Susan Gilbert
February 23, 2015

Get Inside Your Customer’s Emotions through Psychographic Marketing

What is Psychographic Marketing?

While demographics, age, career, and more are all essential data, your marketing is further enhanced by gaining insight into their emotions and needs which is called psychographics.

Would you like to better understand your business’s target market?

The age of psychographic research is upon us as social media has transformed the way we do business to a more personalized approach.

The Webster’s definition of psychographics is “market research or statistics classifying population groups according to psychological variables (as attitudes, values, or fears); also : variables or trends identified through such research.”

When a business is tune with how their customers think, their values, pain points, and what works for their lives stronger relationships can be built, which leads to more conversions and loyalty.

A persona of what makes your market tick could look like this graphic from Hubspot:

Psychographics_in_Marketing
The best place for your business to start when crafting psychographic data is your existing customer base. These are the loyal buyers and brand ambassadors who have already taken a vested interest in your products or services. Knowing this information first will enable you to know what prospects need before they make a buying decision and go to your competitors.

Depending on your target market your customer portfolio will be tailored toward your niche market, ie. a solo consultant would focus on small business owners and entrepreneurs or a restaurant owner would study consumers and travelers/tourists.

What does your ideal customer look like?

Your business has a “target group,” or buyers with unique characteristics. There are several ways to measure this for a complete portfolio:

What are the demographics of your market? When your business gathers information on your customers’ age, gender, income and education you are that much farther ahead in achieving data that is measurable. This information will also show you who is purchasing your products or services.

Where do your buyers live? It’s important to know whether your customers are local, national, or international. Buyers respond according to the region they are from. For example, someone from the west coast of the United States may have completely different needs than a buyer on a east coast. The differences can be quite different for those who are international customers, which also has a variable inside each country. If your business is more on a global scale it’s especially important to understand the customs and holidays of your buyers.

Why are customers buying from your business? This is the psychographics portion of your data research. Your business will want to study your customers’ lifestyle such as how they typically spend their time. This could include a more educated, artistic community or a blue collar audience that likes to save money. Values trail closely behind lifestyle as you learn more about their family styles, political preferences, and economic status. Social class is very important in this scenario, and could reveal whether you are targeting wealthy business owners or penny-pinching students who are seeking a career and are about to enter the job market. Additionally your data could include personality types, opinions, interests, and what motivates a purchase.

Any successful business marketing plan should include thorough research of your target market well before content development and social sharing begins. Psychographic data makes the difference between a longer wait for a sale and a faster process because you will know what your customers desire before they tell you. This investment is well worth the potential for growing your customer base and maintaining your existing clients.

Psychographics-bookcoverWould you like to learn more about psychographics?

My new 32 page ebook, Psycho-What? along with accompanying worksheets will take you from Determining Who is Buying your Products or Services right through to Putting It All Together.
Bonus included: Competitive Research Checklist

Available Now

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Online Marketing with Focus - Let Susan Guide you to Online Success. Especially loves to help Authors, Speakers, Coaches & Entrepreneurs. Susan Gilbert uses her laser focus knowledge to coach and provide online marketing and social sharing programs. Author and publisher of several books including “The Land of I Can,” and “KLOUT SCORE: Social Media Influence,” Susan combines online marketing with strategic thinking. Follow her Digital Marketing Tips at her blog: www.SusanGilbert.com
Filed Under: Tagged With: Marketing, psychograhics, target marketing