How to Use Psychographics in Marketing?
In today’s highly competitive market, brands need to walk the extra mile to stand out and attract their target audiences. Even though you offer quality products and do genuine business, you need to understand your customers and provide what they want, how they want, and whenever they want. Thus, they will choose your brand over others.
Let’s take an example. A brand is trying to sell its high-quality and well-structured online course by running ads on various social networking channels like Facebook, Instagram. Though the course is highly beneficial, people don’t seem to bother even after the brand offered a few percent discounts.
What does that even mean? No one wants to learn new skills and update their knowledge? No. Not at all. It could be because the brand is selling its course in the wrong place. The brands should probably choose professional networking sites like LinkedIn, where the people actively search for online classes.
In the conventional approach, market research focuses on gathering buyer’s demographics like age, gender, occupation, marital status, etc. But, those details alone are not enough. Experts advise considering psychographics also along with demographics while defining buyer persona.
That way, you can understand your audiences and their needs more precisely. Thus, you can target them with more appropriate products/services that can benefit them. That, in turn, increases your sales and boosts profits.
Now, what is psychographics? Most of you might have heard about demographics. But, psychographics is relatively a new term for many. Read on to know about psychographics and how it will benefit your business.
What is Psychographics?
Psychographics is all about studying your target audience’s attitudes and interests. Learning about your buyer’s psychographics in addition to their demographics will help you construct complete and more sophisticated customer profiles.
In short, demographics is like who your buyer is, whereas psychographics explains why they buy. Thus, you can reach your target audiences effectively by understanding both their demographics and psychographics.
So, now, psychographics is essential to understand your customers and build effective buyer personas. But, how to collect their psychographics?
How to Collect Psychographic Data?
When it comes to collecting psychographics, there are two prime methods you can consider.
1) Ask Your Existing Clients
Knowing your existing customers will help you understand the psychographic data of your target audience. Invest time and learn about your current customers. When you meet them in person, you can ask them about their weekend plans, favorite movies, holiday destinations, future goals, and so on.
However, it need not be like a formal interview or something. You can be more direct to the customers and tell them why you are asking for such details. You can even request them to refer to their friends of similar interests and ask them the same questions.
So, get ready with the right questions. It can be anything like their entertainment, goals, or any information that will help you understand them more clearly.
If you want more information, feel free to send out a customer survey. Be honest and tell them that you want to understand them better to serve them better. People generally feel happy to share.
2) Leverage Website Analytics
Website analytics will give you insights into your customer’s behavior. Take a look at your existing website content and previous special offers. What has made people click, check, call or buy your products in the past?
If you haven’t checked this, do that immediately. It will reveal some excellent insights about your customers and will help you understand their real motivations. If it is that discount code that got you more customers, it states that they expect a lesser price. Though the customer may not tell you directly that they like to bargain or want a competitive price, website analytics will let you understand the psychology behind their buying.
How to Use Psychographics in Marketing?
1) Refine Your Social Media Audiences based on their Psychographic data
Brands can understand their target audience better while running ads campaigns across social media platforms like Facebook or Instagram. When targeting relevant audiences based on their psychographic data like interests, preferences will help you gain more insights. For instance, you will get to know what makes your audience buy certain products.
Thus, you can identify and refine your audience depending on the common psychographic data they share. Do audiences share similar goals or interests? For example, young mothers who are also into fitness classes may be interested in more health and fitness-related topics.
Likewise, ask yourself about your target audience’s behavior and interests. And try finding out their psychographic data that trigger their buys. Thus you can target your audience with the most suitable products that they can derive maximum benefits from.
2) Create Emotionally Engaging Ads
When you know the psychographic data of your audience, like interests, buying behavior, or challenges, you can create meaningful ads that they can connect with immediately.
As a brand, when you can trigger the emotions of your target audience, they are most likely to buy your products, improving your conversion rates considerably.
3) Come Up With New and Relevant Content Ideas
Knowing the psychographic data of your target audience is highly insightful as it will let you find relevant content topics of your audience’s interest. Often, brands will run out of content ideas after a few months of constantly publishing them. Of course, it is challenging to find new content topics regularly.
But, since you now know the psychographics of your audience, you can come with more relevant topics. Even if you finish all crucial content topics, you can still explore related new content ideas depending on their interests, attitude, or behavior.
4) Enhance Your Conversion Pathways
Consider that you have set up conversion pathways in Google Analytics to track the progress of your marketing strategies. The analytics will let you identify the people who drop off and at what stage of the sales funnel. However, you may not know why they withdrew.
But, with the psychographic data in hand, you can understand the reason behind the people abandoning carts precisely.
Taking the psychographic data firsthand, you can understand the psychological barriers they had in their buying journey. Thus, you can examine the relevant areas and try fixing them.
For example, are your landing pages up to the mark? Do they speak about the challenges your target audience face and how your brand can solve them? Or does your brand messaging reinforce the beliefs of your target audience? If not, try to fix them. Thus you can improve your conversion rates.
Ultimately, the more you know about your target audience, the more confidently you can change the most vulnerable points of your sales funnel. Thus, you can improve your conversion rates, boosting your sales and profits.
5) Create Targeted and Relevant Email Marketing
Psychographics give you a much clearer idea of your target market, like how they feel and what they want. Hence, you can understand the doubts, fears, and queries of your audience. Thus, you can create relevant emails targeting them correctly.
Furthermore, email marketing allows for personalized communication with your prospects. The more details you know about them, the better you can target them. Thus, you can improve the overall conversion rates.
6) Revisit and Update Your Buyer Personas
Last but not least, when you have gathered all psychographic data of your target market, it is crucial to revisit your existing buyer personas and update them with new information. If needed, you can even create new ones entirely.
Many organizations use multiple buyer personas for each stage of the sales funnel. Besides, if you incorporate psychographic data into your existing buyer personas, you can enjoy more benefits like personalized messaging, identifying ideal customers, and improving your overall marketing campaigns.
Final Thoughts
Customers are the kings who drive businesses. So, being with the customer and doing customer-oriented business is what will make your business stand out from the crowd in today’s competitive market.
Investing time and knowing more about your customers will help you create the most suitable products/services. Gathering the psychographics of the target audiences and using them in your marketing methodologies will help you target them precisely.
Creating buyer personas based on demographics alone will not work for modern businesses today. Demographics will only let you know the limited information of your target audience, like age, gender, etc. Those data have their limitations, and you can’t entirely rely on them for your marketing purposes.
That is why some brands fail even after offering the best quality products/services. You have to present them to the right audience in a way they want. Marketing your products on Facebook won’t work if your target audience, who will derive maximum benefits from your products, is on Instagram.
However, with psychographic data, you get to analyze and understand the emotions, attitudes, interests, buying behavior, and more characteristics of your target audience. Incorporating psychographics in your marketing will enable you to target your prospects effectively. Thus, you can improve your conversion rates and boost your sales tremendously.
