You’ve dug in and found out everything there is to know about your ideal customer and designed a perfect inbound marketing strategy to grab their interest and guide them through the buyer’s journey. You’ve reviewed your results, and despite all of your planning, you’re still short of your campaign goals and can’t figure out why. It’s time to go back to your buyer persona and really get to know your best potential customer. Beyond demographics that provide basic information, understanding your buyer persona with psychographics will provide you with useful insight that will help you deliver messages that inspire them to act.
Demographics vs. Psychographics
The easiest way to explain the difference is to think of demographics as the points that describe who your ideal buyer persona is, while psychographics explains why they are your likely buyers. As you’re building out your personas, you assemble data such as gender, age, income range, family size and other facts that create a one-dimensional view of the person who is going to be the most receptive to your products or services. All of this information is critical, but understanding your buyer persona is also paramount to marketing success.
Some of the questions psychographics answer about your buyer persona are:
- How does your ideal customer spend their free time?
- What problems or pain points do they face?
- What values are important to them and what are their opinions?
As you can see, psychographics is an analysis of what makes your target persona tick. By developing a deeper understanding rather than just dry facts, you can tailor your offers even more closely and create more qualified leads or generate higher sales.
Where to Find Psychographic Data on your Buyer Persona
Understanding your primary buyer persona is easier than you might think. Before you begin researching, think of what you need to know about your potential customers so you can present them with offers that will really matter. How will your products or services enhance their lives, or how will they solve problems? Why are they most likely to buy what you’re selling? With those questions in mind, use the following sources to develop the psychographic characteristics of your buyer persona:
- Marketing data- When digging into psychographics, you are not going to focus on the numbers so much as what is most successful. Look to see what offers are most successful, what type of content your persona seems most receptive to and even what time of day emails are read to gain insight on what type of content works best and when to send it.
- Team up with sales and customer service- Your sales and customer service team work closely with your primary buyer all day, every day. Work together to develop the psychographic profile of your target persona.
- Surveys- Provided you have developed the right questions, surveys can be invaluable in gathering information about why your target customer is likely to make a purchase and even understand what turns them off.
- Social media profiles- Investigate social media profiles of your followers who are most likely to be customers. You can gain a lot of insight into likes and dislikes by viewing what they’re posting, what they react to most and the content they share.
Taking some time to really understand your buyer persona with psychographics will help increase your conversions and capture more of the people who are viewing your offers. You will be able to appeal to them on a level that truly matters, make them feel that your company cares enough to understand who they are, and place yourself ahead of your competition!