During the Jurassic ages of marketing, marketers would have monologues with their customers using TV, radio etc. and the only form of targeting they could do was based on whatever data they had about whether the audience is tuning in to these shows. But times have changed and now marketers have immense amount of information about their customers, owing to the amount of digital footprint left behind. Psychographic targeting is a by-product of this change.
Thanks to social media, marketers can now use psychographic targeting to target their marketing messages in a highly specific and targeted manner. Psychographics is the study of consumer interests, lifestyles, likes, dislikes and if often combined with geographic and demographic information in order to create a detailed consumer profile. All the information that marketers need to market to their audiences is already available in the form of Facebook status messages, pages liked, hashtags used, videos uploaded and liked (YouTube), groups joined (LinkedIn), topics followed (Quora) and so on. Valuable insight can be gleaned from this information which can be used to segment customers and target content to them using social PPC campaigns and organic social interactions.
The beauty of psychographic targeting is that you can get as specific as you want. For instance, someone who just vented about wanting a vacation who shares pictures of beaches in Hawaii, might be served with ads about a limited period offer to a trip to Hawaii.
All buyers have an emotional relationship to their buying decisions, and this emotional attachment is higher when it comes to B2B buying (Source: Google and CEB). Identifying and tapping into this emotion is one of the most interesting opportunities available to all B2B marketers. By building emotional connections with their customers, B2B marketers can drive important purchase outcomes like purchase intent and pricing power. The trick for B2B marketers is finding an accurate way of identifying these emotions. And this is where Psychographic targeting comes into play.
Another example, your target segment consists of mid-level marketing professionals from Fortune 500 companies with about 2 to 5 years of experience. Ms. X who falls right into that segment (found via LinkedIn) vents about how difficult it is to migrate to the new marketing automation solution. By empathizing and helping Ms. X find a solution to her problem by giving her a free copy of your white-paper/article titled “Marketing Automation Migration can be tough: Consider these tips from Experts”, followed up by a free trial to your solution will help sail Ms. X to your side.
Psychographic targeting using information from social media channels can help marketers with layers and layers of information needed for accurate customer profiling. As people share more and more information about their lives and lifestyles online, this tactic is only going to become more and more important.
What are your views? Do you use psychographic targeting to reach customers? Let us know your experiences in the comments section
