Psychographics

What are psychographics?

Psychographics are essentially the attitudes, interests, opinions, values, personalities, and lifestyles of your target market and your customers. Psychographics are extremely useful when it comes to marketing, customer service, but also in opinion research, prediction, and broader social research.

Psychographics mostly deal with IAO variables, which are made up of interests, activities, and opinions. They go beyond just the age and gender of your customers and prospects and try to understand their beliefs, interests, values, and emotions.

Psychographic segmentation is essentially a market segmentation technique in which you can form groups based on psychological traits that influence consumption habits drawn from people’s lifestyles and preferences.

It focuses on how people think and what they want their life to be.

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Why is psychographics important?

You need to understand your customers if you have any intention of succeeding in business. Psychographics give you a narrower and targeted understanding of your customers. It moves your business closer to your ideal customers, the ones that will be most likely to make purchases from you.

It helps target your marketing efforts with greater effectiveness, ensuring that you reach the right people and use the most appropriate marketing messages to increase the chances of them taking action.

It also helps you communicate with your customers in a better manner during customer service interactions, making them more receptive to your suggestions and even creating cross-selling and up-selling opportunities.

By conducting psychographic research, you are able to create a comprehensive psychographic profile of the target audience, which would help you personalize your messaging, ask the right questions, and thereby increase your conversion rate.

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What are psychographics vs demographics?

While demographics would only give you information about the age, location, race, gender, employment status, etc., psychographics helps you dig deeper and target people based on their personality, values, attitudes, interests, lifestyles, etc. 

Is psychographics always far superior to demographics? Not really; they both have their own role and importance.

You could say that demographics help you understand who buys your product, but psychographics helps you understand why they buy it, it helps you understand their motivation and the reasoning behind their purchases.

So, you could use demographics to identify who your ideal customers are and then launch a marketing campaign to attract these customers to make purchases. But if you don’t use psychographics, there isn’t a way for you to understand why they make those purchases, so you won’t be able to use the right message in your marketing material because you do not have an idea of what message would resonate with them. So now, you’re running a marketing campaign targeted towards the right people, but it still isn’t as effective as it could be.

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What is the Difference Between Psychographic and Behavioral Segmentation?

The main difference between psychographic and behavioral segmentation is that behavioral segmentation focuses on dividing and grouping your customers and prospects based on their actions like purchase frequency, brand loyalty, etc., while psychographic segmentation focuses on dividing customers and prospects based on their opinions, interests, activities, lifestyles, values, etc.

Psychographic segmentation would consider behavioral data (by looking at activities), but most of the time behavioral segmentation does not consider psychographic data.

Another difference between psychographic and behavioral segmentation is that behavioral segmentation creates a perception in the minds of your buyers so that they adhere to the brand, while psychographic segmentation assists in innovating products or even positioning them in a manner that makes them more appealing than those of your competitors. It allows you to understand how your customers see your brand and gives you a better idea about how you should position your brand to make it more attractive and compelling, thus allowing you to increase your conversions and maximize your revenue.

How psychographics used in marketing?

Earlier, psychographics was not used in marketing as much as it is now because the psychographic data was considered to be less actionable and more difficult to collect as compared to demographic data.

Nowadays though, thanks to the internet, it is far easier to collect psychographic data and take action on psychographic data. 

Marketers need to include psychographic data in customer personas because this data helps them determine what kind of marketing message would be more persuasive for a particular kind of customer.

In addition to improving the pitch on outbound marketing messages, it also helps you improve your inbound marketing efforts. It allows you to create content and even to design landing pages that will be more effective and would drive more conversions.

Psychographics can even help you with keyword research. It can even be used to drive PPC campaigns on social media.

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What are the benefits of psychographic segmentation?

Psychographic segmentation brings a wide range of benefits to the table. Here are a few of them:

• Psychographic segmentation can help you create messages and experiences that are more suited to the customer or prospect and could be more influential and compelling.
• It helps you play to your customers’ motivations.
• It enables you to increase your engagement levels.
• Psychographic segmentation also helps you improve your overall customer experience.
• It complements the insights that you gather through traditional demographic segmentation.

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What is the advantages and disadvantage of psychographics?

Here are some of the most prominent disadvantages of psychographics:

• Psychographic information was traditionally harder to obtain than other types of data, like demographic data. 
• Usually, it is necessary for your consumers to participate in a psychographic survey in order for you to have access to psychographic data. But, it is still possible to use predictive modeling to statistically project psychographic segments across a population. However, the accuracy of the segment assignment would not be nearly as accurate as it would with a psychographic survey.
• There is also a need for clear rules to be put in place with regards to the interpretation of data in order to ensure that there is a consistency of approach among the individuals or departments that engage in customer segmentation analysis.