What Are Psychographic Surveys?

Convenience-focused customers see messaging around time savings and simplicity. Wellness-focused customers see messaging around nourishment and ingredient transparency. Performance-focused customers see content around fuel and athletic results.

This approach helps teams spend smarter, connect faster, and design strategies that align with what truly motivates their audiences. When you understand why people buy—not just who they are—you can allocate resources, tailor creative, and deliver experiences that resonate with each segment. Psychographic segmentation helps you engage different audience mindsets in ways that make the biggest impact. When you understand those underlying motives, you can focus on spend, refine messaging, and design products that truly connect. Alexandra Samuel is a tech speaker and data journalist who creates data-driven reports and workshops for companies around the world. Marketers are used to thinking and speaking in demographics, since slicing a market up by age, gender, ethnicity and other broad variables can help to understand the differences and commonalities among customers.

Psychographic profiles of target audience segments help companies create relevant messaging for each segment. Unlike most other forms of segmentation, psychographic data explores the unique personal factors which drive consumers’ decisions. When combining these insights with demographic data, you’ll be able to craft better offers, more persuasive campaigns, and, ultimately, grow your business. This competitor analysis helps you gain key insights into your potential customer base and who you’re up against. While the former looks at people’s psychological motives, the latter focuses on statistical regularities among groups—such as age, gender, and location. After using quantitative marketing research to identify psychographic segments, many marketers and researchers will follow up with qualitative research (e.g., focus groups and one-on-one interviews) with members of each psychographic segment.

As a bonus, you’ll have a head start on data collection if you’re continuously collecting customer insights. A single focus group may cost anywhere from $4,000 to $15,000. And psychographic research helps you uncover those values. These tailored touchpoints can turn more people into loyal customers. Your marketing funnel is a simplified approach for how people become aware of your brand and turn to customers.

Psychographic vs. demographic segmentation

Psychographic data is knowledge about a person’s interests, values, attitudes, and personality traits that helps to create a profile of their interests, worldview, and potential motivators. In your campaign, you might choose to include photos of people of all sizes who are equally healthy or on the path to healthfulness. Other potential interests include their taste in music, shows, and books.

However, no one is clicking through and you're losing potential leads.

One-on-one interviews and focus groups allow customers to describe their experiences in their own words. When you need to dig deeper into why people buy, or when survey results raise new questions, qualitative research adds the human context that quantitative data can’t capture. Surveys reveal broad patterns at scale, but interviews help you understand the motivations, barriers, and emotions behind them.

When you’re done, you’ll know exactly what psychographics are and how they’re being used to transform and target digital marketing to a degree of accuracy that was once unheard of. After all, just imagine how much easier it would be to sell your products and services if you could predict people’s passions, fears, likes, and dislikes. See how Salesmate helps teams improve alignment, simplify operations, and scale with more visibility and control. Yasir Ahmad is the content editor at Salesmate who adds the finishing touch to the blogs you enjoy, turning CRM talk into stories you’ll actually want to read.

Other values include prioritizing organic foods or fabrics or choosing businesses that employ union labor. A psychographic profile may include personality traits, such as openness to new experiences, conscientiousness, and a tendency toward introversion or extroversion. Rather than focus your market research exclusively on demographic factors—objective characteristics like age or geography—you can use psychographic profiles to map the more subjective aspects of personality. Businesses analyze psychographic data to segment and target customers. Psychographics is a field of study that tracks the psychological characteristics that influence people’s behaviors and decisions.

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While these aren’t exhaustive examples, they do highlight just how much more detail psychographics provide than demographics. At the core of both psychographics and demographics is data. Demographics rely on general facts about people, such as where they live, their gender, their age, relationship status, and so on. In short, demographics describe who consumers are, while psychographics explain why they behave the way that they do.

One way to gather psychographic data is through market research tools with audience analysis features, such as psychographic data Semrush’s Market Explorer. Now we’ve identified seven different types of psychographic data that can support your marketing efforts, let’s look at how to gather this information. Plus discounts on premium features to foster loyalty and encourage referrals from committed users. For example, a fitness app might offer free workout guides to new users to spark interest. Core values are the fundamental beliefs that guide people’s decision-making. Knowing what consumers are passionate about helps your business develop products and marketing strategies that cater to their preferences.

• This targeted approach increases the likelihood of converting potential customers into loyal customers.
• Compile the data you have already so you know where to focus your energy.
• This is important because it allows you to create a far more robust customer profile and helps “scratch your audience’s” itch when marketing.
• They help you identify key characteristics of your target market, giving you a clear picture of who you should be targeting.

He suggested to use of non-demographic segmentation to help companies better predict consumer behavior, to improve product development, distribution, pricing and advertising. It complements demographic and socioeconomic segmentation, and enables marketers to target audiences with messaging to market brands, products or services. Ali’s research focuses on the behavioral foundations of organizations and management and explores how psychological interventions can be applied within the (digital) workplace to increase employee well-being and organizational performance. Hult offers a range of highly skills-focused and employability-driven business school programs including a range of MBA options and a comprehensive one year Masters in International Business. Insurance companies, on the other hand, use predictive analytics to better align insurance premiums with specific risk profiles.