Psychographic segmentation and lead generation are part of a complex world. As today’s consumers expect a business to understand their needs, knowing the psychology behind your customers is key to offering personalized experiences.
This is why marketers have been looking more into the science of consumer behavior and psychology to determine the best ways to create engaging conversation leads and improve their marketing efforts for their target audience. Understanding such factors can help companies —especially small businesses — get a leg up on the competition.
Demographic data like age, gender, and occupation has probably helped you market better in the past — but it leaves so much on the table. Likewise, geographic segmentation may tend to ignore differences in customer personality traits — it’s critical that your marketing campaigns take into consideration as many factors as possible.
It goes without saying that your goal, as a small business owner or marketer, is to have a healthy amount of customers and stable cash flow. By learning how to use psychographic segmentation in your business, you can better target potential customers and lessen what you spend on ads — and, in turn, boost the overall ROI of your marketing efforts.
What Is psychographic segmentation?
Simply put, psychographic segmentation is a way to group your audience based on values, attitudes, interests, lifestyles, or personality traits. Segmenting data based on psychographic factors can help you create better interactions with customers by understanding:
- What’s important and valuable to them.
- The problems they face.
- Why they behave in a certain way.
- And why they buy from you.
This information can come from analyzing five key psychographic segmentation variables. These variables include, but aren’t limited to:
- Personality traits like self-discipline, extroverts, openness.
- Lifestyle, or how people live
- Social Status, or the crossover between demographics and lifestyle.
- Attitudes, beliefs, or customer perceptions and behaviors.
- Activities, Interests and Opinions (AIO), for example, the types of activities they engage in and how it relates to your products.
When you market based on psychographic or behavioral segmentation, you are able to make your messages more relatable to leads and customers. As a result, you spend money smarter in a marketing campaign, and see more people connecting with your business — a win-win for all.
How to get behavioral and psychographic segmentation data
Finding psychographic data and formulating buyer personas takes a little more work than gathering demographic or geographic data. You have to dig deep and look beyond the obvious and easily available information.
There are two cost-effective ways you can do this:
Talk with your customers.
It may seem like a no-brainer for your marketing strategy, but be sure to involve all customers in your search for psychographic information. The most important and interesting insights often come from loyal customers and people who don’t buy from you who are part of your target audience.
Take the time to involve everyone in your marketing strategy — from leads to new and old customers — to get input on what they value, their perceptions, and how they live. For example, you can talk with people through a Messenger bot on social media, quiz leads to get more info, or even talk to customers in-person.
It’s both beneficial and feasible for small business owners to get this type of information to better use psychographic segmentation in their marketing.
Send surveys.
Even if you think you know your customers, in most cases it makes sense to send a survey. Surveying is more than a “nice gesture” exercise, it’s about getting feedback and answers to collect your own psychographic data. Psychographic profiling based on personality type, for example, is a great way to gain insight into customer motivations.
Surveys are extremely affordable when delivered digitally. You can send one a day after someone receives your product for feedback. Or even include surveys in your Messenger bot flows to learn more about potential customers.
You can even employ your Messenger bot to collect this information from purchasers after they complete your sales cycle, when focusing on psychographic segmentation in marketing.
Importance of psychographic segmentation in marketing
Improve ad targeting.
Your big moment is here— it’s time to put psychographic segmentation for your marketing campaign into action. When you divvy up your ad spend based on lifestyle group, such as CrossFitters who eat paleo, for example, it’s more likely they’ll download your Paleo cookbook versus vegan bodybuilders.
The more focus you put on one specific group or psychographic profile, the higher return you achieve from your various marketing campaigns and marketing efforts.
Create better products.
Every successful business needs to be clear on which problems they’ll solve for each audience. Products and services based on psychographic segmentation variables can help businesses know who prefers what, and how they can tailor their product to certain groups.
For example, a local bag designer collects information on how women perceive their bags from a Messenger bot survey. They learn that upper-class women in Los Angeles will sacrifice the amount of stuff they can store, in exchange for a slimmer design.
Using this information, they can now create new bags that are in demand for consumers, and avoid wasting money and resources on things that won’t sell.
Send better content.
The right content sent to the right audience goes a long way in lead generation. Psychographic segmentation can help you with this customized content creation by offering the most relevant information about trends and news based on their preferences.
A great way to implement this is through a Messenger bot on social media, which can be used to offer a list of options for people to choose from. You can then look at the different types of content they like and dislike, so you can send more relevant content to them.
The Wall Street Journal does this by using clear CTAs in their bots to help readers filter the content they like.
Companies that use psychographic segmentation stay on top
If you followed this article, you’re now familiar with psychographic segmentation and how you can use it to grow your business to strengthen your marketing efforts.
While this is only one of the many different types of audience segmentation, it can help you:
- Better target leads to reduce ad spend.
- Understand the motivation behind why customers buy.
- Become a more customer-focused business.
Regardless of your industry, psychographic segmentation can be used to grow your business. Anyone can use it to improve marketing efforts. Now it’s your turn.
