By Lakshmi Padmanaban
Let’s play a game to kick off our discussion on psychographic segmentation. Take a look at these two profiles and see if you can determine which person they describe:
Profile A:
Mid-30s male
Married with two kids
Works in finance
Lives in the suburbs
Enjoys sports and grilling on weekends
Profile B:
Mid-30s male
Works in finance
Values environmental protection
Likes learning about other cultures
Identifies as an introvert
Dreams of traveling the world someday with his family
Enjoys art house films and indie music
If you said profile B, you’re right!
Profile B provides a clearer picture of the individual beyond surface demographics, precisely what psychographic segmentation is all about.
As marketers, truly knowing our audiences sets us up for success. But to make an emotional connection, we must move beyond superficial traits and demos. We need to uncover the inner drives shaping behaviors and decisions.
It’s here that psychographic segmentation comes into play. Analyzing psychological attributes paints a multidimensional portrait revealing what audiences truly care about. The result is resonant messaging addressing real human needs.
In this blog, I’ll break down how to integrate psychographic emotional targeting into your content strategy. We’ll look at identifying audience psychographics, crafting emotionally engaging content for different segments, and measuring the impact. Stick with me; you’ll leave with actionable insights for driving powerful emotional connections through your marketing.
Understanding Psychographic Segmentation
Psychographic segmentation refers to dividing audiences based on psychological attributes rather than just surface-level demographics. It recognizes that people are complex beings shaped by their experiences, beliefs, and behaviors.
Beyond essential data points, psychographics delves into the underlying motivations driving consumer choices. It examines personality traits, values systems, social class perceptions, lifestyles, interests, and opinions. These deeper insights provide a fuller picture of what makes audiences tick.
Unlike commonly used traits like demographics, psychographic segmentation provides a window into the underlying emotions and motivations behind someone’s actions. They reveal not just ‘what’ your audience cares about but ‘why.’
A few common psychographic variables marketers leverage include:
- Personality traits (extroversion, risk-taking)
- Values (family orientation, health consciousness)
- Attitudes (toward sustainability, technology)
- Interests (hobbies, passions, entertainment preferences)
- Lifestyles (urban vs. rural, adventurous vs. homebody)
By understanding these deeper psychological drivers, you can create content that taps into the heartstrings of different segments in a uniquely resonant way.
Why Should You Explore Psychographic Segmentation?
With competition intensifying, it’s critical to form emotional bonds rather than fleeting transactions. Psychographics facilitate this by uncovering core desires driving purchase behaviors across situations over time.
It helps craft resonant messaging touching on audiences’ inner motivations. This establishes stronger relationships where audiences feel understood on a deeper level.
Ultimately, psychographic insights empower addressing real human needs through meaningful experiences that move brand relationships beyond basic awareness into advocacy. It’s a pivotal tool for any marketer seeking loyal, long-term customers.
How is Psychographic Segmentation Different from Behavioural Segmentation?
Psychographic segmentation focuses on understanding the underlying motivations and characteristics that shape consumer behavior. Behavioral targeting, on the other hand, looks at a person’s online and offline actions/transactions over time. It examines patterns in web browsing history, search queries, past purchases, item views, etc., to build a profile.
The difference starts from how we collect information to how it can be used:
- Data sources: Psychographics rely more on primary research, like surveys. Behavioral uses secondary data from digital footprints.
- Timeframe: Psychographics provides a snapshot of current psychology. Behavioral tracks change in actions/preferences over months/years.
- Predictability: Psychographics can anticipate future behaviors based on known attributes. Behavioral is more reactive based on past detected patterns.
- Customization: Psychographics supports customized targeting of attributes. Behavioral is best for retargeting to known consumers.
- Accuracy: Psychographics accuracy depends on research quality. Behavioral segmentation continually refines profiles as more data points are tracked over time.
While psychographic segmentation provides marketers with a holistic understanding of audiences for building emotional connections, behavioral targeting excels at highly personalized retargeting for known consumers based on their digital body language.
It’s important to remember that behavioral targeting does not replace psychographic segmentation. Rather, it should be used as an enhancement to better understand the target audience and to create more effective campaigns.
What Are the Common Psychographic Variables?
Before you can classify customers according to their psychological attributes, you must familiarize yourself with the common variables analyzed through psychographic research. Understanding these common psychographic data points will help you determine the right metrics to study for your unique target segments. So, let’s dig in and see the common psychographic variables suited for most marketing strategies.
Values
Values refer to the core beliefs that guide an individual’s choices and priorities in life. We all prioritize certain principles in life, whether that be things like family, health, the environment, spirituality, etc. Understanding a person’s core values provides valuable insight since they tend to be quite influential in decision-making.
There are more such values as environmentalism, social justice, family orientation, health consciousness, and career ambition. And brands group people according to their most influential values to better understand motivations.
Outdoor brand Patagonia has openly embraced values-based segmentation. On their website, Patagonia’s founder, Yvon Chouinard, discusses how protecting the environment became the company’s main value in the 1970s. They focus on customers who share this value through initiatives like the 1% For the Planet program, which donates 1% of sales to environmental groups.
Personality
Personality segmentation analyzes enduring traits that remain consistent for a person over time and across circumstances.
We all exhibit distinct traits in how we approach the world.
Models like the Big Five examine extraversion, agreeableness, conscientiousness, neuroticism, and openness. Personality influences everything from how we socialize to what products resonate with us.
Patterns in these traits influence how people experience and engage with brands. And segmenting by personality allows targeting messaging and products to resonate best with each type.
Interest
Interests are also telling — the topics that genuinely fascinate each unique individual. We all geek out about certain hobbies, genres, or categories in our downtime. When brands know what stirs passion, they can create offerings to engage those interests.
National Geographic segments readers into passionate interests like exploration, wildlife, culture, and human ingenuity. They created specialized magazines and programs catering to each — like National Geographic Traveler, focusing on places to visit and interactive digital experiences via the National Geographic Expeditions.
Image SourceLifestage
Where someone is in their life journey matters too. Our priorities change throughout schooling, career, parenthood, and retirement. Awareness and understanding target customers’ current life stages help ensure relevance through appropriate messaging, products, and experiences.
One direct example of this is the toy company. Lego conducts in-depth research to understand the evolving interests of kids in different life stages. They segment each age into different types of play – physical, symbolic, with rules, with objects, and pretense. As detailed in this case study, Lego identifies and stresses the importance of play until the age of 8 and has specific categories of toys segmented based on that.
Image SourceLego tailors product lines and marketing for each, like promoting their story-based themes to each segment. You can even see soft marketing in the age categories, where Lego recommends the best toy based on the age group.
Image SourceLifestyle
We all spend our days differently. We have different daily routines, work schedules, leisure activities, and consumption behaviors. We may be busy professionals, outdoor enthusiasts, social butterflies, or homebodies.
Our lifestyle shapes how we spend our time and money. Segmenting by lifestyle allows marketers to focus on those with aligned routines and priorities.
For example, the coffee chain Starbucks profiles frequent customer lifestyles on its website. They have popularly marketed themselves as the ‘third place’ — a space that is neither home nor work but rather a place for regulars to spend hours working or socializing. This concept has become increasingly popular, and many cafes, restaurants, and other establishments have embraced it to attract and retain customers.
By offering a comfortable, welcoming environment with free Wi-Fi and ample seating, Starbucks has created a space where people can work, study, or simply relax and socialize. This has proven to be a successful strategy to create a sense of community around the establishment and build a loyal customer base.
How to Infuse Psychographic Segmentation in Your Marketing
When implementing psychographic segmentation, the key is finding creative ways to incorporate deeper audience insights throughout your marketing strategy. In this section, we’ll explore how you can leverage psychographics to enhance everything from messaging to customer experience.
Identifying Your Audience’s Emotional Triggers
The first step is gaining insights into the core emotional themes and pain points that motivate different audience segments. Some effective research methods include
Surveys: Ask direct questions to surface feelings, priorities, and sources of frustration for different demos.
Focus Groups: Facilitate in-depth discussions to uncover nuanced emotional perspectives and needs.
Social Listening: Analyze large volumes of first-party customer conversations on social media, reviews, forums for sentiment, and recurring themes.
Brand Analytics: Dive into your existing customer data, like purchase histories, and support interactions for patterns.
Competitor Benchmarking: See what emotional angles competitors successfully activate through their content and messaging.
With such insights, you’ll be able to pinpoint the key emotional triggers to target for each psychographic group: a desire for community, stress over health, or passion for the outdoors. These will form the backbone of your targeted content strategy.
Grouping the Audience Based on the Triggers
Once you’ve identified some potential segments, validate them by testing different message frames to see how they emotionally resonate. Take a close look at each group to pinpoint 1-2 emotional triggers that are particularly relevant.
For example, an outdoor brand may identify the following segments: adventurous extroverts, casual hobbyists, health-conscious introverts, and family-oriented consumers. The adventurous extroverts may respond strongly to messages of freedom and thrill-seeking, while the health-conscious introverts see products as a way to reduce stress.
By matching your messaging to these core emotions for each segment, your content will cut through and form deeper connections than broad-based approaches. With audience research and testing, you can refine your segments and emotional triggers over time to truly resonate.
With such validated segments, dive deeper into each via secondary research sources like social listening, forums, or market reports to pinpoint a few more core emotional themes that motivate each group’s behaviors and decisions.
For example, within your adventurous extrovert segment, you may find a strong desire for novelty and a fear of missing out, driving their passion. Meanwhile, your health-conscious introverts react more to messages of stress relief and self-improvement.
By understanding each segment so comprehensively, you’ll know how to craft targeted content that forms an authentic emotional connection from the outset.
Crafting Emotionally Engaging Content
Once you have the base work ready — identifying the emotional triggers — it’s time to start creating content that meaningfully taps into the core emotions you’ve identified for different segments. Here are some best practices:
- Lead with Emotion: Open with a headline, visual, or lead that activates the key emotional trigger you want to address.
- Tell Compelling Stories: Share real customer stories, case studies, and anecdotes illustrating how your brand alleviated a struggle or fulfilled a desire. People connect through narrative.
- Use Vivid Imagery: Leverage vivid descriptions, photos, and videos to bring emotional concepts to life in a visceral way. Appeal to both the head and heart.
- Offer Solutions: Provide clear, tangible takeaways on how your brand or offerings can alleviate audiences’ emotional pain points or fuel their passions. Give them a path forward.
- Test Different Emotional Angles: Try targeting both positive emotions like excitement as well as negative ones like stress or fear, depending on your message and segment’s baseline feelings.
With practice tailoring your messaging to specific psychographic segments, you’ll start seeing content that truly cuts through the noise and forms deep emotional bonds.
Measuring Emotional Engagement
It’s not enough to create emotionally targeted content; you need metrics to evaluate how well it resonates and drives the desired behaviors. So here are some engagement KPIs to track:
Emotional Reactions: Closely monitor metrics like Facebook reactions, comments containing emotive language, and survey sentiment scores to gauge emotional response.
Shares & Referrals: Content that effectively taps emotions will spread more virally through word-of-mouth as people feel compelled to share. So track social shares.
Time on Site: Emotionally gripping content keeps audiences engaged for longer. Monitor time spent and bounce rates across different pieces.
Conversion Rates: Emotional targeting should translate to business outcomes like higher purchase conversion, renewals, or enrollment in loyalty programs. So make sure to keep an eye on KPI lift.
Customer Feedback: Supplement metrics with qualitative customer reviews and surveys to understand what emotional angles resonated and why.
By analyzing these engagement signals segmented by psychographics, you’ll gain insights into which emotional triggers and content styles are most powerful for driving meaningful connections — making them invaluable for refining future campaigns.
Key Takeaways
Psychographic segmentation provides marketers with a powerful tool for genuinely understanding audiences at a deeper psychological level beyond surface demographics. By tapping into motivations, attitudes, values, and lifestyles, it illuminates the underlying drivers of consumer behavior.
While behavioral data has its place, psychographics paint a multifaceted picture that supports long-term relationship building through consistent alignment with customer psychologies over time. It facilitates segmentation tailored for authentic engagement of specific audience subsets.
The bottom line is that psychographic targeting empowers brands to see people as complex human beings rather than mere data points. By nurturing emotional bonds of shared values and priorities, it establishes a powerful platform for customer loyalty in today’s cutthroat marketplace.
Marketers who take the time to understand target audiences at this deeper level will be rewarded with stronger advocacy, higher lifetime value, and more positive brand perceptions. So don’t just grasp for surface-level demos — dig deeper with psychographics to truly know your ideal customers.
About the Author
Lakshmi Padmanaban is a B2B marketing writer working with startups and SMBs to help them expand their organic reach and establish their authority through practical and actionable onsite blogs and emails. You can find her words in CMI, MarketingProfs, and Analytics Insight, among many others.
