Psychographic Segmentation: Benefits, Variables, and Practices
Market segmentation is crucial to gain actionable insights into target customers and develop effective marketing strategies. Dividing them into groups according to location, age, income level, interests, behavior, and other characteristics helps understand their needs and desires.
To group customers, you can use demographic, geographic, behavioral, and psychographic segmentation.
The last one is the most effective, but psychographic segmentation research alone isn’t enough to enhance marketing and sales efforts. You must mix all four methods to gain in-depth people intelligence.
What is psychographic segmentation?
Psychographic segmentation is a market research method that categorizes customers according to behaviors influencing their purchasing decisions. It uncovers why they choose specific brands, helping you adjust your products, services, and marketing strategies.
Here’s an overview of other segmentation types to help you grasp the importance of psychographics:
● Demographics include age, gender, ethnicity, education, income level, employment, marital status, and other statistical data.
● The geographic segmentation definition explains categorizing customers according to their location (e.g., city, region, country, continent).
● Behavioral segmentation considers attitudes, knowledge, and usage patterns concerning products, services, and websites.
This data shows who your customers are, where they are, and what they do. Psychographic data tells you why they do it.
Benefits of psychographic segmentation
Most of your strategies might fall flat without psychographic segmentation. This research method will help you fine-tune every approach to capture your target audience’s attention and compel them to purchase from you. Here are the top benefits you can expect.
Understanding consumers better
Knowing why consumers buy specific products can help you improve yours. Understanding their behavior enables you to pinpoint their needs, desires, interests, and preferences regarding products and services in your niche.
You can stand out from the crowd, sharpen your competitive edge, and get on your target customers’ radar.
Improving customer experiences
Improving your products or services according to different customer personas enhances their experiences. However, psychographic segmentation research can also help create laser-focused marketing messages that resonate with your target audience.
You can create messages that hit home, forge meaningful customer relationships, and inspire long-term loyalty.
Increasing sales and ROI
Understanding customers better and improving their experiences with your brand translate into more sales and ROI. Psychographic data helps you deliver real value through relatable content and offers that fit into specific consumers’ lifestyles.
Psychographic segmentation variables
The following variables facilitate effective attitudinal or psychographic segmentation research. Personality
Personality traits affect people’s buying habits. They can be introverts, extroverts, risk-takers, emotional, creative, opinionated, etc.
Identifying those traits will help you customize marketing messages to attract more buyers. For instance, if most of your food delivery company’s customers are extroverts, you can customize ads to target people who enjoy at-home game nights with friends.
Lifestyle
Lifestyle data can uncover people’s preferences, habits, and pain points. For instance, students and business professionals lead distinct lifestyles, spending time, money, and energy on different activities. The former might look for budget-friendly products, while the latter prefer premium solutions.
If you sell insulated water bottles or sportswear, and most of your customers lead an active lifestyle, your ads can depict athletes using your high-quality products.
Social status
People’s social status indicates their income level and affects their product choice. This information can help create resonating messages for upper-class, middle-class, or bottom-class consumers.
For instance, using keywords like “luxury” or “high-end” in ads won’t do any good if you target customers with lower purchasing power. Promoting fashionable apparel at affordable prices would yield better results.
Activities, interests, and opinions (AIO)
The AIO variable helps you better position your products or services and capture consumers’ attention.
How do your target customers spend their free time? Do they watch sports, play video games, hike, exercise, read books, listen to music, travel, or binge-watch TV shows? Do they have religious or political beliefs?
Going back to the food delivery example, you can recommend healthy meals if most of your target customers are gym-goers or enjoy recreational hobbies.
Attitudes
Every person’s upbringing and cultural background mold their attitudes, including buying behavior. Geographical segmentation plays its role here, but psychographics can uncover the values, thoughts, and motivators that specific cultures and environments shape.
For instance, your customers might value sustainable living, high-end services, family, or frugality. Understanding their attitudes will help you create laser-focused marketing campaigns and attract qualified leads and prospects.
How to collect psychographic data
The best sources to fuel your psychographic segmentation research include: ● Surveys – getting specific, valuable answers with open-ended questions;
● Interviews (phone, online, or face-to-face) – gathering in-depth people intelligence and feedback;
● Focus groups – interacting with selected demographics and directly exploring their interests, opinions, attitudes, and other behavioral and psychological patterns;
● Market research panels – collecting recurrent feedback from specific participants; ● Social media – measuring sentiment through likes, shares, and interactions with brands;
● Website analytics – tracking visitors’ on-site interactions, behavior, interests, and preferences;
● Data providers – purchasing structured data sets with accurate, correct, up-to-date consumer information.
Conclusion
Psychographic segmentation has a high strategic value, providing actionable insights into different customer personas to help improve targeting and create impactful marketing messages. It’s more qualitative than other market segmentation methods but can’t provide significant value without them.
Combine psychographic data with its demographic, geographic, and behavioral cousins to get a holistic view of customers and ensure your offers and messages hit the bullseye.
