What is Psychographic Segmentation? A Complete Guide for Marketers

Padrig is a copywriter for B2B SaaS and marketing companies, specializing in writing conversion copy and traffic-generating long-form articles. Blending psychographics with demographics gives marketers a more nuanced understanding of the customers they want to target. The business builds its entire targeting strategy on this psychographic profile without accounting for demographic factors—like location and income levels. If you only factor in your audience’s demographic factors, you’ll struggle to pinpoint the “why” behind their consumer choices. Bringing together both psychographic and demographic insights to segment your audience will likely provide a more complete picture of who your consumers are.

For example, someone interested in playing soccer needs to purchase a soccer ball. They cover what a person enjoys doing (and will spend money on), how often they engage in those activities, and the purchases they make based on them. When researching a prospect’s interests, start broad, then narrow your focus as you begin to understand more about them. People often have strong views on religious, political, environmental, and cultural topics, which can significantly impact the products and services they buy and how they respond to your advertising messaging. Psychographic segmentation, by this criteria, considers people’s beliefs, morals, motivations, and overall outlook on life to create a buyer’s profile.

• Matomo champions privacy compliance while offering comprehensive insights and segmentation capabilities.
• Businesses use target market personas for everything from educating their marketing strategies and messaging, to tailoring content, products and services to resonate more deeply with different customer segments.
• Marketers can map these behaviors to underlying motivations to uncover hidden psychographic cues.
• Meltwater, Brandwatch Consumer Intelligence, Adobe Analytics, and Adobe Real-Time CDP all offer real-time insights into audience behavior and interests.
• They can provide deep insights into consumer behavior that complements the information available from demographics.
• Successful psychographic segmentation provides an ideal customer profile based on the combination of various variables.

More than ever, marketing teams need to implement sophisticated techniques like psychographic segmentation in their advertising efforts—because the better you know a person, the more personal value proposition you can offer. While psychographic segmentation helps see the ‘why’ behind consumer decisions, behavioral segmentation sheds light on ‘what’ the consumers do. Psychographic segmentation groups individuals based on their inner values, attitudes, interests, and lifestyle choices, giving an understanding of what makes them tick and what motivations and reasons they have behind their purchase decisions. Conversion rates and customer engagement metrics will help you see if your segmentation messaging works.

Frequently Asked Questions:

A small focus group can help to assess what common trait is shared amongst those loyal to the brand and help you build your buying persona. Interests dictate what consumers purchase, and identifying these interests help you to target and market. This includes things such as where they live, whether or not they have children, whether they are in a relationship or not, and if they’re someone who lives to work vs. someone who works to live. The Big Five is a great method to return to when you’re collecting psychographic data and looking to assess who your target customer could be. It is essentially static data that helps you to define “who” your ideal customer is.

Start with segments and personas

To ensure you’re sending the right branding message, create a positioning statement that shows you understand your target audience. Social media can be a powerful tool for small businesses that want to better understand their target audience. Understanding psychographics helps you craft messaging that resonates emotionally, not just logically.

This ensures segmentation is aligned with key business goals and is focused on actionable areas. Businesses use target market personas for everything from educating their marketing strategies and messaging, to tailoring content, products and services to resonate more deeply with different customer segments. For example, a customer might care more about online reviews (behavioral) because they’re driven by peer validation (psychographic).

Checklist for credible, respectful psychographic research

Depending on the demographic and psychographic data you’ve collected, some marketing channels will be more effective at engaging your intended audience than Audience psychographics others. The next step in the target audience analysis process is to determine where this group consumes content so you can develop an actionable marketing strategy. Niche marketing is certainly a useful tactic, but your target audiences should represent a group large enough to reach through social and organic channels, email marketing and paid ads.