The Relevance of Psychographics in Digital Marketing
Karan Gupta, Head of Zirca Digital Solutions, talks about the importance of adding personality to digital marketing and how psychographics can transform a brand’s engagement with consumers from a short-lived transaction-based interaction, to a long-term association that drives results across the entire marketing funnel. Have a read!
For long, digital marketing has relied on the idea that knowing the age, gender, location and interests of consumers are enough to reach and engage with them.
Targeting them as a collective, brands have, in turn, take advantage of digital marketing to ‘convince’ these consumers that they need their products or services to meet their needs, in hopes that they will buy into the idea and eventually buy their product or service too.
In doing so, however, most brands have alienated themselves from the consumers and increasingly given them a feeling of being sold to each time they engage with the brand’s digital marketing campaigns.
The fundamental flaw of demographics-based digital marketing
Demographic targeting has typically relied on a one-size-fits-most approach. It has never had an insight into consumers, beyond a mere number that it reduces them to – as an age group, location, an interest group or a binary: male or female.
A consumer, however, is human after all and humans are fundamentally driven by their life experiences that define their personality, their biases, and their choices. It is what gives each one a unique individual mindset that impacts how they interact with everyone and everything in the physical as well as the digital world. It is what makes them human.
These mindsets also impact how they evaluate and choose products and services and engage with brands through their journey as a customer.
This means, while a collective of male or female consumers may be interested in a particular smartphone product, their individual reasons, motivations or the need to buy the product, in all likelihood would greatly differ from each other.
It would also impact how they go about discovering the product, evaluating the marketing strategy that pushes the product as a value proposition and consuming all the information associated with the product.
Digital marketing often fails to recognize this granular distinction, and therefore gives the audience a perception that they need a product or service rather than the product or service offering a solution to their real, individual needs.
In a digital world with over-abundance and hyper-consumption of information, this feeling of being sold to is greatly amplified, with audiences often completely disregarding or ignoring any digital marketing that even remotely looks like an incoming sales pitch.
Digital marketing with a personality
What if instead of merely treating the consumer as a number, digital marketing focused on deeper and more human aspects of consumers: their unique personality traits and mindsets.
While demographics barely touch the tip of the iceberg when it comes to tapping into the human aspect of the consumer, psychographics shifts the conversation from ‘who engages with the brand’, to the more important one: ‘why they engage with the brand’.
Psychographics analyze personality traits, beliefs, biases, interests and lifestyle choices. When applied to audience segmentation, psychographics helps determine how consumers unique personalities affect their choices when they engage with a brand, its content, and its advertising. It addresses the heterogeneity within the homogeneity of audience segmentation and gives a deeper insight into the consumer’s unique mindset and triggers that lead to interactions between them and a brand.
Armed with this insight, digital marketing can humanize itself to appeal to each of these unique mindsets. Instead of indulging in a barrage of marketing that overtly sells, digital marketing can turn to content to start conversations that last and engage through the entire consumer lifecycle.
Digital marketing experiences can be customized in a way that they stand out in a deluge of digital experiences with content that triggers engagement. With psychographic-based audience intelligence, it can reach and engage the right consumers more natively, across digital experiences of their choice, in a format that appeals to them the most.
When applied as a science through an intelligent marketing tool, psychographic segmentation can help brands determine how a brand’s content can appeal to a consumer’s unique mindset, through its narrative, choice of words, content format, and even the publisher destination that it appears on, in a way that it engages the consumer most effectively.
Taking a content-led approach, digital marketing can drive awareness among consumers that are searching for the brand or who are yet to discover the brand. Through intelligently created content, it can drive interest among those who want to know more about the brand.
Through continued conversations with different consumer mindsets, it can generate long-term brand association that puts a brand in the consideration set when a consumer goes from an intent to purchase stage.
When applied to digital marketing, psychographics can transform a brand’s engagement with consumers from a short-lived transaction-based interaction, to a long-term association that drives results across the entire marketing funnel.
Psychographics is not just relevant to digital marketing but can very well shape the future of digital marketing and how brands leverage it to engage with consumers.