The feeling of unexpectedly meeting a person who personally knows and understands you in a foreign location among a sea of strangers: That is what psychographic data allows you to deliver.
In the B2B marketspace where every cold call, cold email, and ad campaign is irrelevant, psychographic data enables you to position yourself as a unique one who knows and understands your audience among the spam calls and ads.
Psychographic data is the talk of today and tomorrow. It has the capacity to alter the market in the near future as the personalized experience demands of B2B consumers have reached heights.
This guide will introduce you to psychographic data and show you how to gain them.
What is psychographic data?
Psychographic data is a type of information based on the psychological traits and characteristics of your target audience. It includes personality profiles, lifestyle choices, online interests, opinions, beliefs, and values.
Psychographic data is used to enhance your campaigns with personal information that can make it relevant for your prospects and feel connected.
Psychographic vs demographic data
Unlike demographic profile data, which includes quantitative factors like age, gender, income, and educational path, psychographic profile data delivers deeper insights into the behavior of the person.
Demographic profile:
- Age: 33
- Gender: Female
- Location: New York, US
- Marital Status: Married
- Annual Income: $70k+
- Education: MS
Psychographic profile:
- Personality: Di (DISC Model)
- Dog Lover
- Interests: Cricket, Modern Music
- Recent lifestyle choices: Purchased healthier food alternatives
- Values: Time
These demographic and psychographic profiles will give you a better understanding of how the latter can help you personalize your campaigns and address your target audience with more confidence and assure the prospect you approach that you know and understand them.
Key components of psychographic data
Psychographic components let you segment and target your audience with much greater focus and influence than a blunt sales approach. The key psychographic factors include:
Personality insights:
Personality insights give you a detailed view of the personality traits and characteristics of a potential buyer. These insights are based upon personality evaluation models like OCEAN or DISC.
OCEAN is an acronym used to represent the Big Five personality traits:
- Openness: Represents the willingness of a person to try new things.
- Conscientiousness: Shows a person who is thoughtful and diligent.
- Extroversion: A personality type measured how excited. social, and outgoing a person is.
- Agreeableness: Defines a person with trust, kindness, and compassion.
- Neuroticism: Characterized by negative emotions in a person.
DISC classifies people into four behavioral styles:
- Dominance: People who are confident, outspoken, decisive, and focus on results.
- Influence: Tend to be more open, trusting, and influencing, with an emphasis on relationships.
- Steadiness: Sincerity, loyalty, calmness, and dependability define this personality type.
- Conscientiousness: A person who is detail-oriented, independent, and focused on quality and accuracy.
These personality models can almost accurately describe a person’s personality traits allowing you to detail your campaigns with personalized content that can boost engagement and conversion rate.
Lifestyle:
t is crucial to know how your target audience live their day to day lives for focused targeting and psychographic data can help you here.
Psychographic data reveals daily routines, activities, interactions, spending habits, and choices of your target audience. It provides you with information that allows you to segment your prospects based on their personal life choices.
If a prospect’s spending habits reveal a money-saving pattern, your pitch can offer them a discount which will push them towards making a purchase.
Interests:
Hobbies, media consumption, free time enjoyments, sports interests, arts, or technology are all categorized as interests of people.
Understanding these can help tailor messages that resonate with the interests of your target audience and can make your approach relevant.
Values:
The core principles of a prospect which can influence their actions, starting from engagement to decision-making, are the values that are considered in psychographic data.
For example, a prospect whose core values include sustainability may expect eco-friendly solutions for their teams.
Attitude:
The beliefs, opinions, feelings, and dispositions people have towards certain topics, products, or brands are seen as the attitudes of people.
The attitude can be positive or negative, but it can significantly affect buying decisions. So, learning and understanding these will give you a deal-winning upper hand while you pitch your product or service.
Applications of psychographic data
There are a set of business applications where if applied, psychographic data can accelerate business growth.
- Targeted marketing and sales campaigns:
Content and personalization, the two pillars of modern sales and marketing, can be enhanced using psychographic data.
Psychographic data allows you to tailor your messaging to resonate with unique audience segments and align with the interest and values of your target demographics, making campaigns more engaging and relevant.
- Customer segmentation
Identify and target niche markets based on shared values or lifestyles.
To achieve this, you can combine psychographic data with demographic information and create value or interest specific psychographic segments for targeted approaches.
- Product building:
Understanding the desires of consumers can improve the user experience in your product, ensuring it meets differentiated needs of your audience.
Psychographic data helps you identify the gaps your product holds in accordance with the market trends and user standards. This allows you to develop innovative solutions that result in smoother product experience.
- Brand positioning:
Position your brand in a way that connects with your target audience’s values.
By leveraging psychographic data, differentiate yourselves from competitors by knowing the unique preferences of your audience, fostering stronger connections.
- Advertising optimization:
Know where your audience visit frequently and place ads there.
Learning the online behavior of your target audience will give you the ability to craft customized messages and place it in the right locations that leads to higher visits and conversion rates.
- Crisis management:
During a crisis, being informed on the attitude of the prospect will help customer service teams to communicate better.
Psychographics of your paying customers will help you navigate carefully through sensitive issues that may damage the trust your business holds, declining the rate of customer retention.
- Market research:
Identify trends and shifts in consumer behavior and stay ahead of the curve.
Gain a competitive edge by identifying emerging trends in the market. Rapid shift in online consumer behavior will reveal potential areas for improvement, enabling you to align with future market trends.
- Brand loyalty and advocacy:
Orienting closely with customer values and preferences fosters strong communities of customer loyalty.
Reduce churn and enhance retention by implementing strategies that line up with customer preferences and beliefs, creating deeper connections and loyal advocates who share their benefits.
8 ways to find psychographic data
Psychographic data can be identified through a combination of qualitative and quantitative research. The most prominent of them are:
- Personality intel tools
There are tools available in the market that give out personality insights about a person within a matter of seconds.
Zintlr chrome extension for LinkedIn is one of the best tools in the market to get personality intel.
Zintlr chrome extension provides you with personality intel like personality type (OCEAN and DISC), attitude, core values, career path, and future motivations for any LinkedIn profile of your prospects.
This allows you to tailor your pitch accordingly and deliver engaging content and promising pitches that progress your prospects further down the sales funnel.
- Surveys and questionnaires
With surveys, you can ask specific questions about values, interests, and lifestyle choices of your prospects. This helps you collect psychographic data of your prospects and segment them with their shared interests and values.
You can target a small group or a larger one for your questionnaires. With a larger group of audience, segmenting them might be hard but it will be easier to identify the emerging market trends. Smaller audience groups make it crystal clear for you to segment them and prospect without the need to pour in more effort and time.
- Focus groups
If you are looking to improve your product to align with industry standards or launch a product into a new market, focus groups can help you strengthen your business.
Focus groups are a small yet diverse group of people who are gathered to discuss a particular product, service, or solution. These discussions are observed by a moderator who asks structured questions to probe the conversation into desired directions.
These focus groups give out in-depth insights that may not surface in surveys, generate new ideas, test new products or concepts, and reveal trends and preferences of a target market.
- Interviews
Interviewing your customers is a great way to collect psychographic data. The advantage here is that you already would have built a relationship with your customers, making it easier to connect, interact, and ask a wide range of open-ended questions.
Questions like:
“What matters most to you when choosing [your product or service]?”
“What are your top priorities during your free time?”
“Describe your ideal weekend.”
“What influences you the most when choosing a brand?”
“What are the social issues you would like to address?”
“How much do you relate a brand with your personality?”
These can help you bring out the psychographic data of a customer, allowing you to enhance your service or product, assuring customer retention.
- Social media listening
Social media is a tool to understand the thought process of your prospects. Social media platforms like LinkedIn, Facebook, X (formerly Twitter), and Instagram can give you analytics about a prospect.
You can use social listening tools like Sprout Social and Brandwatch to analyze and closely listen to the social media activities of your prospects and gain insights into their interests and lifestyle.
- Customer feedback and reviews
Utilize customer feedback forms with targeted questions that encourage them to give out their views and preferences. Use open-ended questions that may work with your customers and clients.
Observe and analyze post-purchase and customer service interactions. Look for patterns that describe the needs, frustrations, engagement drainers, and preferences of your customers and segment their profiles based on shared interests, values, and motivations.
- Website analytics and heatmaps
Tracking user behavior while navigating through a website will exhibit the smooth and rough areas of user experience and engagement.
To track and analyze website analytics the best tool is Google analytics (GA4). It gives you where your page got traffic from, most visited pages, visitor journey, devices used by visitors, and product page conversion rate. Most importantly the analytical numbers of time visitors spent on your site and if visitors return to your page shows the quality of your page.
Also, tools like Hotjar give you landing page heatmaps that uncover where on the page have your visitors spent more time, have interacted more, and have scrolled how far on a page.
- A/B Testing
A/B testing gives a comprehensive view on the preferences and interests of your prospects.
It can be figured out by evaluating and comparing the performance of different pages, used on the same set of audience. This gives you the behavioral data that you need to customize and enhance your landing pages for improved engagement and conversion.
These 8 ways can help you collect psychographic data of your target audience.
