Psychographics is the classification of people based upon psychological measures. Some measurements include: Attitudes, habits, values, interests and opinions. Surveys are often used to measure the attitudes of the public. Measuring attitudes helps marketers predict behaviors and determine how to use marketing to compel people to purchase a product. While psychographics are commonly applied in many traditional marketing efforts, they can easily be incorporated into online marketing to improve the ROI from your site.
Examples of How Psychographics Are Used
Marketing messages depend upon the audience that the customer intends to reach. For example, a company marketing a food product may entice the consumer by appealing to the customer on the basis of price compared to the competition. Another strategy may be to appeal to the customer in terms of the benefits of the product. While we may know the benefits of the product, having a better understanding of the customer will give you insight into which benefits are most important to customers. If customers tend to prefer organic foods and are focused on their health and the environment, benefits of the product will emphasize these attributes such as being made of all natural ingredients. Depending upon the interests of the target market, companies will select a marketing message to appeal to the consumer.
With a website, this means that knowing what other interests your users have can have a significant impact on sales or ad revenue. If you know what customers are interested, you can feature products from other categories that you know your customers will like in an attempt to up-sell. Similarly, you may find that many of your users like to travel and even though you don’t run a travel website, you might be able to have good click-throughs on travel ads or affiliate offers.
How to Maintain a Loyal Customer Base with Psychographic Marketing
Companies must first determine the type of people that are using their product and then produce a message that is consistent to their beliefs. Psychographic measurements can help companies determine what drives their customers to make a purchase. For instance, as in the previous example, some customers value health above cost. Other people value cost before health. The marketing message would vary depending upon the group that they are addressing. Psychographics help clients make better decisions about which benefits or features to emphasize in emails sent to customers. Or if you find that a majority of customers who buy a product really like a certain attribute about it, this should be emphasized in the on-page sales copy.
Why is Psychographic Marketing Important?
While demographics are helpful for knowing physically who your audience is, psychographics allows you to really know your audience – what they like and are interested in. This allows you to create a better experience for customers and website visitors which will result in higher sales. Knowing these interests, you can not only tailor your marketing efforts to increase product sales but you can also create highly targeted content for your website that users are going to have a higher probability of being interested in. Even if you can’t change the overall topic, you can use examples in your content that is going to be more relevant to your users as you can draw examples from their interests.
Companies also save money with psychographics marketing. Marketing to the wrong customers may result in a loss for the company. Marketing people find the best leads in all media formats from newspapers to Internet. Some companies require more than one marketing campaign. A general marketing campaign is often not as effective as a targeted campaign.
So What Does All This Mean?
Psychographic marketing can be really helpful as it gives you insight into the interests, values, and mindset of users, allowing you to improve your upsell and to place more relevant content and ads on your site. Unfortunately, the whole process can seem a bit overwhelming (and cost prohibitive) if you haven’t done it before. Fortunately there are options for doing this that are both easy to implement and cost effect.
The simplest solution is to email your customers a survey, which could be created in an online survey program or in a Google Doc. If you want to take it up a level, you can go with an online market research company – This allows you to survey a wider audience so that you can try to reach a wider customer base. If you are looking at expanding your customer base or readership, this may be a good idea. Further companies offering online market research services often have some statistical analysis baked into the product to help you best understand your results.
Image Credit to aldon
Written by Geoff Rickson
Geoff writes for AYTM Market Research, who provides online market research for small businesses and startups. AYTM allows you to create market research surveys specific for your business and get quick responses from their market research panels.
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This is a really helpful post. I have never read about this idea before and I really think that focusing content into a niche is a great way to encourage readers and sustain their readership of your site.