Psychographic data is integral to marketing strategies and product development. It provides insights you can use to make informed business decisions that ultimately affect your connection with your target market. This equals effective marketing, successful business decisions, and product development that appeals to your consumers.
Psychographics is the study of people’s attitudes in interests. It’s usually combined with demographic data to understand the target market for a product or service. Psychographic data reveals traits such as values, interests, desires, lifestyles, and goals.
The primary use for psychographics is in market research to add depth to demographic data and help you better understand your customers’ emotions about your brand, product, or service. Psychographic profiles of target audience segments help companies create relevant messaging for each segment.
Psychographic data can be gathered via:
When we talk about demographics, we’re talking about the structure of the population. They are concrete characteristics you can use to narrow your market segments by splitting groups into subgroups based on one or more traits.
A demographic survey includes questions about:
Demographic data is generally collected via survey using quantitative questions.
Psychographics looks at emotions, habits, and attitudes. It focuses on understanding customers' feelings about a brand, product, or service. This data can leverage your marketing and make your efforts more effective and accurate.
It includes factors such as:
Collection of psychographic data in a survey is done using qualitative methods.
Demographics tell you who your customers are. Psychographics tell you why they buy. Marketers use demographics and psychographics to create various marketing strategies and advertising campaigns.
Example of a demographic and psychographic profile:
Demographic profile
Psychographic Profile
Customer segmentation is the general practice of creating subgroups in your target market based on their shared characteristics. It is used in business-to-consumer (B2C) and business-to-business (B2B) marketing. Customers may be segmented by demographics, psychographics, or other relevant categories, such as customers who have previously made purchases from the company.
You can use market segmentation surveys to help you understand how the members of your target market are the same and different.
Psychographic segmentation is the process of customer segmentation using psychological characteristics to divide your target market into groups based on similar traits. By creating these subgroups based on psychological characteristics, you can create marketing campaigns that will effectively impact each segment.
Psychographic segmentation is used with demographic segmentation to create profiles of target audience groups.
There are five psychographic segmentation variables to consider. You need to be aware of each type to use the data for market research effectively.
Grouping your customers with psychographic segmentation has multiple benefits for your business.
Clearly, having psychographic data is vital to your marketing, advertising, and product development. But how do you collect the data? Let’s take a look.
It’s not necessarily easy, but you’ll glean much more information from speaking directly to your customers. You can pick up on body language and vocal cues in person or via video conference.
The downside is that hiring and training interviewers can be costly, and data collection and analysis are quite time-consuming. That’s why surveys remain a solid choice for psychographic data collection.
Psychographic data can be thoroughly collected with open-ended questions and open-text answer boxes. It can be tempting to send a long survey to gather as much information as possible, but your respondents are more likely to complete the survey if it doesn’t take them longer than five minutes, so try to keep it concise.
Hone in on what psychographics you want to know and begin with a high-level question tailored to your business.
For example, start with a question asking, “What is your biggest challenge in finding clothing for your active lifestyle?” An open-text answer allows participants to identify their personal challenges. This also allows you to look for trends among respondents.