What is Psychographic Segmentation?
Successful businesses constantly leverage various types of segmentation to learn about target customers. Segmentation data can be used to improve products or services, as well as to drive a company’s marketing and advertising.
Behavioral segmentation is used to group people together based on their purchasing behaviors, while demographic segmentation is determined by demographic characteristics such as gender and age.
Another form of segmentation that marketers can capitalize on to better understand their customers is psychographic segmentation.
Psychographic segmentation consists of dividing a market based on consumer personality traits, lifestyles, interests, attitudes, and values.
The insights derived from psychographic segmentation allow businesses to develop and market products and services more precisely and effectively, because a match between the product or service and each segment’s needs and wants has been defined.
Why Do Businesses Perform Psychographic Segmentation?
Psychographic segmentation is an extremely powerful tool for marketing the same products and services to individuals that have varying psychological traits and characteristics.
For this reason, psychographic segmentation has become a go-to tool for top marketers that have the goals of increasing purchase amount and frequency, lifetime value, and loyalty.
Performing psychographic segmentation also enables marketers to build buyer personas, which provide insights buyers’ decisions such as attitudes, concerns, and criteria that go into making a purchase. Developing these personas is critical to the long-term health and success of a marketing department.
Simply put, psychographic segmentation can help to increase marketing ROI due to more effective marketing campaigns and messaging that ultimately inspire action. .
By understanding customers at a psychological level, marketers can craft better messages and distribute them through the channels they know customers are paying attention to. They can offer customers opportunities that are more relevant, which increase the chance that the customer will buy.
For businesses, psychographic segmentation methods lead to a more efficient allocation of resources such as money, time, and effort.
Factors Used to Group Populations During Psychographic Segmentation
Personality Traits
All brands inherently have personalities, and the best brands build these personalities based on the personality traits of their customers, creating alignment and resonance between the two.
When consumers can relate to the characteristics of a brand, product, or service they’re much more likely to consider purchasing.
By segmenting a population based on personality traits, brands can then more accurately and effectively embody those traits, which leads to enhanced brand loyalty from consumers.
Lifestyles
Everyone’s lifestyle evolves as they mature and go through various life stages. And as such, their needs and wants change accordingly.
Segmenting a population by lifestyle takes the life stage of a customer or prospect into consideration, so that the things that are important to them at that point in time are more prominently addressed in marketing.
By catering to the wants and needs of individuals in a specific life stage, marketing efforts will hold more resonance with audiences.
Opinions, Attitudes, Interests, and Hobbies
The opinions held by market segments and the activities that they prefer to engage in have a significant impact on the products and services that they purchase.
This factor of psychographic segmentation is often leveraged in online advertising and on social media so that individuals receive tailored messaging catered to their interests and other personal factors.
By customizing marketing communications to align with these opinions, attitudes, interests, and hobbies, marketing departments can create rich and relevant experiences for their customers and prospects.
Socioeconomic Status
A person’s socioeconomic status is determined by comparing a person’s income, education and occupation to others in the same demographic or market.
Segmenting a population by socioeconomic status enables organizations to market specifically to those customers that actually have the buying power to purchase the goods being marketed.
For instance, the placement of a billboard advertising a luxury watch brand can be determined by using the average socioeconomic status of a company’s target market. By using socioeconomic status to inform the billboard’s ideal placement to drive purchases of the advertised watch, the better the ROI on the billboard is improved.
Degree of Loyalty
Customer loyalty is a business’s bread and butter, and rightfully so. Companies who invest in growing and sustaining the loyalty of its customers reliably experience higher profit margins.
Not only is this customer segment a company’s best bet for word-of-mouth marketing, but segmentation marketing messaging and advertising to target this group can go a long way in creating an experience that people come back for time and again.
How to Use Surveys to Inform Psychographic Segmentation
So, how does an organization or marketing department go about gathering the data necessary to perform psychographic segmentation?
You guessed it — with surveys, of course!
Surveys can essentially act as interviews with your customers, as they’ll allow you to receive personalized and unique information about your target population.
By asking the right survey questions, you’ll be able to learn what your customers like to do in their spare time, what their lifestyle is like, what they value most in life, what motivates them, and lots of other information that can later be used to segment the population.
