The Ultimate Guide to Psychographics in Marketing

But the precise segmentation solutions available today make it surprisingly simple to combine demographic, behavioral, and psychographic segmentation variables, as long as you have access to a robust foundation of data and identity. This strategy delivers a robust multi-dimensional view of the buyer persona that will allow you to identify precise segments and create meaningful experiences. Your brand might start with demographics as a first cut but then layer in behavioral data to understand what customers do, as well as psychographic data to understand why they do it. Rather than choosing one of the above approaches to customer segmentation, most brands will want to take a combined approach. A travel brand promoting luxury cruises, for example, might focus its attention on older customers with high income levels, while a pharmaceutical brand promoting pregnancy-related products would look for female audiences within a specific age range.

Following that, we’ll talk more in-depth about applying psychographics to your marketing efforts, as well as the different methods available for data collection. AIO focuses on the interests and activities of your target audience. These traits look deeper than age/gender and give businesses real insights into customer behaviour. Grouping individuals based on their hobbies, activities and lifestyle choices, such as fitness enthusiasts, foodies or travellers, helps you to get closer to your target audience.

By analysing the responses, you can identify common themes and patterns among different psychographic segments within your audience. And for busy professionals, you can focus on the space-saving and time-saving benefits of your equipment, showcasing its ability to deliver effective workouts in limited time and space. Let’s say your company specialises in providing equipment for home fitness enthusiasts. Whichever research tools you employ, gather data from a large, representative sample of your target audience.

Why psychographics matter to marketers and salespeople

And in doing so, you want to be able to identify common pain points, desires, aspirations, and motivations that influence their purchasing decisions and behaviors. Psychographics are essentially the qualitative characteristics of people that explain why they behave the way they do, going beyond the surface-level demographics. Psychographics is diving deeper into the psychographic profiles of your target audience to understand their values, their attitudes, their lifestyle, their interests, their hobbies, their aspirations, and their personality traits. Demographics are the statistical characteristics of a population that marketers use to better understand and segment groups of people, right? This lesson is a preview from our Digital Marketing Certificate Online (includes software).

• The resistance may come from buyers themselves, but it could also come from peers, friends, family, or colleagues.
• Watch the Dreamforce keynote to learn how teams spark conversations and respond in real time.
• We'll explain the different types of segmentation used by marketers; explore its benefits; and expand on how it relates to subjects like targeting, messaging, and positioning.
• In reality, marketers can segment the market using any base or variable provided that it is identifiable, substantial, responsive, actionable, and stable.
• When they don’t, the video stalls regardless of how nice it looks.
• You now understand what is important to your buyer, so you’ll know just how to motivate them.

The technique known as perceptual mapping is often used to understand consumers' mental representations of brands within a given category. Developing the marketing program requires a deep knowledge of key market segments' purchasing habits, their preferred retail outlet, their media habits, and their price sensitivity. The primary market is the target market selected as the main focus of marketing activities. Another major decision in developing the segmentation strategy is the selection of market segments that will become the focus of special attention (known as target markets).

For instance, psychographics have helped Adidas find that their performance products are more popular with sports lovers and those who consider themselves outdoorsy types. In combination with demographic and behavioral data, psychographics have helped them target various products with exceptional precision. To investigate the problem, they adopted psychographics. Now we know what psychographics are, how do they look in action? Whatever the approach, though, the benefits of psychographics all come down to the incredible detail that they provide.

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To this end, CoreHealth has partnered up with PatientBond, a “platform for driving digital personalized engagement” using email, text message, and Interactive Voice Response. For CoreHealth’s business model, it is important to find ways to increase employee participation in its clients’ workplace wellness programs, screenings, and health interventions. To see how this works in practice, let’s look at one company using psychographic modeling to revolutionize the health services industry — an industry that, according to Deloitte, has been moving from volume to value to compensate for revenue pressures and declining margins. Service industries are also getting in on the game, devising their own five-factor models, reaching new clients, and improving their services at the same time. A customer’s knowledge that advertising is targeted and tailored directly to them increases their confidence that the products they consume directly reflect their own unique combination of personality traits and thus their own individuality. By now, consumers have internalized advertising’s message that each of them is different, unique, and individual.

Contentsquare puts you in direct contact with your target audience through surveys and interviews, so you can create buyer personas based on data rather than guesswork. Small companies knew they could be doing it wrong, and if they messed up, they might end up in jail (a psychographic criterion). But, what they learned through interviews was that they needed to segment based on entirely different criteria.

“Our customer file was aging so we reassessed our target audience,” said Director of Brand Engagement Kathryn Pratt, speaking at the Association of National Advertisers’ 2019 Brand Activation Conference. These techniques were also adopted by Blue State Digital a digital and technology service firm whose clients have included both Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton. Jimmy’s online purchase history suggests that he’s a gun owner, but he also has liked a number of posts on his Facebook Newsfeed that support certain gun control regulations. The data captured on each restaurant’s audience ranges from consumer interests to favored brands & TV shows, among other insights. They don’t shun edgier stuff, such as Chelsea Handler’s show on Netflix, or the material one might encounter on the Will Ferrell co-founded website, ‘Funny or Die.’ Cable news, particularly CNN, also ranks, as do Oprah and President Obama.”

With psychographic data, it’s much easier to design landing pages for key personas. Parents who focus on minimizing screen time (“limiters”) gravitate towards software and devices that support their kids’ literacy, math, and academic skills. Social media monitoring is hugely valuable, too, since the organic conversations that emerge online may help you spot emerging issues or psychographic clusters.” Social media analytics lets you identify trends in interests and attitudes, and even use sentiment analysis to help dig a little more deeply into psychographic attitudes. Read more on how brands can create shared value in this great article.

Geographic segmentation may be considered the first step in international marketing, where marketers must decide whether to adapt their existing products and marketing programs to the unique needs of distinct geographic markets. Depending on company philosophy, resources, product type, or market characteristics, a business may develop an undifferentiated approach or differentiated approach. Market segmentation is not only designed to identify the most profitable segments but also to develop profiles of key segments to better understand their needs and purchase motivations. The objective is to identify profitable and growing segments that a company can target with tailored marketing strategies. Psychographics are more personal and less standardized than demographics, so you’ll need to build custom fields and tags yourself.

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Methods like customer interviews and focus groups can be more time-consuming than a survey blast. This can help you identify their hobbies, interests, and lifestyles. For example, eBay likely wouldn’t host a focus group with people over 65 years old.

Audience intelligence tracks how competitor audiences evolve and whether buyers are migrating between brands. Audience intelligence reveals which creators actually reach your target buyers based on audience overlap rather than vanity metrics. The platform helps consumer brands track visual mentions and understand audiences engaging with visual content.

Generational segmentation assumes that people's values and attitudes are shaped by the key events that occurred during their lives and that these attitudes translate into product and brand preferences. One of the difficulties organisations face when implementing segmentation into their business processes is that segmentations developed using a single psychographics variable base, e.g. attitudes, are useful only for specific business functions. Unlike traditional segmentation models, this approach assigns more than one segment to each unique customer, depending on the current circumstances they are under. Purchase or usage occasion segmentation focuses on analyzing occasions when consumers might purchase or consume a product. This is an applied example of behavioural segmentation, using attitude to a product or service as a key descriptor or variable which has been customized for the specific application.

This information can be used to identify customers who are likely to make a purchase, churn or engage with a particular marketing campaign. AI-powered tools can now analyse vast amounts of data to identify patterns and trends in consumer behaviour. Meanwhile, unbeknownst to you, the pet food company's product development team is analysing data from the loyalty programme to uncover trends and insights. Psychographics enable your business to create personalised experiences that align with customers' values and interests. And don’t forget to keep your finger on the pulse of your competitors. Once you've collected psychographic data, you can conduct a segmentation analysis to identify distinct psychographic segments within your audience.