Knowing your target audience is crucial for the success of any marketing campaign. With changing demands of consumers, it gets extremely vital to understand not only “who” your customer is but more importantly “why” they are your customers. As a brand, what is it that makes your consumers engage with you. This is where Psychographics appears on the scene. This is has been a buzzword in the marketing industry grabbing attention from all corners, especially from marketers and brands. Let’s dive deep into the concept of psychographics to understand what benefit it brings to the brands.
What is Psychographics?
Psychographics is all about gaining insight into consumer’s personal choice and preferences which involves detailed analysis of consumers based on their aspirations, interest, habits and opinions. It focuses on the cognitive values which are usually qualitative in nature such as attitude, emotion, actions, likes, dislikes. These are the factors which govern and motivate shopping behaviour and preference of consumers. Most of these characteristics are intangible and hence creating psychographic segmentation requires more research as compared to creating demographic profile.
How does it differ from Demographics?
Although both Demographics and Psychographics help in creating customer profile but Demographics focus on the quantitative characteristics like Age, Income, Location, Gender, etc. Psychographics provides traits which are qualitative and often describes the personality of the consumer. The psychological factors are leveraged by marketers while creating a marketing strategy to effectively target potential customers.
Often, people falling in one demographic segment depict different buying pattern. Demographics can be a perfect starting point but if utilized in combination with Psychological data can be lethal for creating comprehensive and detailed customer profiles.
How to Gather Psychographics Data ?:
Collecting psychographics information is not as straight forward as gathering demographics data and requires detailed analysis and research. There are various methods that marketers use to tap this information, some of which are below:
- Interacting with Existing customers: Talking with your consumers is the best way to know more about them. Make sure you engage with your loyal customers and ask them questions to understand what motivates them to avail your services or use your product. What do they really care about? Ask them about their favorite holiday location, recreational activity, and hobbies. All these details will enable you to understand your customers on a personal front. Asking similar questions to different people will provide you some common factors that can be utilized to understand the trend. Make sure you don’t compel the users to answer questions; they should feel relaxed and answer honestly.
- Using Google Analytics: Google Analytics provides ample data which if drilled down provides a lot more than just demographic information. If researched appropriately, it is capable of providing deep insight into factors which shapes a customer’s personality. For instance, people falling in a similar age group can be further segmented on the basis of common interest areas or similar opinions.
- Social Platforms: Brands must be active on social media and should aim to stay in front of their consumers. Social platforms like Facebook and Twitter are the most preferred avenues for seeking psychographics data. Marketers can analyze the clicks, likes, and tweets of their customers which could reveal a lot about their interests and opinions.
Using Psychographics data in Marketing:
- Customize Landing page: A landing page is one of the most crucial pages of any website as it is what creates the first impression on the users. The quality of the landing page has a major role in retaining users to the website. With the information of psychographics data, brands should focus on using appropriate images and relevant keywords to effectively target the potential customers.
- Refined campaign settings: Advertising campaigns can be set up utilizing the psychographics data. One can tweak Facebook and Google ad parameters as per the psychographic commonalities among the target audience. One can granularly reach out to potential customers by running campaigns on the basis of interest areas of the users.
- Improved content creation: As they say, Content is the king. If users don’t find your content worth reading, they would switch the webpage. With the knowledge of what motivates your customers and what exactly they are looking for, content writers can include topics which are relevant to the primary audience. Brands must create a content plan for new topics to cover as per the psychographic data.
- Use relevant keywords: Bidding for relevant keywords is what decides if potential customers are directed to the website. Psychographics provides information about consumer’s liking, goals, fears which can be utilized while deciding keywords to bid for. Using highly relevant and targeted keywords certainly increases the conversion rate on the website.
- Social Media marketing: Psychographics data provides information about the online activities of users. One can know the social platform on which the consumers are most active. Utilizing this information, brands can plan to accordingly invest in that particular social platform. If the users are most active on Facebook there is no point wasting money on Instagram or Twitter. So with the availability of Psychographic data, brands can invest in a most relevant social platform.