How to Use Psychographics In Your Content Marketing Strategy

Psychographics—a person or group’s attitudes, opinions, and interests—were once a fringe psychological topic in the 1970s. Now they’re a chapter in Marketing 101. 

Information about consumer psychographics have become invaluable. It’s no longer enough to know where people are, how old they are, and what type of job they hold; you need to know about what they like and how they behave. 

Personalized Experiences 

Customization and product diversity made a mess of work for the modern marketer. Creating hyper-personalized content based on segmented preferences takes data and creativity. However the results create a more refined connection with the consumer through personalized language and content that speaks to their needs, wants, and desires. If you are not familiar with mixing psychographics into your content marketing strategy, keep scrolling… it will put a fresh twist on your approach and drive results. 

On their own, psychographics can teach you a lot about a person’s qualities. Combining psychographics with demographics and other buyer purchasing data will give you a more complete picture of your consumer. With all of this information, many marketers create a consumer persona: a semi-fictional character that represents a given market segmentation. 

Once you know the basic ins and outs of a consumer segment, advertisers and marketers can use targeted language and content to create personalized experiences. But before you can use psychographics data, you’ll need to know how to collect it. 

Here’s a simplified framework for collecting and combining different types of data to create a consumer persona. 

Collecting Data 

First you need to collect demographic, psychographic, and buyer behavior data. Most researchers use surveys, focus groups, organize sales data, and even purchase existing data sets. The goal is to discover the target consumer’s age, location, gender, income, education, job, family status, hobbies, interests, goals, opinion, personality, struggles, and values. You might ask questions like: 

• How old are you? 

• Where are you from? 

• Where do you work? 

• What are your aspirations? 

• What do you like and dislike? 

• What do you spend your free-time doing?

You also want to understand the target consumer’s social media habits, any perceived barriers or misconceptions about your product, and the types of behaviors that are relevant to their purchasing habits. You might ask questions like: 

• Where do you shop for this product?

• Why do you choose this brand over that one? 

• What are the reasons you don’t use this product? 

This is a far cry from an exhaustive list or the way that these questions should be framed in totality, but they will get your mind on the right track. There are many hidden aspects of the consumer to discover, so asking more discovery questions will provide you with data to leverage. 

Crafting A Persona

Once you’ve collected the proper data, it’s time to craft the persona. Let’s say that you are a technology marketer who is trying to sell the latest smartwatch. You’ve identified some common patterns in your data and are ready to put them all together into a single profile, which might look something like this… 

Consumer Persona: Techie Beckie (Technolover) 

• Key demographics: ~27 years old, 65% female, 35% male, wealthy, crypto rich, highly educated, works from home. 

• Demo/Lifestyle: Beckie is a 27 year old female who works as a social media influencer making creative Tik-Tok videos. She is single and owns a dog and a cat. She lives in a highrise apartment in the downtown of a metropolitan city near most of her friends who are also content creators. On an average day she wakes up late and then checks her phone. She takes her dog for a walk, then meets her friends for brunch where they brainstorm ideas for making a viral video. After filming a few videos, Beckie goes to the gym. Beckie likes to stay in excellent shape and be camera ready. After working out, Beckie takes her dog out again to the park to play fetch and film a few videos of her dog being “a good boy.” Beckie then gets ready for dinner and night out on the city with her friends. Most nights she returns home around midnight, brushes her teeth, rinses and repeats the next day. 

• Attitude/Habits: When it comes to technology, Beckie is up to date with the latest; what’s in and what’s out. She constantly is checking her phone to keep up with the latest trends in social media, mainly Twitter. As such, Beckie keeps her ear to the ground on what new gadgets come out, and tells her friends what she thinks is fresh and what is yesterday’s news. She is not loyal to any particular brand because trends change so fast, but she thinks that fashion and style are more important than functionality. But Beckie admits that she is a sucker for a new feature that no other brand has. She purchases most of her tech on Amazon and other online retailers like Alibaba. 

What can you do with this persona? 

• Position Your Product: First, you can position your smartwatch so that it appeals to Beckie. When she sees your advertisement and product, you want Beckie to immediately identify with it because it matches her profile and solves her issues, wants, and needs. For example, highlight your watch's new and sleek features, and perhaps use a celebrity endorsement to associate the watch with the latest in fashion. Throw in some data about how the watch tracks your social media engagement (+ fitness and sleep) and it might be a perfect match for Beckie. 

• Relate To The Customer: Communicate the watches ability to immediately and easily access media apps on the go, even when working out, to show Beckie that she can watch videos in between her sets at the gym. Advertise on twitter, and sell on Amazon or Alibaba. Finally, since Beckie holds a lot of crypto currency assets, make the payment compatible with her currencies, or even create a coin of your own! This customer-centric approach makes a brand approachable, and even better, directly speaks to the end consumer. If their voice is represented by a brand, they are more likely to trust it. 

Copywriting a Smart-Ad  

It’s time to come full circle and implement your data into an advertisement campaign targeted for the technolover persona. Remember, the segment is young, tech savvy, mod, and will switch brands. In our example we mentioned that you are selling a smartwatch. Let’s say the company is called One, and the watch is called the “One Smartwatch.” Here’s some sample copy targeted at the technolover persona: 

Get it all done in one!

Everyone is gossiping about the new luxury smartwatch that influencers like the Joneses and Radisson Bae are wearing. One—an innovative technology company—recently partnered with industry leaders in fashion to create the stylish one stop shop for smartwatches. Now you can update and track your social media engagement, fitness, and wellness—all while rocking the hottest new look in fashion. The One Smartwatch is loved by celebrities and models alike, and appeared on this month’s cover of Bogue Magazine! There’s even a cherry on top: C-R-Y-P-T-O. The One Smartwatch is not only capable of storing and trading hundreds of cryptocurrencies, you can buy it now for 15% off with the One coin.