Psychographics 101: How to Think Like a Customer

Finally, ask them to discuss how they narrowed their options, who was involved, and what they learned about the solutions they evaluated. (You might spend 5 to 10 minutes learning about their motivations for their decision to buy.) Even better, you don’t need a huge budget to collect reliable and useful insights. This is where you aggregate everything you learn about the steps your buyers take, the resources they trust, and the influencers involved, from beginning to the end. If a sales manager wants to purchase a cell phone service for their entire sales team, their supervisors or employees might plant seeds of doubt based on a popular misconception. What could make a potential customer worry they’re making the wrong choice?

If you’re reaching a US-based audience, football and baseball may be the more popular options. Geographic segmentation can ensure you’re considering the preferences of your customers for ads for sports, for example. One of the easiest examples for getting started with demographic segmentation is to ask your customers to share information.

Understanding your customers' inner desires is the key to business success. There is no single answer to how many buyer personas a company should have or how to determine what will make your audience segmentation successful. Advertisers can use audience insights to identify new or underserved markets and discover approaches to better cater campaigns and messaging to existing ones.

For example, when a company expands its reach to global audiences, it interacts with a wider range of viewpoints and personalities. Don't overlook the power of quizzes to give you valuable insights about your target market. You can build a following organically through online posting, manage your social media connections, and gain insights into your target audience. Additionally, you can leverage demographic data to understand the motivations of different customer segments.

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There’s also Facebook Social Graph, which is designed to identify connections between Facebook users. Tracking from Facebook and Google is planted all over the web, so these companies are collecting data about you no matter where you go. Ever confirmed that you’re attending an event on Facebook, or looked for a specific location on Google Maps?

Want More Psychographic Data? Facebook and Google Got You Covered

When you need to find the right people to take your survey, use SurveyMonkey Audience to reach your target market quickly and easily. You can use market segmentation surveys to help you understand how the members of your target market are the same and different. Customers may be segmented by demographics, psychographics, or other relevant categories, such as customers who have previously made purchases from the company. It’s usually combined with demographic data to understand the target market for a product or service.

(This is, as we will see, a common tactic for companies that wish to tailor their psychographic models to industry-specific needs.) Early on, in an effort to more narrowly target its messaging, Porsche customized a five-factor personality model that included the following psychographic segments. Other early companies that use psychographic tactics include Narratrs, Five, StatSocia, and Merchant IQ, among others.

What are the benefits of using psychographics in marketing?

Their high education levels could imply an interest in continuous learning, personal development, and sustainability. As full-time workers, we might infer that they’re likely to seek out activities that help them unwind and disconnect from work—like yoga, meditation, or outdoor pursuits. To illustrate, we researched UK-based sustainable clothing company Rapanui. Now we’ve identified seven different types of psychographic data that can support your marketing efforts, let’s look at how to gather this information.

Motivate buyers based on their needs

• By applying analytics to break down the marketplace of consumers into smaller groups, marketers and advertisers can profile and target key audiences more effectively.
• By thoroughly examining these key components of psychographic profiling, marketers can build a multi-dimensional understanding of their target audience.
• For instance, if your company is a music platform, psychographics might help determine that your target audience is interested in reading about live events, not just musical releases.
• In marketing, it’s easy to confuse demographic segmentation with psychographic segmentation, but they uncover very different insights about your target audience.

Recent advances in artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning (ML), and natural language processing (NLP) have significantly expanded the scope of psychographic segmentation. These variables can be integrated into segmentation models using supervised learning or multivariate analysis to improve behavioral predictions. What are psychographics in marketing For instance, a model may attain a higher level of predictability with a greater number of segments, but too many segments become unwieldy and infeasible to juggle when operationalizing the model. That target audience could be representative of the general population, a specific demographic or socioeconomic group, a population of consumers who utilize a certain product or service category or any group of people relevant to one's research or business objectives.

A streaming platform, for instance, can align recommendations with interests like wellness or true crime; a fitness brand might tailor programs to users who value community over competition. Get insights about people you’re trying to serve and how to reach them, with SurveyMonkey’s Audience Panel. It is this balance of data and psychology that enables companies to predict future behavior, refine their marketing strategy, and speak to the heart of their target audience. By capturing both behavioral data and qualitative insights, CRM platforms give marketing teams the ability to build richer psychographic profiles that go beyond simple demographic segmentation. Unlike demographic data, which is relatively straightforward to obtain, psychographic information requires a blend of qualitative methodology, behavioral data, and consumer insights.

You can analyze psychographic data in relation to demographic, geographic, or behavioral data, in addition to firmographic data, which is especially important for account-based marketing. Even at a micro level, it’s nice to know your audience’s demographics and which demographics make the best customers for your business—especially when you’re ramping up ad spend. In contrast to psychographic data that covers opinions and interests, demographic data relates to the structure of a population—factors like age, race, sex, and income.

Buyers have certain outcomes they hope to see from their purchase. In marketing, knowing your audience’s psychographic traits is key. This approach helps understand why people make purchases. This leads to more personalized marketing that hits the mark. It makes it easier for companies to meet the specific needs and wants of different groups. It allows companies to engage with people personally and improve their marketing.

Even with the best marketing tools and precision, it feels like even though you're casting a wide net, you’re not catching as many fish as you know you can. If your target customer loves yoga and you're trying to sell them your nutritional counseling program, you can incorporate images or offers that involve yoga. For example, your target buyer might be interested in hiking, but in reality, they don’t have the time or feel confident enough to go hiking on their own.