Every savvy marketer knows that knowing your audience is the key to a strong digital marketing campaign, which is why many marketers have created personas for their target and existing customers. Personas are a great way to guide your marketing strategy and identify the types of people you should be marketing to. Up until very recently, most personas were based on demographic data, like age, location and family income.
More and more, however, marketers are appreciating the power of psychographics. Psychographics refer to activities, interests and opinions ” data that traditionally has been very hard to track unless you had a large marketing research budget. Recently, though, social media and website analytics have rendered psychographic information more accessible and even affordable for businesses outside of the Fortune 100.
While both demographics and psychographics are independently important, taking both demographics and psychographics into account creates a complete picture of a buyer.
Consumers use the internet to find the groups and products that more precisely define them. With platforms like Google and Facebook offering all kinds of cool tools in exchange for personal information and tracking permission, most internet users click yes to data collection without a thought. We all know it’s this information that drove Google revenue to $89.5 billion and Facebook’s revenue to $27.6 billion in 2016.
When a hiking mom who attends synagogue sees an ad for kosher trail mix, she might think it’s magic. Yet, it’s psychographic data that helped with the precise ad targeting.
Psychographic information can help marketers dive into the buying motivations, needs and pain points of smaller consumer groups. Amazon embraced this approach by making niche products and culture easy to find and patronize. Aggregating each segment amounts to a broad base that threatens to take over all commerce. With 2016 Amazon earnings at $136 billion and its stock price flirting with $1000 per share, no marketer can second-guess Amazon’s approach. The narrower the persona, the more finely tuned the products and brand messages and better the conversions and sales.
Focus on psychographic data is yet another shift brought about by the internet. Where companies once focused on just a few personas, today they must granulize their market and look forward to revenues that result from an aggregate of many small segments.
Psychographics Fit the Current Culture Shift
It’s more than the abundance of data now available to more brands driving the popularity of psychographics. A significant culture shift, too, fuels the potential for the granularization psychographic data provides.
Consider how gender has evolved from the binary male/female dichotomy to many points on a spectrum. Where once we had two gender identities, today Facebook lists 71, plus an empty field for custom.
And it is not just gender identity and sexual orientation that becomes more varied. Options for ethnicity, life stage and more have exploded as well. Buzzfeed Vice President Edwin Wong tells AdWeek, People are more comp cated, and way cooler, than just a snowflake. Traditional marketing wants to see demographic groups, but there’s a way to understand the ethos of a generation. It’s psychographics that reveal ethos, or beliefs and aspirations. Demographics just don’t deliver these more complex feelings, particularly for the Millennial generation that puts fringe on the normal spectrum in so many ways.
What Are Psychographics?
While demographics give you good basic information, they don’t reveal much about how an audience thinks and feels. Psychographics have been shuttled to the side or second-place for too long. A good portion of the buying decision, particularly of large products, is primarily emotionally-based, supported only later by reason and facts.
Psychographics are made up of activities, interests and opinions.
Activities like hobbies and routines provide clues to purchase behaviors. Someone who rides the bus to work and watches football on the weekends buys different products and has different problems/pain points than the commuter who drives and spends the weekends taking kids to sporting events.
Interests can be similar to activities, but these pertain more to what a consumer lists on a survey. Someone interested in golf may not actually golf herself. Activities are more of a regular occurrence. Interests exist in more of a cerebral, than practical sphere.
Opinions about current events, societal trends, movies, actors and television shows help marketers build a more three-dimensional persona. Collecting opinions about products and brands also show up on many psychographic surveys. The degree to which a concept or fascination dominates a consumer’s life also figures into the opinions facet of psychographics.
Knowing your consumers’ psychographics mean you know what they love, hate, worry about, and hope for. Having this information helps you market far more effectively.
How to Collect Psychographic Data
Where once collecting psychographic data involved expensive focus groups and external research companies, technological advances have made it possible for companies to collect this important information affordably.
Consider these options:
1. Online surveys
Though surveys can appear simple, the questions that you ask and how you ask them can actually impact your results. Take care to review your questions from different vantage points before you publish your survey, and have it reviewed by several people, if possible.
2. Consumer communities
Also termed, social listening, some companies have created Facebook and LinkedIn groups around their brands. In addition to providing useful, relevant content, channel managers can ask specific questions from time to time to gauge members activities, interests and opinions.
3. Google analytics
More than just a visitor traffic tally service, Google analytics can reveal what’s popular at the time. Which blog post got more traction? When did more visitors come in from LinkedIn? Facebook? Reviewing this information uncovers trends, as well as interests, activities and opinions.
4. Social Media Analytics
Understanding when channel visitors are active on your social channel provides insights into consumer habits. Some companies even utilize sentiment analysis to understand their followers better.
5. Sales
Before interviewing the sales team about their customers‘ traits, compile a list of good questions that will reveal activities, interests and opinions. Personas built on information from marketing, sales, and real customers, have the best chance of succeeding.
6. Customer Interviews
Yes, it’s old school, but with the help of data, customer interviews can be the completing cherry on top of the ice cream sundae made up of data, analytics and communities.
Conclusion
During the 2016 presidential primary, Senator Ted Cruz paid a psychographic profiling company $750,000 to differentiate two potential voters who looked exactly the same, demographics wise. Rest assured, most top marketer go as pale as their customers hearing figures like that for just one aspect of overall marketing.
The good news is that there are plenty of tools at your fingertips that you can use to build out your customer personas and continue to evaluate your targets ” all you need to do is look closer.
