your marketing is what will determine how effective it is for you. Ideally, you will start to create your copy, images, and advertisements in ways that leverage the psychographic profiles you have created.
