Psychographic Segmentation

by Vlad Ungureanu

Jul 2020

Key takeaways from this article!

Psychographic Segmentation

Psychographics refers to the study and classification of people according to their attitudes, aspirations, and other psychological criteria, especially in market research.

Psychographics have been applied to the study of personality, values, opinions, attitudes, interests, and lifestyles. Considering that the main goal of marketing is to convince people to buy your products or services, psychographics provides an effective way to tailor campaigns, ads and messages with the highest success rate for each psychographic segment.

Adamant Links - What Personality Tells Us About People

Using the Big Five/OCEAN model for psychographics segmentation provides access to the following characteristic of each personality:

• School Performance
• Preferred Occupation
• Individual Characteristics
• Internal Values
• Lifestyle
• Preferences (movies, literature, art styles, games, music, cars)
• Motivation and Shopping Motivation
• Decision Making Process
• Communication Style
• Most Commonly Words Used
• Social Media Behaviour and Preferences
• Smartphone Usage
• Preferred Brand Personalities
• Specific Marketing Strategies
• Most Efficient Marketing Channels
• Preferred Design Elements in Websites
• Preferred Fonts
• Preferred Image Content and Composition
• Preferred Fonts
• Preferred User Interface Elements

Adamant Links - Psychographic Segmentation

Enhanced Customer Persona

Understanding the psychological traits that define each market segment provides an efficient way to improve almost every aspect related to your marketing campaigns and strategies. Psychographics segmentation provides an unprecedented way to understand the values, motivation, decision making, needs, desires and behaviour of your potential customers. For example, people that score high in Extroversion are more likely to be interested in sports, while people high in Agreeableness are less likely to be interested in sports.

Address specific needs

Based on the Big Five/OCEAN traits, some personalities prefer novelty while others are stable and predictable; people high in Neuroticism are insecure and cautious while people high in Extroversion are adventurous and confident. Understanding each segment allows you to address specific needs, leading to higher engagement from your potential customers.

Compelling Ads

Not only can you target specific needs, but psychographics provides information on how to phrase your message, what images to use, the colours each segment prefers, what persuasion techniques work best for each segment and even the font they are more likely to appreciate.

Optimize Marketing

There is a strong link between personality and behaviour, reflected in the way people use the internet, social media and smart phones. Understanding how your potential customers behave allows you to use the most efficient channel to reach them, reducing marketing effort and costs, while still providing better results than any general approach.

Adjust Brand Values

In order to better appeal to your preferred psychographic segments your brand can adjust their image, values, commitments and policies. For example, sportswear companies should be perceived as more active and dynamic to address high Extroversion people. Technical/Industry companies, that address mostly Conscientious people should be perceived as stable, calculated, organized and reliable to attract the most favourable segment of customers.

Better Conversion Rates

Targeting specific segment needs, in a preferred way, on their preferred channels, in their preferred manner is most likely to provide the best conversion rates for any marketing campaign.

How to collect psychographic segmentation data?

Customer Interviews: given the possibility, directly asking your current customers what motivates them, how they perceive themselves, your brand and your products can help you better understand the psychographic segments you are already reaching. While the process itself might be tedious and take a long time, it is most likely to provide reliable information.

Online Surveys and Questionnaires: people love to express their opinions, especially if they know that it is going to be heard and taken into account. While you might not reach your actual marketing segments, this approach does provide a general overview of the market and helps you position yourself as a brand.

Focus Groups: gather people from various backgrounds, age groups, biological genders and interests and evaluate how they respond to you, your brand and your products. Keep in mind that focus groups might easily get biased by group thinking.

Marketing Research Companies: you might choose to delegate this task to specialized companies who generally employ multiple channels and methods to gather information and structure it for you.

Adamant Links Analytics: with our proprietary method you can analyse and predict user personality using non-invasive, anonymous site behaviour and usage data. Our product provides real-time analytics for each customer, leading to a real and accurate psychographic segmentation of all the people that visit your site.

In our next article, get a detailed look at psychographics and biological gender:
Psychographics and Biological Gender