While people who share demographic or behavioral characteristics may be grouped together, this does not mean they will also share psychographic characteristics.
When marketers want to understand their audience, they cannot rely on demographics and behaviors alone.
To sharpen the focus, we need to build a more detailed understanding of why people behave the way they do when it comes to brands and purchasing, as well as in other areas of their lives.
Psychographics are a tool that marketers use to understand the context that their consumers are coming from. This includes understanding their values, beliefs, and interests. By understanding these things, marketers can create messages and campaigns that are more likely to resonate with their target consumers.
What is psychographic research?
Psychographic research can help you uncover and better understand your audience’s needs, motivations, and problems. Psychographic research is the study of people’s values, desires, goals, interests, and lifestyle choices. It is often carried out alongside demographic and other types of research to build a more complete understanding of your target audiences. Psychographic research can help you uncover and better understand your audience’s needs, motivations, and problems.
With the right psychographic questions, here’s an example of the characteristics you can gather from your audience:
Personality: Question: How would you describe yourself?
Sample answers:
- I’m a risk-taker.
- I find that I’m easily swayed by other people’s opinions.
- I like to challenge and push myself to be the best I can be in life.
- I like to stand out in a crowd.
- I tend to make decisions quickly and based on ‘gut feeling’.
Self-perception is the way we see ourselves. Do you see yourself as someone who is intelligent? Confident? Capable? These are all attributes that we can possess. Questioning which attributes we see in ourselves is a good way to get to know ourselves better.
Sample answers:
- I’m creative.
- I’m more affluent than the average.
- I’m adventurous.
Which of the following best describes your lifestyle?
Sample answers:
- I tend to buy the premium version of a product.
- I’m very career-orientated.
- I like to pursue a life of challenge.
Desires: Question: What do you desire from life?
Sample answers:
- Money.
- Respect from my peers.
- To be knowledgeable.
What do you think is the most important thing in life?
Sample answers:
- My appearance.
- To better myself.
- To better society.
- Value for money.
- Family.
This is just the tip of the iceberg.
Your psychographic research needs to be both accurate and deep in order to understand the complexities of consumers.
It is now easier for consumers to see how different attributes can affect their decisions to either engage with a brand or purchase a product. This is because there is now data available that allows you to pinpoint and combine these attributes.
Where psychographics fit on the data spectrum
Psychographic research is not usually done by itself. Most brands use other first or third-party research, like website analytics or social listening data, to confirm what they find out or to get more information.
But put as simply as possible, here’s how they differ:
Demographic data tells you about a population’s characteristics. Behaviors tell you about what a population does. Psychographics tell you about why a population does what it does.
The psychographics that market research provides is often hailed as the most crucial insight they can get because it can have a big impact on creative ideas, strategies, or marketing campaigns.
You can build highly sophisticated profiles of consumer preferences by combining demographic and psychographic information to get a clearer picture of who they are.
Quantitative vs. qualitative
There is a misconception that psychographics are only qualitative, when in fact they can be quantified. Behavioral and demographic data that marketers gather from website analytics is an example of this.
When psychographic data is analyzed properly, it can provide more insight into someone’s thoughts and feelings than traditional research techniques.
Active vs. passive data
Active data is information that is willingly given by an individual, while passive data is data that is collected without the person’s knowledge. Neither type of data reveals the identity of the person.
demographics = Passive data behavior = Passive data psychographics = Active data
active data = information that is actively collected by an organization, e.g. through surveys passive data = information that already exists and is not actively collected by an organization, e.g. data from social media By combining active and passive data, organizations can learn more about their audiences and develop stronger marketing strategies.
Baking psychographic research into your strategy
Many brands are being asked to change their models to be more focused on the consumer. Our latest research reveals one of the overarching reasons behind this shift:
Consumers want more personal relationships with brands.
Brands need to rely on data that gives them a deep understanding of the target market they’re trying to reach.
How to Find Psychographic Data
Once we know what psychographics are, how do we go about getting them? Listed below are several major methods.
1. Interview existing clients.
Think about your best current client and ask them more about themselves the next time you talk. You can ask about their weekend, if they’ve seen any good movies, found any great deals, or made any New Year’s resolutions.
If you know the person well, you can explain why you’re asking for their help. If you don’t know them well, look for friends who fit your ideal customer profile and ask them the same questions.
If you want to get to know someone, ask them questions about their interests, what they like to do for fun, if they are thrifty, what motivates them, and what their personal goals are.
If you want to get a bigger sample, send out a customer survey and tell them that you want to better understand what they care about. Most people will be happy to share their thoughts.
2. Investigate website analytics.
If you would rather conduct a more discreet investigation, examine your existing website content and previous special offers to see what has motivated people to click, call, or buy in the past.
If you’re not keeping an eye on your analytics, you might need to do some testing. In general, this approach can be very successful, since people’s real motivators are exposed by the things they do. They might not see themselves as bargain hunters, but if a discount code brings them in, then that indicates their preference for deals.
3. Use focus groups.
A focus group is a group of people who are not affiliated with your company and who participate in a discussion about your brand and your products. The participants are supposed to be as unbiased as possible, and they should closely align with your target market. For example, if you sell hiking gear, your focus group should be made up of hikers—not just anyone who wants to participate.
To run an effective focus group, craft a thoughtful questionnaire that helps you uncover the needs and wants of your target audience.
4. Collect data from market research companies.
If you have a good idea of what your target audience looks like, you can use that to do research on your own. You can get the data you need from companies that have already done research in your target area.
We recommend starting with a free or low-cost market research tool, as this option can get expensive. If you need more sophisticated options, you can consult a major company such as NielsenIQ or Qualtrics.
Now that you have the data, you can use it to improve your marketing campaigns. For example, if you are selling a nutritional program, you can use the data to determine which ads are most effective.
Psychographic Factors
Psychographic segmentation looks at psychological factors to group together consumers with similar characteristics. This includes factors like personality, lifestyle, social class, habits, behaviors, and interests. By understanding these factors, you can better target your advertising and marketing to each group.
- Personality Characteristics – Personality characteristics determine the way a person interacts with the world around them. It’s likely that people in your target audience share some personality characteristics that you can tailor your marketing campaign to.
- Lifestyle – Lifestyle psychographics tell the story of how a person views themself within society. This factor can be influenced by relationships, occupation, and other significant life choices.
- Social Class – Although there are no official social classes in the United States, consumers sometimes classify themselves into lower, middle, and upper classes and make buying decisions that are loosely based on them.
- Habits – Habits are psychographic factors that a person has become accustomed to in their daily lives. Habits aren’t easily broken, so marketers tend to consider these quite heavily when creating campaigns and advertisements.
- Behaviors – How a person acts is a behavioral psychographic factor. Behaviors are exhibited through a person’s buying patterns, product usage, and even the frequency at which they purchase a product.
- Interests – This psychographic factor can influence the way a person interacts with a brand. Interests will vary from person to person, but generally, the target audience will share common interests that can be woven into marketing campaigns to elicit a particular response.
Groups are created for psychographic segmentation based on more personal or individual criteria, similar to behavioral segmentation.
For example, if you want to segment your audience using lifestyle as a psychographic factor, you need to decide whether your buyers are attending school, working full-time jobs, engaging in active activities, or living a primarily sedentary lifestyle.
Now that you know what psychographic factors you can use, you can start collecting psychographic data.
Psychographic Marketing
Now that we have hypothetical data from the previous section, we can use it for our marketing strategy.
1. Motivate your buyer based on their needs.
Now that you know what is important to your buyer, you can figure out how to motiviate them. Providing what they need to make a purchase decision will encourage them to buy from you.
The target audience for this campaign wants to hear that the nutritional counseling service being offered has worked for others and that it will improve their health without a huge time commitment. Customer testimonials will be used to appeal to this target audience.
2. Meet them where they’re at.
Since you know your target buyer spends their free time on Pinterest, you no longer need to spend money on Facebook, YouTube, newspaper, and magazine ads.
Share tips on your Pinterest for Business account that will help your followers save time around the house and with meal preparation. Offer suggestions for fun activities that can be enjoyed with family and friends.
Look at what people are re-pinning on Pinterest and think about what that tells you about them. For example, if they re-pin a lot of articles about healthy snacks for kids, that might mean they’re interested in helping their children eat better. If they seem to like pins about having fun with friends, you could try sending them more content along those lines.
3. Capitalize on their priorities, hobbies, and interests.
You should share articles about the benefits of good health for job performance, and how to make exercise fun for kids, since these are both things that are important to your target buyer. In your ads, use images of a healthy parent spending time with their kids.
If you want to better target your buyer, try to learn more about their hobbies and interests. You can use this information to decide what kind of content to create and what images to use in your ads. For example, if your target buyer loves to bake, you might want to include healthy baking recipes in your content on Pinterest, Instagram, and your blog.
4. Include a tailored call-to-action.
Finally, you will include a call to action that is based on your target buyer’s needs, priorities, interests, and values. For example, at the end of your advertisement, you might say “Start your journey to a healthy lifestyle here – click here to begin.”
You could use an image of the person your target buyer wants to become, to go with the text. This person could be a healthier, older version of themselves; someone who has time to do the things they love; or somebody with a more defined physique. The image you choose should be based on the psychographic profile you’ve made for your target buyer.
Some popular psychographic segmentation examples are as follows:
5 takeaways for brands on psychographic research
- Relying on demographic and behavioral data alone to understand your audience leaves gaps in targeting and leaks in media spending
- Psychographics allow you to be more precise and build better brand experiences
- When combined with passive data, psychographic data gives you the wider context around your audience needed to build an effective consumer journey
- Surveys are the best way to gather psychographic data on a large scale. It’s these large samples that give your data validity.
Psychographics can be used to guide media spending, creative development, new business pitching, and brand purpose.
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