What is Psychographics? How Can You Gather Psychographic Data?

Psychographic data is a fascinating topic of research and it is quite valuable to marketers

To the uninformed, psychographics might seem like a debunked “scientific” notion like phrenology, but it’s actually one of the most interesting advancements in psychological research that marketers can use in their campaigns. But what exactly is psychographics? Why should you be concerned? How can you put it to use? Get all the answers We’ll look at what psychographics is, why it’s important for digital marketers, and some brilliant ways you can use it in your campaigns. But before we get started, let’s go over a quick tutorial on psychographics as a scientific subject.  

What is Psychographics?

Psychographics is the study of people’s interests and attitudes, which is frequently combined with traditional demographic data to create more comprehensive profiles of target markets and consumers. Although psychographics is utilized in a range of applications, market analysis is its major application. We may learn a lot about a person by looking at demographic data about their life, such as their age, income bracket, education, and occupation, but this information is only of limited utility on its own. It reveals nothing about their hopes, beliefs, dispositions, or any other subjective psychological measurement.  

How Can You Gather Psychographic Data?

Even though many of the indicators preferred by digital marketers are quantitative in nature, psychographics is more qualitative. Yes, psychographic data can and should be accurately classified, but in comparison to typical quantitative research approaches, psychographic data can be substantially more subjective and complex.  

Market Research Firms

If you’ve ever done market research, you’re certainly aware of how inconvenient it can be, especially if you’re a freelancer or part of a tiny group with few resources. That is why many businesses hire specialized market research firms to conduct the legwork for them. This has various advantages, including rigorous scientific data collection procedures and a thorough screening to ensure data security. It also raises a budgetary issue, as market research results, even basic white papers, and reports, are rarely inexpensive.  

Focus Groups

Focus groups can be a great way to collect psychographic data. It enables you to generate testing audiences based on your parameters (such as your company’s ideal consumers and defined buyer personas). The main disadvantage of focus groups is organizing them and collecting data from them. Organizing a focus group can take a significant amount of time, and that’s before you even pose your first query. However, there are no assurances that the data you collect will be useful or even reliable.  

Customer Surveys and Questionnaires

Customer survey questions are another approach for gathering psychographic data. This methodology has numerous advantages, including the fact that surveys and questionnaires are very inexpensive to conduct, may be sent electronically for participant convenience, and overall consumer familiarity with this kind of market research. However, survey questions have disadvantages, including a few strong ways to overcome low participant involvement and the potential unpredictability or imprecision of the data itself. Many individuals answer survey questions in an aspirational manner, which means they may not react completely honestly to certain questions, particularly those on more controversial subjects.  

Detailed Analytics Data

Using thorough analytics data to collect psychographic data may be the most time-efficient method. Because of the abundance of personal information available about its users, social networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter are perhaps more suited to the collection of psychographic data. Personal interests, for an instance, can be extremely significant psychographic statistics, as can data that some people may not be as honest about in a real-world situation like a focus group, such as political convictions.  

Conclusion

Psychographics is an intriguing and fascinating topic of research that may be quite valuable to marketers seeking a better understanding of what makes their market segments tick. Combining more personal psychographic data with conventionally factual marketing measurements can be challenging, but the potential benefits make it worthwhile to investigate.