For those unfamiliar with the term, psychographics might seem like some outdated and questionable scientific concept, similar to phrenology. However, it’s actually a cutting-edge area of psychological analysis that marketers can utilize to enhance their campaigns.

What exactly is psychographics? What makes it relevant to you? How can you make use of it? This article aims to answer all of these questions. We’ll delve into the concept of psychographics, why it’s so valuable for digital marketers, and explore nine impressive ways to incorporate it into your campaigns. Before we dive in, let’s briefly touch upon psychographics as a scientific discipline.

What is Psychographics?

Psychographics involves studying people’s attitudes, opinions, and interests. This field often combines this data with standard demographic information to create more detailed profiles of specific audiences and target markets.

While psychographics is used in a variety of applications, it finds its primary application in market research. We can learn a lot about individuals simply by analyzing their demographic data, such as age, income, education, and occupation. However, this data alone has limitations as it doesn’t reveal anything about their aspirations, beliefs, attitudes, or other subjective psychological factors. That’s where the power of psychographics comes in. By merging demographic data with psychographic insights, we can build much more complete, sophisticated profiles of consumers, based on a much richer understanding of their true identities. Now that we have a better grasp of psychographics, let’s explore how to gather this invaluable data.

How Can You Gather Psychographic Data?

While digital marketers often favor quantitative metrics, psychographics leans more towards qualitative data. Of course, psychographic data can and should be categorized appropriately. However, compared to traditional quantitative research methods, psychographic data tends to be more subjective and nuanced.

Market Research Firms

If you’ve ever conducted market research, you know it can be a tedious process, especially for freelance marketers or smaller teams with limited resources. That’s why many businesses opt for specialized market research firms to handle this task. This approach offers several advantages, such as scientifically rigorous data collection methods and thorough vetting to ensure data integrity.

However, it introduces another budget consideration, as market research data, even general reports and white papers, usually come at a cost.

Focus Groups

Focus groups can be a very effective way to gather psychographic data. They allow you to assemble test audiences that align with your specific requirements, including your business’s ideal customers and predefined buyer personas.

However, the main challenge with focus groups lies in actually organizing them and collecting data. Setting up a focus group can be quite time-consuming, and that’s even before you ask the first question. Moreover, there’s no guarantee that the information gathered will be useful or even reliable.

Customer Surveys and Questionnaires

Customer surveys and questionnaires offer another method for collecting psychographic data. This approach has several advantages: surveys and questionnaires are relatively inexpensive to create, can be distributed electronically for easy access, and consumers are generally familiar with this type of market research.

Image via Help Scout However, surveys and questionnaires also have their downsides. There are limited ways to address low response rates, and the data itself can be unreliable or inaccurate. People often respond to questionnaires in a way that reflects how they aspire to be, not necessarily how they truly are, especially when it comes to sensitive topics.

Detailed Analytics Data

Perhaps the most efficient method for gathering psychographics data is utilizing detailed analytics data.

Social media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter are arguably more effective for collecting psychographic data due to the wealth of personal information they possess about their users. Specifically, an individual’s personal interests can be incredibly valuable psychographic data points. The same goes for data that some individuals might not be as truthful about in a real-world setting like a focus group, such as their political views.

9 Ways to Use Psychographics in Your Marketing

As mentioned earlier, psychographics is most commonly used in market research, particularly when creating and developing comprehensive buyer personas. However, its potential applications extend far beyond this area. Let’s explore nine ways you can utilize psychographics in your next campaign.

1. Create More Refined Social Media Audiences

If you’ve ever launched a Facebook Ads campaign, you know how precisely you can target potential customers. While targeting relevant audiences by their interests is a valid strategy, delving deeper into what truly motivates your audience unlocks a whole new realm of possibilities.

After identifying and refining your core audience, look for shared psychographic traits within your target market. Do their political beliefs play a role? Does their preference for certain brands or even specific products hint at broader underlying attitudes? (For instance, mothers in their thirties who are also interested in yoga might be receptive to broader health-related topics.) How do these consumers perceive themselves? These are all questions you can start with for psychographic targeting research that might uncover new opportunities you hadn’t considered before.

2. Write More Emotionally Resonant Ads

We understand that utilizing emotional triggers can be incredibly impactful in online advertising. If we can craft emotionally compelling ads using minimal information, imagine how much more effective your ads could be with a deeper understanding of your target audience.

However, employing emotional triggers in ad campaigns requires careful consideration, as what one person finds captivating and enticing might be morally objectionable and off-putting to another. Nevertheless, psychographic data can reveal a lot about your target market, enabling you to write emotionally powerful ads – whether positive or negative – that can significantly improve your conversion rates.

3. Enhance A/B Tests

Ideally, you’re already A/B testing most of your marketing materials. However, integrating psychographic data into A/B tests can lead to even more insightful and accurate results.

Image via VWO It’s important to clarify that when I mention using psychographics to enhance A/B tests, I’m not necessarily referring to the tests themselves. Segmenting an A/B test based on psychographic dimensions is quite difficult because there’s no foolproof way to determine or define a visitor’s psychographic profile the moment they visit your site. What I am suggesting is that psychographic analysis can provide valuable insights into why visitors responded to the A/B test in a particular way.

For instance, did a specific landing page you tested perform well because of something as straightforward as a design element or the wording of a call to action? Or are there more intricate underlying reasons that might have influenced visitor behavior? The main image on your landing page could resonate differently depending on your audience’s psychographic makeup. It’s up to you to determine if this data is actionable, but the more you understand why visitors interacted with your site in a particular way, the more precisely you can target your ideal prospects in the future.

4. Identify New Content Topic Areas

One of my favorite content marketing approaches is what Larry calls “land and expand.” This involves strategically expanding your content topics to include tangentially related subjects. These topics might go beyond your immediate business interests but are still relevant and engaging to your primary audience. This is where psychographic data can truly make a difference. For instance, here at nexus-security, we’re aware that many of our readers work in digital marketing – surprise, surprise! – but our analysis of website and social media analytics data also revealed that many are interested in broader trends within the technology industry.

Affinity categories in Google Analytics allow you to explore your site visitors’ interests By delving deeper into psychographic research, we could ask more specific questions when crafting our broader content marketing strategies based on those interests. For example, we could investigate whether our readers’ interest in technology stems from an idealistic perspective of how technology can solve pressing social issues or if this interest is purely from a consumerist or entrepreneurial standpoint.

Twitter Analytics is an excellent source of psychographic data such as personal interests Once you start to grasp who your audience truly is, you can implement the “land and expand” strategy much more effectively – a significant advantage for established blogs that might struggle to find new and engaging topics to cover.

5. Improve Your Conversion Pathways

If you’ve set up custom conversion pathways in Google Analytics to track the success of specific goals and objectives, incorporating psychographic data can be incredibly effective. It helps pinpoint why people don’t convert and provides a clearer understanding of why they abandon the funnel at a particular stage. Let’s assume you have a custom conversion pathway set up in Google Analytics, and this pathway is linked to a specific business objective (which it should be). You might know that many potential customers fail to convert on a specific landing page – but you’re unsure why.

A visualization of conversion pathways within Google Analytics By applying the psychographic data you’ve collected to this specific issue (i.e., why you’re losing people at a particular point in your funnel), you can approach the problem with a much sharper focus. Is the language used on your landing pages deterring prospects because their perception of your business differs from yours? Does your brand messaging resonate with your audience’s existing beliefs, or does it clash with their self-perception as consumers? The more you know about your target market, the better equipped you are to hypothesize why the most vulnerable points in your sales funnel are underperforming – and then take steps to strengthen them.

6. Reinforce Your Brand Values

We’ve discussed the significance of cultivating brand advocacy in the past, and for good reason. Brand evangelists are your most dedicated fans, and one of the best ways to encourage people to become loyal brand ambassadors for your company is by showcasing your brand values in everything you do. A straightforward way to achieve this is to analyze the psychographic profiles of your most loyal followers and ensure your broader messaging reflects these brand values.

Illustrated examples taken from Baileys’ brand value daybook. Original art by Serge Seidlitz. The cosmetics company Lush is a great example of this principle in action. While I don’t have access to Lush’s actual target market psychographic data, the company clearly emphasizes its commitment to ethically sourced, eco-friendly products that are not tested on animals. It’s highly likely that this messaging strongly resonates with the personal values of Lush’s ideal customer.

So, how can you reinforce your brand values within your broader marketing messages?

7. Create More Targeted, Relevant Email Marketing Blasts

One of the most valuable aspects of psychographics is its ability to provide a much clearer understanding of not just who your target market is, but also what they desire and how they feel. This, in turn, allows you to tap into your audience’s doubts, fears, and questions to create highly relevant and targeted email campaigns.

We already know that crafting highly personalized email blasts is an effective way to improve your open rates. Leveraging psychographic data allows you to achieve exactly that. You can also cross-reference existing analytics data from your email marketing campaigns to gain a deeper understanding of why your most successful email blasts resonated so strongly with your readers – and then replicate those elements. Email marketing offers certain freedoms that other marketing campaigns might not, such as using hypothetical questions as captivating subject lines, connecting your company’s brand values to current events, and other creative strategies. Psychographics can further enhance all of these techniques.

8. Use Aspirational Imagery and Messaging

One of the most insightful things you can discover about your prospects through psychographics is not just who they are, but who they aspire to be. Aspirational messaging can be incredibly powerful, and the more you understand your market, the more effectively you can leverage these aspirations in your campaigns.

At nexus-security, we often remind our readers that people don’t purchase products for the sake of it; they buy things to solve their problems. This is why aspirational messaging can be so persuasive. It allows potential customers to envision how your business can not only improve their lives in an immediate, problem-solving way, but also how your business can help them become the individuals they aspire to be – a compelling and effective technique.

9. Revisit and Update Buyer Personas

While our final tip might not be as exciting as the previous ones, it’s no less crucial. Once you’ve put in the effort to gather psychographic data about your target market, it’s essential to either update your existing buyer personas and messaging matrices to include this new information or create entirely new ones.

Many businesses utilize multiple buyer personas for different stages of the conversion funnel, so incorporating psychographic data into your existing personas is vital to ensure your campaigns hit the mark. This also offers a range of other benefits, including the potential for more personalized messaging, a clearer and more comprehensive profile of your ideal customers for new hires, and ultimately, more effective marketing campaigns overall.

Psychographics, What Exactly Is It?

Psychographics is a captivating and insightful field of study that can be immensely beneficial for marketers aiming to gain a deeper understanding of what drives their target markets. While combining subjective psychographic data with traditionally empirical marketing metrics can be challenging, the potential rewards make it a worthwhile endeavor. If you’re already using psychographics in your campaigns, I’d love to hear about your experiences. Feel free to share your ideas or suggestions in the comments!