5 Ways You Can Use Psychographics in Marketing

Since time immemorial, marketers all over have tried to crack the code to a successful marketing campaign. And while demographics is an important metric of any marketing campaign, the real decider of any campaign’s success is usually customer interests, values and beliefs. And, this is what marketing psychographics is – Understanding customers’ attitudes, interests, value and lifestyles.

Briefly put, if demographics explains the question of who your customer is, then marketing psychographics explains the why. Psychographics is the study of people’s interests, characteristics and personality, to understand the motivation behind purchase decisions. It is practiced in conjecture with demographics to formulate better and detailed audience profiles and markets.

List of 5 Ways to Use Psychographics in Marketing

So how can marketers use psychographics to enhance their marketing? Let’s dig in.

• Build Customer Personas

Customer personas are fictionalised representations of your ideal customers which help in understanding your prospective buyers and formulate marketing strategies accordingly. By using marketing psychographics, customer personas are better visualized and designed to provide a larger understanding of customers. In turn, you can use the knowledge gained from customer personas to design personalised emails, SMS and advertisements.

Creating customer personas using psychographics allows creating comprehensive profile of the ideal customers and building more effective marketing campaigns with personalized messages.

• Employ Customer Segmentation

Customer segmentation is necessary to distinguish the diversity between different types of customers. This plays a part in the way you market to them, as each segment warrants a different marketing approach. Any organisation can use psychometric data to segment customer. For example, clubbing people from the same social class or segmenting people who follow a certain lifestyle, etc. are some of the ways to segment your customers.

Customer segmentation allows an organisation to design and communicate targeted marketing strategies that resonate with a specific focus group and evoke a positive response from them. This approach facilitates more concise and focused marketing efforts without being overwhelmed by marketing to one and all. Customer segmentation is best used to advertise to a specific group of people with common interests.

• Focus on Customer Emotions

Do you remember the Cadbury ‘shubh aarambh’ ad from a few years ago? The one where the boy proposes to the girl and the tagline ‘kuch meetha ho jaye’ pops up? It was a hit among audiences and worked wonders for Cadbury India. Its success can be largely attributed to two factors: 1) the clever incorporation of Cadbury chocolates as a precursor for special occasions, and 2) the sweet and unconceited way in which it pulled our heartstrings.

Emotions are the building-blocks of our personalities which largely drive the way in which we experience the world. Your marketing efforts should churn certain emotional triggers which illicit a positive response. There are complications of using emotionally driven advertisements as different groups of people might respond to such things differently. This is where you can use customer segmentation to identify the target audience and understand what emotional trigger draws the best response from them. Psychographics helps in zeroing in on what customers care about, giving you the ability to play to that.

• Personalise the User Experience

Psychographics gives you a visceral understanding of what customers want, and you can use it to create personalised marketing strategies for them. Based on their searches, interests and likes, you can identify ways and techniques to best target customers and provide a personalised experience. A lot of companies use AI and algorithms to drive personalised advertising campaigns online.

The best way to understand the influence of marketing psychographics in personalisation is to look at Netflix. The streaming service analyses what each user watches and what content they are invested in. They even analyse the ‘completion rate’ of users: where do they pause, the number of pauses made, where the common cut-off point is, time lapses etc. Netflix uses this data to recommend content to users which they are more likely to enjoy. Even Amazon does this, where they look into a user’s purchase history, wish list and products viewed. Moreover, they use this information to recommend products to users, based on what other customers purchased in a similar situation. By knowing what is of users’ interest, you can design a customised purchase experience.

• Identify Newer Content Areas

With marketing psychographics, you can understand your customers’ interests and what kind of content interests them. In fact, understanding the interests of your customers will help identify which content works for them and help you identify newer and interesting content ideas. Not only will this keep your older customers engaged and happy, but also help in attracting newer audience.

Psychographics is an excellent way for marketers to understand their customers better. It allows you to personalise your marketing and also make customers feel understood. This in turn will help in not only making your marketing more effective but do wonders for your brand’s overall image.