Psychographics in Marketing: How to Use It + 7 Examples

Where the demographic data tell researchers who the people are, psychographics detail the why behind the choices they make. Identifying these segments helps marketers, researchers, and even policymakers create campaigns, products, or programs that resonate with the underlying motivations of each group. This report can be tailored to focus on a specific country, region, continent, or provide global coverage.

In your campaign, you’ll highlight customer testimonials to appeal to them. You now understand what is important to your buyer, so you’ll know just how to motivate them. As your needs become more sophisticated, you can then consult with a major company such as NielsenIQ or Qualtrics. If you already have a good idea of what your target audience looks like, you can use that information to do research on your own. Focus groups are more effective when you craft a thoughtful questionnaire that helps you uncover the needs and wants of your target audience.

This insight will shape your marketing strategy, and it usually has nothing to do with what’s new or what makes your product truly unique. Which features of competing companies, products, or services do your customers consider essential to make a purchase? You want to understand the precise circumstances that lead people to pursue a solution like yours. Priority initiatives aren’t just pain points that your features are designed to reverse. Opinions, attitudes, and beliefs are distinct psychographic categories, but I’ve grouped them together because they tend to be strongly correlated.

Types of psychographic data

If you're using a multi-channel messaging platform or CRM, set up custom fields or tags for your psychographic segments. How people interact with your own online assets can hint at psychographics. In a focus group, you gather a small set of individuals (often 5 to 10) in your target audience and have a moderated discussion to probe their opinions, feelings, and motivations.

When segmenting your audience psychographically, marketers commonly consider a few key categories of traits. By clustering people based on these psychological factors, you identify distinct groups who respond uniquely to marketing messages. If you identify psychographic segments with strong potential, you can incorporate them into your marketing campaigns to expand your reach.

What Is Psychographic Segmentation and How Does It Work?

It's a good place to start, as it lets customers tell you what they most strongly identify with. Getting market data for psychographics depends on how you collect the information and the questions you ask. Consider highlighting the activities an audience regularly engages in—actions speak louder than words, after all. You can also place target audiences onto one side of simple character binaries (such as spontaneous vs. analytical.) To bolster your demographic profile, you need insights into the more subjective factors that make an audience unique.

Modern psychographic data collection tools (

Scroll down to see the segment cards—giving you a top-level overview of each segment’s unique characteristics. Including a breakdown of top keywords found in their bios, a summary of their top influencers and content sources, and a list of the top hashtags they use. The interactive graph on the left clusters people into segments based on shared affinities and interests. The tool classifies your audience by personality types, online habits, media affinities, and top influencers. Access even more granular psychographic data with Semrush’s Audience Intelligence app. As full-time workers, we might infer that they’re likely to seek out activities that help them unwind and disconnect from work—like yoga, meditation, or outdoor pursuits.

Using all four in psychographic conjunction, marketers can create far more accurate segments and buyer personas (representative models of the ‘ideal’ customer). While this information helps marketers determine Imani’s social class and shopping habits, it doesn’t tell the whole story. These can be used to inform digital marketing activities.

When you use them to look for patterns in user interactions, you’ll see the types of content they engage with, the products they view and the actions they take. Social media monitoring tools can help to automate this process and identify trends and sentiments relevant to your brand. By monitoring social media conversations, comments and engagement metrics, you can gain insights into the psychographic profiles of your audience. When it comes to collecting psychographic segmentation data, it’s useful to get familiar with and use all the methods, tools and techniques available for getting the best insights into your target audience.

Rather than focus your market research exclusively on demographic factors—objective characteristics like age or geography—you can use psychographic profiles to map the more subjective aspects of personality. Therefore, if you want to use psychographic segmentation, it’s best to combine it with quantitative data to ensure you’re effectively targeting the right customers at the most appropriate times. In addition, psychographic segmentation can be easily misunderstood because it doesn’t use quantitative data, so marketers may accidentally make incorrect assumptions about customers. A coffee company might segment its customers by lifestyle and daily habits to help marketers understand their audience. Social class psychographic segmentation can help brands understand how to price their products and market to certain groups of people based on spending power.

• If you look at what sales is trained to do, the messaging in the product demos hardly ever matches up with the marketing message.
• Promote your product’s unique qualities or applications that align with an audience's main goals, ideals, attitudes, and beliefs.
• Now we know what psychographics are, how do they look in action?
• Psychographic segmentation often begins with buyer personas, fictional profiles that capture both the facts and the motivations behind behavior.
• Psychographic analysis and psychographic segmentation offer a clear path to doing business on your customers’ terms.
• In the following subsections, we’ll discuss the specifics and determine why using psychographic segmentation to guide your strategy can be highly beneficial.

Once you’ve started using psychographics, the next step is proving it’s working. A few tweaks in tone or focus can make it feel more personal and more likely to get a reply. The product stays the same, but the messaging doesn’t have to. As long as your main content still matches what the preview promises, more people will open and click through. Use what you know about each segment’s mindset to tailor your email marketing messaging.

Here are some things to take into consideration before investing into psychographic market research. And psychographic research helps you uncover those values. These tailored touchpoints can turn more people into loyal customers.

Online tracking through services like Google Analytics involves monitoring website visits, clicks, and online behaviors to build profiles of individuals' interests and preferences. You can analyze activity on social media platforms—posts, comments, likes, and clicks—to understand psychographics of specific groups. These discussions can reveal psychographic insights through conversation and interaction. One-on-one interviews enable researchers to deeply probe individuals by asking open-ended questions and delving into their attitudes and motivations. Researchers can design online, telephone, and in-person questionnaires to query respondents’ beliefs, interests, and preferences. Psychographics, in this case, can provide a clearer picture of these two individuals and how they spend their time.