Marketing has conventionally focused on studying the demographics of customers such as age, ethnicity, education, etc. Going beyond this and incorporating psychographics in the engagement strategy like customer’s interests, activities, attitudes, values, etc has become crucial to get a competitive edge.

What is Psychographics?

Psychographics is the study and classification of people according to their attitudes, aspirations, and other psychological criteria. Psychographics is more of a logic building by analyzing human traits on the basis of their personality, interests, values, and lifestyles.

If you want to sell something you need to know your buyers’ persona. You should make them buy and why they choose you. Most people do a basic analysis of demographics to know the target audience. A good marketer always plays smart and starts by knowing about the psychographics of the target audience. This includes the Attitude, Interests, Values, and Desires of a person. In all, you have to understand the buying decisions of the buyer. To take all the areas into consideration for better understanding let us combine demographics and psychographics.

Buyer’s Persona = Demographics + Psychographics

What is the importance of Psychographics?

Psychographics is the study and classification of people according to their attitudes, aspirations, and other psychological criteria. Psychographics is more of a logic building by analyzing human traits on the basis of their personality, interests, values, and lifestyles.

What is Psychographics?

Psychographics is the study of the psychological traits of a person. It makes us know about their living values and lifestyle choices. You need to have data related to these traits so that you can define your buyer’s persona. The choice of choosing psychographics is very important. However, if you combine relevant demographic and psychographic information with an understanding of what makes your target customers buy you can make a conclusion about it.

Let us discuss the importance of Psychographics :

• If you know the values and beliefs of your buyer, your marketing message can be customized according to it.
• If you know the likes and dislikes of buyers you can eliminate the content that involves the disliking factor.
• If you know their preferences in reading and the platforms they use for it you will simply get to know where to reach them.

The psychological analysis will help you know the buyer’s journey. Psychographics makes you know why they make decisions and help you with messaging, persuasion, and creativity.

What is Psychographic Segmentation?

Psychographic segmentation is a form of market segmentation based on market research, reviews, and surveys. It is a practice of dividing the audience into subgroups. The basics of this segmentation are psychological characteristics. The main objective of doing is to understand the decision-making process of customers. This segmentation will help in knowing the pattern of thinking and decision making of your customers.

What are the factors that should be considered?

Psychographic characters make you know about people’s beliefs and attitudes. Let us have a look at which characters you should consider along with accurate demographics.

1. Personality: It is the collection of traits that a person possesses. If you get to know the personality of your audience you can plan strategies that include their interests. You need to know whether a person likes spending time with others or alone. Accordingly, you can plan strategies. Ex: If the person likes being alone and reading in the spare time you can provide some good content blogs to attract them.
2. Values: It defines the sense of right and wrong. Ex: Everyone these days are aware of pollution. Everyone is trying on their part to reduce it. If you are having a general store and you request people to bring their own cloth bags to minimize the use of plastic they will encourage you for it.
3. Attitudes: It is believed that religion has a great impact on politics. Not always true but mostly it is. You can have an idea of a general perspective view of the human. Ex: You are having a shop for biscuits. You will showcase children mostly in the post while advertising. As the major consuming audience will be children.
4. Interests: It includes the hobbies of a person. Every person will have many hobbies. It can be anything that is able to occupy someone’s time. Ex: Google offers you to play games if your internet connection gets lost. It is attracting people by providing them the feature of playing when not connected to the internet.
5. Lifestyles: It is about the daily routine of a person. Ex: If you are having a resort and spa but you know that your target audience is a group of people who likes playing sports. To catch their attention you start including how relaxing can be a SPA or you can choose some sports person to advertise for you.

Studying these five characteristics you will be able to define your buyer’s persona and accordingly, you can plan your marketing strategies.

How to collect Psychographic Data?

Research work will be needed to know the factors. For doing the research we need but to have data and these are some of the ways to gather customer information:

• Market research reports can really help in forming the psychographics. There are various companies in the market that sell reports but this method is not so reliable for small companies.
• Google Analytics is also a helping tool that reveals the interests of buyers.
• The most appropriate way will always be customer reviews and surveys as they give direct insights into thoughts.
• Surveys are also used to gather information. They are not easy to do but are capable of acquiring information from a larger number of people. SurveyMonkey and Typeform are tools used to conduct surveys.
• Social Media platforms too now have analytics feature which can be also used. They can be used to know the interests area of customers

What are the impacts of Psychographics?

Social Media Platforms like Facebook use psychographics very well. The social feed and ads you see there are based on your hobbies and interests. Even Google search shows you the feed related to your past searches i.e your hobbies and interests.

Brands use this data of ad platforms to know the interests of their buyers. Still, we have a long way to go with psychographic targeting. Psychographic segmentation is becoming a crucial aspect of business strategy. It is important to know how and from where you are going to acquire customers.