Psychographic Segmentation: Advantages and Usage

Though, psychographic and demographic segmentation, still go together.

Psychographic data is qualitative whereas demographic data is quantitative.

Demographic segmentation will tell you who your specific customer is looking into their personal details whereas the psychographic will highlight why they buy from you.

Hence, marketers will mostly need both demographics and psychographics in order to make a marketing strategy.

This helps in adding detail to the buyer or customer persona that guides the product development, market messaging and brand positioning for different target groups.

Knowing your buyer’s psychological characteristics helps to make a holistic customer profile.

The buyer’s persona is a fictional character that indicates your main customer base.

You can make this by considering your audience’s both demographics and psychographics.

While making a buyer’s persona, the demographics will give you dry facts such as the relationship status, yearly income, number of children, gender, living condition and age of your target audience.

Whereas the psychographics will focus on whether the target customer is career-oriented, likes to prefer quality over quantity or likes healthy living.

See the difference?

Psychographics will give you insight into the potential buying behavior.

These two combine to make a holistic customer profile that is easy to target through marketing campaigns.

Types of Psychographic Segmentation

These days, people tend to find their interest tribes and group themselves accordingly. Such as Marvel fans or Game of Thrones fans.

Hence, the segmentation is becoming smaller, though easier to identify.

This is because people use social media to display their interests.

To look deeply into psychographics, you need to know the 5 variables of psychographic segmentation.

Personality

Buying habits depend a lot on personality.

The recent trend of MBTI has made people divide themselves into personality traits and characteristics.

Though personality filters are a broad spectrum of characteristics.

These include:

• introvert or extrovert
• optimistic or pessimistic
• sociable
• creative
• conscientious
• emotional
• open
• organized

These character traits define your personality and how a marketer will see their audience.

Activities, Interests and Opinions (AIO)

This variable taps into what your target audience likes to do in their free time.

Do their interests lie in playing and watching sports, do they have strong opinions on politics and watching the news or do they like to binge-watch?

Moreover, digging deeper into what sports they like, or do they only prefer to watch action movies.

The activities and interests of these enthusiasts and hobbyists will define how you eventually position your products in order to gauge their attention.

Lifestyle

A single brand can make products for people with different lifestyles.

Knowing their lifestyle can help to target the right product to the customer.

For instance, a business entrepreneur going to work and a mother taking her kids on a trip, both will require handbags.

However, both may need different types of handbags.

The same goes for trainers or sneakers, athletes may need them for training while some may use them as only casual wear.

Besides that, taking feedback from the customers you are targeting the product to can help to understand their challenges in life and how your product can help them.

Attitudes

Attitudes are formed over time because of cultural backgrounds, the environment you live in and your upbringing.

However, it is difficult to determine as it is intangible.

The marketer will have to use some imagination to come to a conclusion about what attitude they should be targeting.

For instance, discount vouchers may work for a parent but not for a sports car owner.

This brings us to the last variable.

Social Status

Knowing the social status of the buyer is important as it can affect the niche markets, product choices and price.

Their social status will determine whether they buy luxury goods or basic items.

Since, every social class already has their preferred vehicles, grocery stores, holidays and clothes lying in their affordable range.

This further influences the brand’s pricing, marketing mix and distribution channels.

After knowing these 5 psychographic segmentation variables, you can begin to segment your target audience accordingly knowing their buying decisions.

However, you may wonder about the benefits of this segmentation and how it can help your brand, to carry it out.

Let’s find out about that in detail, next!

Knowing more about your customer will improve your communication with them.

This will allow you to better understand their personal and emotional level and talk in their language.

Thus, gauging their attention.

Moreover, you will be able to find out how your audience perceives your products and services plus how they use them, and why they require your products.

It goes without saying that this segmentation will give a deeper understanding of what your customer really wants.

You will know their concerns, motivations, wants, aspirations and needs which will further help to target them more effectively.

As a result, the focus during marketing is not only on the benefits and features of your products and services but rather on how your products can improve the customer’s life.

Thus, you will be able to make products specifically targeting different personas.

This will also bring up more opportunities for future engagement.

Furthermore, it can highlight the gaps in your existing products and services.

This happens when there is better communication between the brand and target customers through segmentation.

If you look into psychographic segmentation vs behavioral segmentation then the former goes a step further.

That is because it also includes the attitudes and opinions of the target customers.

Now that you know the benefits of segmentation, let’s find out how you can use it.

First up, you need to conduct research into the interests and hobbies of your potential customers.

This includes activities, hobbies and interests such as:

• Activism
• Media Preferences
• Sports
• Values
• Brand Preferences
• Personality Types
• Recreation
• Travel
• Music
• Professional and Networking Association
• Opinions on current events
• Brand Preferences

Now the question is, how do you find out about these aspects.

You can send surveys, interview customers, use digital analytics or organize focus groups.

Surveys

A cost-effective and efficient way of getting psychographic data is through surveys.

This includes asking:

Open-Ended Questions

These have a qualitative approach so ask open-ended questions instead of specific ones.

Also, leave space for open text answers.

Semantic differential scale question

These types of questions can give you a specific answer.

For instance, you can ask the customer to rate a product, company or brand.

This will enable you to understand their attitude alongside getting feedback.

Likert scale questions

These involve questions that can be answered in a rating such as strongly agree or agree, neutral, disagree or strongly disagree.

Again, giving you an insight on opinions.

You can start with a question to understand how your brand can improve your customer’s life.

These are questions such as what are your challenges with this brand.

Next, you can proceed to refinement asking what improvements they would like to see.

This can be in the form of Likert scale questions.

Other Forms of Data

Besides surveys, there are other ways to collect data as well.

Digital Analytics

Tapping into social media likes, website analytics, retweets and browsing data can give you an idea about the people who are interacting with your brand.

This will also give you an idea about the reputation of your brand and whether there are any shortcomings.

Interviews

Surveys are an efficient way to collect data, however, you miss out on body and voice expression in written text.

Therefore, conducting in-person, video or phone interviews can make you understand the body language of your potential customers and will help you devise a more accurate answer.

Though, remember to conduct interviews with both satisfied and dissatisfied customers.

The former can be good for testimonials and social proof.

Whereas the latter can give deeper feedback on improvements.

Research Panels and Focus Groups

Organizing a market research panel includes selecting specific people for your survey.

You can get people with diverse backgrounds and demographics.

Moreover, you can also get people from specific audience groups and demographics.

Plus, you are able to decide what you need and who you want to ask.

After you get psychographic data through these means, you will have an idea about who your customer is and why they do buy the products and services.

Next, you need to match the customer insights with your products.

Use them to update your marketing tactics, buyer’s persona, brand positioning and product roadmap.

Once you test these new concepts, you can relaunch your products catered toward specific psychographics that align with your business model.

Finally,

Psychographic segmentation is as important as demographic segmentation for your business.

Apply it to your business and marketing models to find out your target audience and potential customers.