What Is Psychographic Segmentation and How Can It Boost Engagement?

Any kind of marketing approach that gives you a deeper insight into your customers has the potential to help you make stronger connections with them.

Psychographic segmentation is a perfect example. Unlike demographic or behavioral segmentation, it goes into depth about what makes your customers tick, which means you can better understand how to reach out to them in a way that resonates.

In this article, we’ll look at what psychographic segmentation is, how it works, and how to implement it in your marketing campaigns.

What is Psychographic Segmentation?

Using psychographic segmentation is a way of developing a deeper understanding of your target audiences. Unlike demographic segmentation, which focuses on easily pinned-down facts like age, income level, or location, it involves categorizing your customer base by studying their psychological characteristics.

Delineating customer segments via psychological traits means you can build up a picture of what motivates each group to commit to certain buying decisions. In turn, this can help you develop more effective marketing strategies and increase your conversion rates.

Why Psychographic Segmentation is Important for Engagement

Consumer behavior isn’t monolithic. In other words, not all of your target customers arrive at a purchase decision via the same route. But the one thing they all have in common is that they’re more likely to respond if you tailor your messaging to their personal preferences.

When you develop a deep understanding of the psychological factors underpinning their motivation, you can create appropriate content for different target segments. For instance, rather than simply sending a generic check-in email, you can curate messages that resonate more deeply with your target audience, boosting engagement.

Other Benefits of Using Psychographic Segmentation

As well as boosted engagement, there are a number of other advantages to deploying psychographic segmentation in your marketing. These include:

More effective product development: Building up a full picture of your potential customers’ psychographic characteristics can provide an excellent starting point for developing new products that meet your target audience’s needs.

Improved customer service: The better you understand your customer base, the easier it is to deliver top-tier customer service. This makes it more straightforward to implement first-call resolution best practices in a contact center, for instance, because your agents will be able to use more personalized insights with each customer to help give them what they need.

More accurate targeting: Splitting your target market into psychographic segments enables you to connect with different groups of customers in a much more effective way.

Bear in mind that two customers may have an identical demographic profile but have very different interests and motivations.

For instance, imagine two women in the 25-34 age group who live in the same city, and each have two children under 10 years of age. But one is an avid hiker, while the other prefers to stay home and try out new recipes. Ideally, you’d be tweaking the messaging your brand sends out to each one accordingly to try to encourage deeper engagement from both customers.

With that in mind, let’s consider the most important psychographic segmentation variables to look at.

Psychographic Segmentation Factors

So, what are the main psychographic factors you should be focusing on? There are no hard and fast rules about this, but there are several areas that companies often zero in on to try to create more effective marketing campaigns. These are:

Consumer Personality Traits

You don’t need to go full Myers-Briggs here. It’s not realistic to ask every prospective customer to fill out a detailed personality test, but having a grasp of some of their more obvious personality traits can help you gain valuable insights.

For instance, are they more extroverted or introverted? Who are the more adventurous and open-minded individuals, and who are more reserved? There are ways you can phrase open-ended questions to try to encourage survey respondents to reveal these traits in a non-intrusive way, such as:

• What motivates you to achieve your goals?
• Do you prefer to base decisions on facts or intuition?
• How do you respond to everyday challenges?

You can then build up quite a rich picture of each customer personality, which will give an indication of the types of products they might be interested in and what their general consumer preferences are likely to be.

Core Values

Understanding what’s important to your customers is vital for fine-tuning your brand storytelling. Of course, most brands will want to avoid more potentially divisive areas like direct political statements (unless the brand itself has a specific connection that makes these relevant).

However you can dig into your potential customers’ beliefs in ways that your brand can relate to. For example:

• Which of your customers prioritize family?
• Who is passionate about environmental issues?
• How important are social responsibility initiatives to your customers?

Interests and Hobbies

This one is fairly easy to pick up on because people love talking about their interests. Which customers lead an active lifestyle and participate in outdoor activities? Who are the passionate music fans or sports lovers? Who enjoys creating and crafts?

Researching this aspect of your customers’ daily activities is obviously going to be highly relevant if you sell products that cater to those interests. But even if you don’t, it can be very useful to seek out this information because it helps you create more accurate buyer personas and target customer profiles.

Lifestyle Preferences

On a day-to-day basis, what do your customers get up to? Are they busy professionals who grab a quick coffee each morning on the go? Do they spend their weekends traveling to follow their favorite teams? Are they health-conscious people who go to the gym regularly?

Understanding your customers’ lifestyle preferences gives you insight into their purchasing habits at a deeper level. It’s also an excellent way of identifying which channels to reach out on to best connect with your potential clients.

Common Research Methods for Psychographic Segmentation

So, how do you go about collecting this kind of information? There are a number of routes you can take, and it’s usually best to use a mixture of different approaches. Try to incorporate a few of these:

Online surveys: Sending out psychographic surveys is one of the quickest ways of understanding your customers. It’s also one of the best ways to get broad-based data, since it doesn’t take much time commitment on the part of the customer. Consider sending surveys out to your email list or putting short pop-up surveys on your website. Offering an incentive, such as a discount voucher, can increase response rates.

Social listening: The advantage of social listening is that you can essentially eavesdrop on customers’ candid opinions. Whether they have a problem with your product or service or are particularly loyal customers who love your brand, you’ll find honest criticism on social media. Moreover, social platform analytics are useful for getting insights into your followers’ interests and purchasing habits.

Focus groups: For a more detailed examination of your customers’ opinions and thoughts, you can use focus groups or one-to-one interviews. These can be carried out online or in person, but they require a relatively heavy time investment from the participants. So, again, offer an attractive incentive to encourage people to participate.

Analytics tools: You can collect some psychographic data, like the interests your website visitors have, from standard tools like Google Analytics. In addition, you can glean more in-depth information by tracking online behavior using heatmaps and session recordings.

Existing research: Another option is to explore existing research that’s already in the public domain. Of course, this won’t give you detailed information about your individual customers. Nevertheless, if you have a reasonable grasp of who your customer base is, you can often find reports from sources such as government websites or industry experts that provide consumer insights you’ll be able to use, at least as a starting point.

How to Implement Psychographic Segmentation

Collecting the information is one thing; making it work for your marketing campaigns is quite another. But if you can get it right, it can help support a full-funnel marketing approach that delivers excellent results. Here are the steps you’ll need to follow:

1. Collect the psychographic data using your chosen research methods.

2. Analyze the data and use it to place your customers into individual categories of people who share certain key characteristics in common.

3. Devise detailed buyer personas based on these categories.

4. Use these to help create personalized brand messaging and content tailored for each category.

5. Keep collecting data regularly and reviewing your strategy. It will need to be constantly updated to maintain relevance.

Final Thoughts

There are several approaches to customer segmentation you can take, and the ones you choose will depend on your brand goals.

The key thing to remember about psychographic segmentation is that it deals with the “why” questions: why do your customers live their lives the way they do? Why do they make certain product choices over others? Why do they respond to some messages more strongly?

Tapping into those underlying motivations is an excellent way of driving higher engagement because you’ll be able to connect with potential customers on a more fundamental level. And that’s a terrific way of making sure those customers come back time and time again.

Featured image by Adam Wilson on Unsplash