To write copy that converts, you need to understand your customers. One half of this is the demographic data that buyer personas bring to the table. The other half is psychographics—a study into your customers’ values, goals and purchasing habits. By combining psychographics and buyer personas, you can refine your marketing strategies and start to write copy that sells.
We’re going to walk you through what psychographics are, why they’re so important and how you can find this data. Let’s go!
Table of contents
- What are psychographics?
- Why are psychographics important?
- What goes into a psychographic profile?
- How can you find psychographic data?
- What can you do with psychographics and buyer personas?
What are psychographics?
Psychographics is the study and analysis of consumers according to their attitudes, goals and interests. By collecting this data, you can start to understand what motivates your customers’ buying behaviour. This will allow you to create detailed customer profiles that will inform your buyer personas and elevate your copy.
How do they differ from demographics?
Traditional buyer personas consist of mostly demographic data, such as:
- Age
- Gender
- Location
- Occupation
- Education
- Income
- Employment status
This is a great place to start with attempting to understand your target audience, but it fails to take into account what it is that influences their buying behaviour. This is where psychographics come into play.
Psychographics include:
- Personality traits
- Lifestyle
- Interests
- Habits
- Beliefs
- Values
- Buying behaviour
Why are psychographics so important?
If you look at your target audience solely through demographics, there’s a good chance that they’ll fall into very similar groups in terms of age range, education and so on. This fails to acknowledge the fact that they will undoubtedly have different personality traits, interests and values.
Your customers aren’t purchasing your product because they’re between the ages of 22 and 32, or because they graduated from university. Their purchasing decisions are driven by much more nuanced attributes than that. So, if you want to create copy that actually resonates with people, you need to acknowledge this uniqueness and individuality.
By using their psychographic data, you can get to the bottom of what it is that entices them to make a purchase, e.g., affordability, sustainability, uniqueness and so on. You can even determine what they value most and what they actively avoid—tweaking your copy so that you can guide them properly through the buying journey.
Once you have this data, you can leverage it to improve:
- Web copy
- Blog content
- Email marketing
- Advertisements
- Social media content
What goes into a psychographic profile?
☑️ Personality traits
A customer’s personality will shape the way that they view your website and interact with your copy. Someone who is impulsive is going to react differently to your sitewide promotion than someone who leans far more on the side of cautiousness. Similarly, a customer who views the world through pure logic is more likely to react to straightforward product features and benefits than the emotions-based copy favoured by those who are driven by their feelings.
Understanding these personalities will go a long way in helping you carefully cultivate a brand personality that has a lasting impact on your customers.
☑️ Interests
What are your target customers interested in? What do they get up to in their spare time? The answers to these questions will help you tweak your marketing campaigns so that your target audience can actually relate to them.
Whether your customers spend most of their time hiking, have an interest in architecture or simply love looking at pictures of cute dogs, you can leverage it all to ensure your marketing campaigns directly align with what your target audience is passionate about.
☑️ Lifestyle
Lifestyle is something that will have a strong impact on how you craft your copy and marketing campaigns. Are the majority of your customers single, or married with kids? Do they spend their weekends clubbing, or staying in? Do they prioritise comfort or fashion?
If you want to increase the chances of your audience giving your product/service a try, lifestyle segmentation is extremely important.
☑️ Beliefs and values
Now it’s time to look at how your customers view the world around them. Are they driven by concerns about the environment and sustainability? Are they looking for more inclusivity? Home in on these beliefs and values and you’ll be able to craft marketing campaigns that actually have an impact with your customers.
If you fail to take these beliefs and values into consideration when writing your copy and setting up your campaigns, you run the risk of alienating your customers with content that goes against what they believe in.
☑️ Buying behaviour and habits
How often do your customers make purchases? Are they in the habit of saving up or spending money as soon as it hits payday? Are they easily swayed by promotions and sitewide discounts? The answers to these questions will help you determine the frequency of your emails, promotions and general advertising.
How can you find psychographic data?
Reviews
Reviews aren’t just a great form of social proof that you can use to reel in customers, they’re also pretty handy for compiling valuable insights about your current and potential customers.
By examining what it is that customers are saying about you—a process also known as review mining—you can explore:
- What your customers liked about your product/service
- What your customers disliked about your product/service
- How you could have made their purchase better
Not got enough reviews of your own? Not to worry! Head on over to your competitors’ websites or review provider websites to mine theirs instead. Given that your target audience will be relatively similar, these insights will be just as important and will shed light on which areas you can improve to ensure you outperform your competitors.
You can also do this with social media platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and Reddit.
Surveys
Surveys can be a much more effective way to get specific information from your customers than reviews. You can focus on the areas you want to know more about, such as how they made their purchasing decision, why they chose you, what they value/don’t value and so on.
You can add a link to these surveys in the ‘thank you’ email that you send to customers who have recently made a purchase. All you have to do is ask them if they’d be willing to spend a few minutes providing vital feedback that will help you improve your service. If that doesn’t gain much traction, you can incentivise it the same way you would for reviews, e.g., “Fill out our short survey and get a 25% discount on your next purchase!”
Surveys are an inexpensive way to gather valuable psychographics and they’re easy to distribute. You are limited, however, by how much you can ask in one survey. If there are too many questions, your customers are likely to drop off. So keep it simple!
Interviews
If you’re looking for more in-depth information, you can’t go wrong with interviews. Though they can be more difficult to set up, the pay off can be immense. This gives you the opportunity to peer into your customers’ brains so that you can truly understand what motivates them.
In-person interviews are too difficult to schedule, not to mention all but impossible to sell to people—the incentives would have to be pretty grand to get people on board. The better alternative would be to set up telephone interviews with customers.
As you conduct these interviews, try to let your customers guide the conversation. Ask them to walk you through their buyer journey, from the moment they realised they had a problem to the point at which they decided you could be their solution to what it was that pushed them to make their purchase.
As they do this, ask them questions like:
- What pushed you to purchase our product/service?
- Did you consider other businesses before you came to us? If so, what was it that made us the better choice?
- How did we solve your pain points?
What can you do with psychographics and buyer personas?
👉 Analyse your data
As we recommend in most of our articles focusing on data-driven tasks, you should create a spreadsheet to help you analyse and track your psychographics. You can add columns for each aspect, such as:
- Origin of data (review mining, survey, interview)
- Positive feedback (features they like, business aspects they valued)
- Negative feedback (aspects of the buyer journey/features they didn’t like)
- Improvements (what you could do differently)
- Competitors they first considered (and why they picked you instead)
- Buyer journey information (how they found you/what gave them the nudge to make the purchase)
As you add your data to the sheet, keep an eye out for any patterns. If you’ve got a lot of data to trawl through, consider colour coding it to track overlapping trends.
👉 Segment your audience
Once you’ve got your emerging patterns, you can start working on segmenting your audience properly. With so many different values and motivations floating around, you need to segment your audience so that you can provide the right copy that will resonate with them.
Examples of audience segments include:
- First-time customers
- Returning customers
- Potential customers
- Customers switching brands
These segments will then allow you to:
- Determine the frequency of your marketing campaigns
- Define your target audience successfully
- Create content that targets each segment’s values/issues
👉 Update your personas
It’s now time to take the information you currently have from your existing buyer personas and combine it with your newly acquired psychographics to create much more nuanced buyer personas that are actually reflective of the people purchasing your product/service.
👉 Highlight your brand values
People respond more positively to brands that align with their own values. This is why you need to look at your audience segments to determine what it is they value most.
Are they passionate about…
- Sustainability?
- Diversity?
- Cruelty-free products?
- Fair pay?
You can then take these values and work on integrating them into your own brand values (as long as they’re actually relevant). You can display this on your homepage, landing pages or even in your social media bios.
👉 Optimise your copy
Not satisfied with your current conversion rates? Watch them skyrocket when you optimise your copy to better suit your target audience.
The psychographic data that you’ve recently gathered will be vital in helping you figure out which areas you need to adjust and focus on, such as:
- Tone of voice
- Features vs. benefits
- Imagery
- Target keywords
👉 Generate content ideas
Your newly acquired psychographic data will also work wonders for your content strategy. Though you’ll undoubtedly have central topics that you currently focus on in your blog, you’re bound to find new topics to tap into from your data.
Whether you’re generating content to target your customers’ pain points, worries or general topics of interest, your new insights will allow your engagement to reach new levels. (It’ll also make your brainstorming that much easier!)
👉 Run A/B tests
Instead of making changes to your copy and simply hoping it works, you can test your new ideas with A/B testing. What this means is that you’ll present two different versions of the same webpage to different segments of your audience.
With A/B testing, you can:
- Tweak your CTAs
- Switch up the placement of your brand values
- Try out new images
Once you know which version is most effective with your target audience, you can actually commit to making the changes.
And there you have it! You’ve got some actionable tips on how to use psychographics and buyer personas to level up your copy! For more tips and advice, keep your eye on the Supersede blog.
