Strategic audience segmentation increases the chances of collecting qualified leads, which in turn increases the chances of curating targeted sales and marketing campaigns. All this culminates to finally identifying new opportunities in your existing markets.
Creating and using psychographic profiles goes beyond basic forms of customer segmentation to provide even deeper insight into your target audience’s personalities and beliefs, and how they interact with your brand.
By understanding your audience more deeply, you can deliver personalized brand experiences— not just focusing on who they are or where they are, but also on what they think, believe, and value. With psychographics, it is possible to strengthen brand affinity and customer loyalty, and increase revenue.
Let’s start with the basics.
What are Psychographics?
Psychographics are insights made up of the psychological and cognitive attributes of consumers. It reveals their beliefs, values, and goals. Incorporating psychographics in your marketing and sales efforts by designing campaigns that appeal to your consumers and their purchasing habits will ensure that your shot never misses its target.
But how do you do this?
A Psychographics Example
Let’s say the business you have is a food subscription box model that allows your customers to request ingredients for customized recipes.
You have identified that your target audience has less time cooking their meals from scratch but are bored with the options that exist in the market. They are willing to spend more money on a subscription option that provides them with customized recipes for the week.
After identifying this, you then create a marketing campaign that revolves around your existing customer testimonials that highlight the plight of cooking meals after a long hectic day and position your service as the solution.
Incorporating psychographics along with demographics allows you to create an accurate buyer persona of the audience you want to target for your subscription business. This will also help you segment your audience and position your product better.
Therefore, it is extremely important to create psychographic profiles of your target audiences.
So, what is the difference between demographics and psychographics? Simple. Demographics focus on what your prospect is (age, gender, ethnicity, location) whereas psychographics focuses on who your prospect is (their values, beliefs, attitudes, and hobbies).
But before we do so, let us understand what psychographic segmentation is and the factors that influence it.
What is Psychographic Segmentation?
Psychographic segmentation or psychographics is a market segmentation tool that derives actionable market segments by assigning specific psychological characteristics to consumers based on some of the factors such as their behaviors, interactions, opinions, and interests. Psychographic segmentation enables businesses to predict their next customer with a great deal of accuracy, through the inspection of appropriate psychographic variables.
Let’s take a look at the factors that influence psychographic segmentation below.
The 6 Psychographic Factors
1. Personality Traits
This factor depends on what behavioral traits define your prospects. They provide insights into how your prospect interacts with their environment. For example: Introverts enjoy spending time by themselves whereas extroverts thrive on social interactions.
2. Activities
This factor provides you with details on how your prospects like to spend their time and money.
For example, an art enthusiast is more likely to pay for a year-long VIP membership access to a museum.
3. Opinions
This factor shines a light on what your prospects’ opinions, beliefs, and values are.
For example, political or religious beliefs may have a major influence on how a customer perceives a product or service.
4. Interests
This indicates what your prospects gain satisfaction from and what is their motivation behind a purchase decision.
For example, a hiker will be interested in investing in quality gear that potentially will save their life as opposed to buying cheaper options.
5. Social Status
This is often influenced by the monetary capacity of your prospects.
For example, haute couture fashion is easily accessible by the upper class whereas middle and lower-class individuals look for fashion options that provide a bang for their buck.
6. Lifestyle
This factor is influenced by your prospects’ relationships, occupations, and daily routines.
For example, a full-time employee has rigid working hours and a fast-paced lifestyle, but a retired professional can spend more time on other leisurely pursuits.
Using the above psychographic factors, you can build a psychographic profile of your most successful customers and use the same to target new customers.
What are Psychographic Profiles?
A psychographic profile is a unique description of an individual or group’s attitude, personality, interests, habits and all other psychographic data you have collected. Psychographic profiles help you understand what really matters to your audience by distilling their core values and beliefs.
Customers often tend to make their purchasing decisions based on psychographic factors such as their personal interests or values, thereby making psychographic profiles extremely effective.
A psychographic profile not only helps you understand your audience’s psychological preferences but also can improve your outreach methods, advertising techniques, and more, to create an overall captivating brand.
Psychographic Profile Example
Presidents love it too! One of the most famous examples of psychographic profiling was Donald Trump’s use of political consulting firms Aggregate IQ and Cambridge Analytica.
This firm leveraged a Facebook app called myPersonality. Users of this app took a psychometric test to see how they tested against the Big Five personality traits: openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism (OCEAN).
This data was later pooled with other data such as Facebook likes to build detailed psychographic profiles of the users. Later on, these users were subjected to personalized ads designed to convert their political beliefs or secure a vote for Trump.
How to Find Data to Build a Psychographic Profile?
Having understood what psychographics are, we shall move on to learn how to acquire them. Let’s take a look at what are some methods you can use to find psychographic data.
1. Interview Existing Customers
Image by upklyak on Freepik
The best way to find psychographic data is to speak to your existing customers. You can ask them about their holiday plans, what they did over the weekend, what kind of movies they like to watch or what kind of music they listen to, what kind of books they read, or if they have any New Year’s resolutions.
Based on what kind of relationship you share with the customer, you can gauge the type of questions you can ask them. The answers to these questions will allow you to understand what type of prospective customers you should target.
It helps you understand what they do in their spare time, their hobbies, what interests them, if they like bargains, and their personal goals.
While it is great to speak to your existing customers to get psychographic data, doing the same with a larger sample of people helps as well.
Send out customer surveys to a larger sample and get them to tell you about themselves.
Pro:
Ability to get detailed information from customers and the chance of follow-up questions if you need further clarity.
Con:
Need to invest a lot of time with each customer to get detailed information.
2. Use Customer Surveys and Questionnaires
This is an easy and useful method to collect psychographic data. The trick is to know how to set up your surveys and questionnaires with the right questions for the right audience. The best way to ensure that you get your target audience to fill the surveys or questionnaires is by incentivizing them. The incentive can be as small as a $10 Amazon gift card or a pair of $300 noise-canceling headphones, depending on your budget.
Pro:
Fast and a low-effort way to gather information in a short time frame.
Con:
Not a lot of people are motivated to fill out surveys and questionnaires, therefore making it difficult to get a proper cross-section of your psychographic target market.
3. Focus Groups
A focus group is a collection of individuals who can provide psychographic data about your target market. These groups of people can be in-person groups or virtual/online groups.
Demographically speaking, a focus group should consist of diverse individuals so that they can provide you with valuable insights about a particular product or service and the psychographic factors that influenced their purchase decision.
Pro:
Provides you with a deeper insight into your prospective customers and often individuals in this group sound off on other individuals’ answers.
Con:
Sometimes the group setting can be detrimental because certain individuals in the focus groups might not be honest with their answers as they would be in an anonymous setting.
4. Third-Party Research
For the ones looking for a quick, no-hassle way of collecting these insights, specific tools and services that can equip you with the necessary psychographic data for a fair price.
Pro:
Ability to access a vast database of information that is already collected and stored in one place.
Con:
Budget restrictions can be an issue for companies that are on a small budget since their tools can be expensive based on the level of service chosen. Also, data decay due to inaccurate data is always a concern with ready-to-use data dumps.
5. Leverage Website Analytics
Another place to look for psychographic data is your website analytics (i.e., Google Analytics). Dive deep into your analytics and understand what kind of visitors are landing on your website, where are they coming from, what they are clicking on, what piece of content are they engaging with, which CTAs they interact with, what is your main source of traffic, and which of your web pages are they spending the most amount of time on.
Pro:
Personalized data since these visitors are unique to your website and the information is readily available.
Con:
Since this is a retrospective analysis of your website data, it can be time-consuming. If you are not familiar with your analytics tool, it can be complicated to understand. If you have a large amount of data, it can be challenging to draw conclusions and would require a ton of A/B testing to identify patterns and how to exploit these patterns.
6. Outsource Your Psychographic Data Collection
Another way to collect data is to outsource the entire operation to a marketing agency. This agency in turn gathers the information you require by using a few or all of the aforementioned methods.
Pro:
It’s an easy way out.
Con:
It’s expensive.
7. Social Media
We live in a world where we feel compelled to share every minute of our fascinating lives on social media. A great place to look for psychographic data is social media. While it is not the best idea ethically, it is, however, relatively easy to browse through your target audience’s profiles to understand what they like, enjoy, and take an interest in.
Pro:
As mentioned above, it is an easy way to gain insights into your target audience and how they use social media.
Con:
The information gathered can be difficult to quantify since there are a lot of variables involved when browsing through social media profiles.
The methods mentioned above can help add more depth and information to your psychographic profile. Either using one or a combination of methods will help you create a detailed and accurate psychographic profile of your desired prospects and identify their unique needs.
7 Ways in Which Creating a Psychographic Profile Can Help You Target the Right Prospects (With Examples)
As outlined above, we have now gathered hypothetical data about using the methods.
Now, let us take a look at how to implement these insights into your sales and marketing strategy.
1. Focus on what your prospect needs and motivate them.
Now you have an idea of what is important to your prospect. It is time to motivate them based on their needs. Give your prospects what they need so that they can make a purchase decision.
Just offering heavy discounts is not going to work. Instead, they want to know how your product or service is going to solve their problem.
Example:
You have a made-to-order food app and are looking to motivate your prospects to use your app to order delicious ready-to-eat recipes. So how do you achieve this? One way to motivate your prospects is by incorporating customer testimonials in your marketing campaigns and sales conversations to appeal to your prospects.
2. Meet your prospects where they are at.
If your prospects are leveraging Pinterest, for example, then you need to stop spending your money on Facebook Ads, YouTube, print, etc. Change gears and develop content that can be used on Pinterest.
Example
You have a made-to-order food app and are looking to bring new customers to your professional website. Create and share content like time-saving tips on how to make a nutritious meal on your account. Make sure to provide some fun ideas on how they can accomplish the same.
Another important aspect of this is to keep an eye on what kind of activity your prospects perform like what posts they re-pin and analyze them.
3. Leverage your prospect’s hobbies and interests.
Based on the example above, you have identified that work and family are important to your prospect. You should now share content that emphasizes the importance of good health, work-life balance, tips on how to make exercising fun for your family, and more.
Example
Use customized ads that showcase the nutritional ready-to-order recipes you provide and how they can access the same. This will bring visitors to your website and potentially get them to enroll in your program.
4. Use specialized call-to-action.
Now that you have brought in visitors to your website, it is very important to have a tailor-made call-to-action that pushes all the right buttons with your prospect (interest, hobbies, priorities, and needs).
Example
A call-to-action you could potentially use after listing the benefits of enrolling in your programs: This is the first step to a healthier life – Are you ready?
5. Highlight key features of your product.
Once you collect psychographic data, you are bound to end up with multiple insights. It is time to decide on which 4-5 features of your product should you highlight so that prospects find what they are looking for.
Example:
Your product comes in a variety of colors and you are extremely pleased about it. However, if your prospects don’t care about it, then remove it from the list of selling points and move on to other ones. Heat maps will help you in assessing the areas on your website that get the most amount of hovering and clicks.
6. Train your sales teams.
Many times, the psychographic-influenced messaging in your marketing campaigns does not end up getting reflected in sales conversations. Therefore, it is necessary to train your sales team so that your messaging gets reflected in the conversations they have with prospects about your product or service.
7. Help sales identify qualified leads.
Psychographics can act as a source of light when it comes to leads. Instead of blindly wading through the darkness for leads that aren’t sales-ready, you can use psychographics to help you identify new markets that are rich in sales-ready leads.
Identifying your prospects’ behaviors and habits can help your sales teams to take the conversation further.
Wrapping Up
There’s no doubt that understanding your target prospect’s psychographic profile is beneficial. You can leverage it to appeal to your prospects. It will help you determine what marketing channels to use, what messaging to include in your sales conversations, and also in building content that will encourage your prospects to imagine what it would be like to use your product or service.
This, in turn, will have a significant impact on generating the right kind of leads, thus increasing your ROI and retaining your existing customers.
