How to Get Great Results Using Psychographic Segmentation to Create Content

Psychographic segmentation has been a part of marketing for a long time now. But to properly use it in your marketing and advertising campaigns, you need to understand such things as what a psychographic profile is as well as the difference between demographic and psychographic segmentation. Here is how to get great results using psychographic segmentation to create content.

What Is Psychographic Segmentation?

Psychographic segmentation is a marketing technique that uses customer data analysis paired with psychology to segment your target audience. Compared with usual segmentation, psychographic segmentation can be more nuanced, personalized, and effective. In this case, the process involves creating customer clusters and then grouping them into segments based on such characteristics as social class, social status, lifestyle, personality, interests, values, religion, opinions, attitudes, and hobbies.

The difference between demographic segmentation and psychographic segmentation is that the former is narrower than the latter. Demographic segmentation usually takes into account such factors as age, gender, occupation, nationality, education, etc. while psychographic segmentation works with the aforementioned characteristics. Both techniques can be effective, but psychographic segmentation is used less often despite its efficiency making it a powerful tool for any marketing strategy.

Like a regular customer profile, a psychographic profile is meant to help you work with the segment of your audience that the profile was made for. But the most important part is how you create this profile. To do so, follow these steps:

#1 Gather Psychographic Data

  As mentioned above, demographic segmentation and psychographic segmentation are quite different. Demographic data includes everything from age and gender to occupation and education. Psychographic data includes everything from social status and personality to religion and interests.

To some extent, it is more difficult to collect psychographic data. Some of the demographic data can be gathered by checking insights on your marketing campaigns and data collected on your website. But you can’t really do that with psychographic data because it is more complex. Moreover, people aren’t very keen on disclosing such details as their views on religion or their personality traits.

However, there are different ways you can collect psychographic data from your customers. Firstly, you can send out surveys by email or place them on your site offering customers to complete them and get something in return (e.g. free premium content, discounts). Secondly, you can create fun quizzes that will help you collect customer data (e.g. What is your ideal date based on your personality?) Alternatively, you can hire an expert to do the research.

#2 Get Customer Feedback

One very important part of psychographic segmentation is customer feedback. By getting such feedback, you will be able to get even more insight into who your customers are. Though surveys can be quite effective, what will truly help you understand your audience are client interviews. Of course, these are somewhat expensive to organize and manage, but you will be able to get so much information for analysis, that your results will be very accurate.

As Tess Lake from the writing service reviews site Best Writers Online says, “Client interviews are a rarely used tactic for collecting information about customers, but they are extremely effective. The key is to filter the information you gather this way and decide which interviewees fall into the category of your potential customer and which don’t. This way, you will have more ‘clean’ information to analyze.”

#3 Do Market Research

Like information about your customers, information about the market and your competitors can also be useful. Of course, psychographic segmentation focuses specifically on your customers rather than your competitors but doing market research can help you get the full picture and understand your environment better. Besides, doing market research is fairly simple when you compare it to gathering psychographic data.

The best way to do market research is by hiring the right person for this who has the necessary experience and qualifications. However, if you want to have someone in your company do it, here are some questions they will need to be able to answer once the research is complete:

●  Who are your biggest competitors? What marketing techniques do they use and how do they do it?

●  What is your industry like at the moment? What are the predictions for the nearest future?

●  How big is the demand for your products? How big is the supply?

●   What is the position/status of your company on the market?

#4 Work with Focus Groups

Working with focus groups can be a surprisingly effective way to test your products and services. In addition to that, you will also be able to get even more psychographic information about your customers by looking at their responses and impressions. The downside is that working with focus groups will be somewhat expensive, just like organizing client interviews.

Remember that having the right people in your focus groups is crucial for collecting accurate customer data. But like with surveys and interviews, you can simply filter the information you collected by analyzing it more closely and deciding whether the person giving the information could be your potential customer.

#5 Analyze Social Media Activity

Social media activity can be a great source of demographic data, but you can also try to collect psychographic data from it. Depending on the technique you use, the data may be more or less accurate, so it’s extremely important to understand that social media data might be inaccurate to an extent. That being said, all the data you collect from different sources will have some errors in it.

As Josh Schmitt from the paper writing service reviews site Writing Judge  puts it, “Social media is one of the best sources of information about your target audience. Most of your potential customers probably use social media leaving bits of information about themselves here and there.”

Here are some ways you can collect psychographic data by analyzing social media activity:

●  Insights: Some social media platforms let you check insights to get a better understanding of your audience. Of course, this data falls mostly into the demographic category, but it can still be useful. Instagram Insights, for instance, can show you data about the performance of your account. With the help of Facebook Ads, you can launch ad campaigns both on Facebook and on Instagram – and then get data from these campaigns=

●  Polls and Quizzes: As mentioned earlier, polls and quizzes can be a great way to collect psychographic data. On Instagram and Facebook, you can post these on the Stories. On Facebook and Twitter, you can publish these in posts and tweets respectively. Most other social media platforms let you post either of the two.

●   Livestreams and Direct Messages: When a potential customer takes the time to reach out to you through direct messages, it creates another segment of your audience which you can also analyze – this segment would be more active compared to others. At the same time, activity on the livestreams you host on social media can also provide you with valuable data because your customers will leave comments on the livestreams.

●   Likes and Comments: And, of course, likes and comments can help you get psychographic data though in a more unique way. Firstly, you can ask questions to your followers and urging them to comment their opinions under your posts. You can also post about different topics and then compare which topics do better based on the likes your posts get. This way, you will be collecting data specifically from your followers who are directly interested in your content and your brand.

#6 Generate New Content Ideas

Now that you have collected enough psychographic data from various sources, you need to start generating new content ideas. Analyzing psychographic data will allow you to create customer profiles and segment your audience. Then, you can target every segment separately with your various marketing campaigns.

Perhaps the best way to generate new content ideas when you have the analysis with you is by getting your entire team together and brainstorming. It’s essential to realize the importance of teamwork in this case because that’s the best way to come up with something creative, unique, and original.

#7 Develop Communication

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Last but not least, you need to develop communication with your customers. This is the final step of the psychographic segmentation journey. All your marketing efforts based on the psychographic profiles you have created will be more effective and will help you connect with your existing and potential customers.

But how exactly can psychographic segmentation be applied? For example, Klook, an East Asian travel platform, used psychographic segmentation to determine that their audience often chooses the destination to go to based on the available activities. So, instead of asking travelers to first choose a destination, they actually start with activities first.

Another very popular company using psychographic segmentation is Old Spice. According to the research they conducted, 70% of the household shower gel is purchased by females. So, instead of aiming their male products at males, they actually targeted females. Moreover, they found out that their customers wanted to be “manly”, so they started phrasing their marketing campaigns by using the stereotypical man talks.

Keep in mind that all types of marketing can use your psychographic segmentation findings. You can base your social media marketing campaigns, email marketing campaigns, content marketing strategy, and so much more on the analysis you have done.

Final Thoughts

All in all, psychographic segmentation can definitely be a valuable marketing tool if applied correctly. Use the tips in this article to start implementing psychographic segmentation into your strategy and launching successful marketing and advertising campaigns.