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Psychographic Market Segmentation

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BRIDGE THE GAP BETWEEN PSYCHOLOGY AND DATA

As “customer-centricity” gains traction in being essential for business growth, psychographic segmentation offers marketers a window into your customers’ psychological makeup and shows you ways to connect, motivate and deliver value in a more meaningful way.

Psychographic segmentation is a method used to group prospective, current or previous customers with shared similar characteristics. These characteristics may include:

  • Personality traits
  • Beliefs
  • Values
  • Attitudes
  • Interests
  • Lifestyles
  • Social status
  • Opinions

These shared attributes may be observable or not. Combining these insights with other customer data can reveal powerful opportunities to market the same product or service to people from otherwise dramatically different demographic groups, geographies or other segments.

At DirectiveGroup, we help clients in B2B industries grow sales and revenue from the highest profit-producing customer segments.

Digital Marketing That Delivers Impact & Results

Sustainable business growth is built on a foundation of market research, essential data, strategy and integrated digital tactics.

Don’t find customers for your products, find products for your customers.

-Seth Godin

Get the Most Out of Your Research

The way you go about executing psychographic research depends on the size of your addressable market, your budget and your time horizon.

Whichever method you choose, it must deliver a segmentation model that does the following:

  • Be practical. You must be able to take action on the insights provided.
  • Clearly identify customer segments. You must be able to easily recognize the differences between the customer groups. People should belong to one group or another, but not both.
  • Be reproducible. You must be able to produce similar results even with a separate set of subjects. The method has more than a single time usage.
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WAYS TO GROUP BY PSYCHOGRAPHIC CHARACTERISTICS

Personality Traits

Brands, products, and services all have personalities, created intentionally or unintentionally. When purposefully, marketers will often create these personalities to match the personality traits most attractive to their target market. When a consumer can relate to the characteristics of a brand, product, or service they are more likely to engage with it. Learning about the personality traits of your target segments can help you refine your brand personality, or vice versa, looking for traits you’ve already expressed through your brand can create a more fiercely committed and loyal audience.

Lifestyle

We all have different lifestyle patterns that reflect many factors, including our stage of life. Our wants and needs change based on those patterns. Segmentation by lifestyle considers where the customer or client is in their lifecycle and what is important to them at that exact time. When segmenting a target market based on lifestyle psychographic characteristics, marketers promote their products and services as solutions to those wants and needs. Note that while this approach is generally applied to B2C for consumer products, it can also be applied to B2B based on company lifecycle characteristics.

Opinions, Attitudes, Interests, Hobbies
This categorization looks at factors such as opinions on religion, gender, politics, views on the environment, sporting and recreational activities, and arts and cultural issues. The opinions your market segments hold and activities they engage in have a huge impact on the products and services they buy, and even how they respond to your messaging. This is a rich area of opportunity in digital marketing, particularly with content marketing and social media. We think it is worthwhile for every company to explore this as a way to foster rich and rewarding experiences for both the customer/client
and the company.
Social Status

This segmentation approach crosses with several others, including demographic (income strata) and lifestyle (stage of life). Since there is a strong psychological component in a person’s need to maintain social class standards, this can be a very powerful method of segmentation. This approach can be used fruitfully when there is a direct connection between interest in and consumption of your products and services and social status. In fact, many marketers try to make this connection, so their products are a natural outward expression of social status. And again, this can be used with both B2B and B2C products and services.

Degree of Loyalty
Customers who buy your brand either all or most of the time are extremely valuable. And it is worth nurturing the loyalty of all customers. By using this method of segmentation, you can adapt marketing vehicles and messaging to retain your most loyal customers. You can also segment according to the degree of loyalty, potentially marketing different products and services in different ways with different messaging to each segment. A rule of thumb is that it is 10-times more profitable to sell to existing customers than to find and sell to new ones.
Occasions

If your product or service is purchased or consumed around an event or occasion, it makes a lot of sense to segment this way. And if it currently is not, is there possibly a way to introduce a connection to an event or occasion? Purchases made for weddings, holidays, etc. are examples. But there are also very interesting examples of how companies have connected to occasions and stages of life in very ingenious ways. And if your offerings naturally fit into this category, you may want to experiment with broadening usage to other times by using benefits sought, lifestyle or attitudes segmentation as well.

PSYCHOGRAPHIC RESEARCH METHODS

Primary market research, mainly in the form of attitudinal surveys, is analyzed via factor analysis by a statistician to find patterns and groupings. For this method, you will need to have a sense of where the differences or dichotomies may lie, so you can probe in those areas. This research may be followed up with a qualitative study to dig deeper into certain areas. Be aware that the competencies of your research/marketing agency can affect the outcome, reflecting the truism, “Your answers will only be as good as the questions you ask.”

“Down-and-dirty” market research using some methods such as Google Surveys. Again, you will need to have a sense of the dimensions or elements of difference. And you can just intuit the differences and test through an inexpensive digital means, or have a statistician conduct the more formal analysis. This is (obviously) even more subject to error, but for small budgets, it is probably better than a stab in the dark, in that it can be directionally correct.

Marketing artificial intelligence can be seen as segmentation on steroids because of the solution’s ability to rapidly test, learn and improve, mainly through predictive analysis and deep learning. In the not-too-distant future, we believe this method of “marketing learning and optimization” will be seen as a formidable match to the digital marketing explosion of tactics and content. Finally, with this method, you will be able to intelligently optimize the voluminous data produced through the millions of digital options possible given the multitude of channels, platforms and devices that may be part of your target segments’ buying process.

WHY

DirectiveGroup

 

No gimmicks. No fluff.
No meaningless data.

Strategy Audit
Strategy-based approach

We start with the end in mind. We work with you to establish clear, measurable outcomes and determine the right mix of data, tech and creative to keep moving your business forward.

Experience
Experience integrating with internal teams

We’ll work collaboratively hand-in-hand with your internal team and be involved as much or as little as you like.

Transperancy at every step
Transparency at every step

You’ll always know what the next steps are, what is being done and by whom. We keep you updated on the status of your campaigns and work with you to make strategic changes for better results.

Success
Your success is our success

Our team carries the attitude and mindset of “think like an owner”. As such, we work relentlessly to help your growing company become an industry leader.

WHY

DIRECTIVEGROUP

No gimmicks. No fluff. No meaningless data.

Strategy Audit
Strategy-based approach

We start with the end in mind. We work with you to establish clear, measurable outcomes and determine the right mix of data, tech and creative to keep moving your business forward.

Experience
Experience integrating with internal teams

We’ll work collaboratively hand-in-hand with your internal team and be involved as much or as little as you like.

Transperancy at every step
Transparency at every step

You’ll always know what the next steps are, what is being done and by whom. We keep you updated on the status of your campaigns and work with you to make strategic changes for better results.

Success
Your success is our success

Our team carries the attitude and mindset of “think like an owner”. As such, we work relentlessly to help your growing company become an industry leader.

Discover High-Value Opportunities and Multiply Profits with Products and Services That Sell Themselves

The amount of data, tactics, and approaches the marketers have to face daily increases the need for a strategic partner. We provide the surety of a big digital marketing agency but deliver results with the mastery, commitment, and passion of an in-house team.

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