Psychographics in Marketing: What It Is and Why You Should Care

Psychographics can be useful in a number of ways, both in analyzing customers and consumers, and in analyzing your company and its culture.

It’s a great tool to help you target your right people, whether that be clients or new team members, and connect with your existing ones on a deeper level.

What is Psychographics and Psychographic Segmentation?

Psychographic refers to the interests, values, attitudes, personality traits, lifestyles, and opinions of your target audience or market. Not only are psychographics used in marketing, they are also beneficial in broader social, opinion, and prediction research.

Psychographic segmentation is one of four types of market segmentation. It utilizes psychographics to make assumptions about a target market that are then used to help to create or develop marketing strategies accordingly.

Psychographic segmentation allows a brand or business to take an in-depth peek inside their target market and figure out what their motivations and priorities are. This allows them to create a focused and personalized user profile, which can then be used to determine which products should be marketed to that targeted audience pool.

What is IAO?

Psychographics mainly deals with the IAO variables, which includes Interest, Activities, and Opinions. The IAO variables create a picture of the inner thought processes of a target audience and identifies what forces drive them to buy or reject a product or service.

Unlike demographics, which sticks to the factual information about a consumer, psychographics identifies their emotions, beliefs, values, psychological influences––both conscious and subconscious––as well as their lifestyle, attitude, and personality traits.

Interests

Interests identify the inclinations of the consumer; what they like to see, what they don’t like to see, what kind of products they prefer, etc.

Activities

Activities cover their hobbies; what they like doing in their free time, whether they prefer indoor activities to outdoor ones, and more. These things provide an overall picture of what they like to spend their time and money on. Although this may not seem very important, activities can result in more focused categories of your audience and help you market your product or service to the right group.

Opinions

Opinions are very important, especially in this day and age where most people are actively trying to become better and kinder human beings. Finding a like-minded person can be the start of a great relationship––finding a brand that resonates with your opinions and values can have much the same result. Knowing the opinions of your audience helps you determine how to design your pitch and what group to market it to.

How to Gather Psychographic Data?

The first thing you need in order to collect psychographic data is to collect demographic data. Psychographic data is connected through quantitative research methods, resulting in segments. The easiest and most common way of gathering psychographic data is through surveys, with online surveys being a preferred method.

Online surveys offer a simple way to collect psychographic data from an audience of your choosing, and mostly involves the use of the Likert scale to gauge the beliefs and values of those consumers.

Once you have quantitative data, you can perform qualitative research to increase the accuracy of that data. Qualitative research is usually done through interviews and focus groups.

Psychographic Consumer Behavior

To make your target market data even more refined, you can also perform behavioral segmentation. Behavioral segmentation focuses on the actions and behaviors of the consumer. These acts include their spending and buying habits, brand interactions, as well as their user status. Categories are created in the data based on how the customer interacts with you and other brands, as well as different activities and behaviors related to their day to day life.

Foster Amazing Connections with Consumers Using Psychographics

There’s no doubt that psychographic segmentation can be insanely useful for brands and businesses, whether internally within your team or externally with customers. It’s essentially like digging into the collective human psyche to figure out commonalities, and then using those commonalities to build long term relational connections. Long Term relational connections is just another way to say good business!