Understanding your target demographic is crucial to successful marketing in the B2B industry. Campaigns rely on strong data surrounding consumer behavior. Rather than reaching out to a broad audience, segmentation can make sure messaging gets to the right leads at the ideal time.
Creating a marketing segmentation plan can help jumpstart these efforts. There are several ways to segment your audience including firmographics, demographics, geographics, behavioral and psychographics.
Psychographics for B2B marketing may be a huge key to helping your company remain competitive within your industry. By separating your clients and creating outreach based on lifestyles, relevant information about your products reaches qualified leads to push them into your sales funnel.
Read on or use the links below to jump ahead to learn more:
- What are Psychographics?
- Breaking Down Types of Psychographics
- The Importance of Audience Segmentation
- Gathering Psychographic Data
- Approaching Psychographics in B2B Marketing
- Leveraging Psychographics to Optimize Marketing
- Key Takeaways
What Are Psychographics?
Audiences can be segmented into several different categories. By focusing on psychological traits like lifestyle, personal interests and opinions, outreach will target consumers based on their psychographics.
This information looks deeper into the behavior of the target consumer. The goal of psychographic segmentation is to gain valuable insight into the lifestyle and preferences of your ideal audience. While it seems like a great way to categorize leads, this information is not always as obvious as demographics and may require data discovery.
Having this type of understanding allows your marketing team to create content that resonates with buyers. This will encourage engagement and allow for the development of a strong customer relationship.
Psychographics can also help uncover new leads. When identifying the audience and targeting your outreach, marketing can focus on sourcing new leads who follow similar behavioral patterns. Understanding what motivates your customers is important, but psychographics can also be paired strategically with demographics.
Simply put, demographics explain who is buying your products while psychographics break down the factors behind the purchase. Utilizing this data together for segmentation can help narrow your targeted audience even further
For example, demographics might include gender or religion, while psychographics look at the buyer’s habits. Not all individuals in the same demographic group are motivated by the same factors, which is why combining behavioral traits is helpful. This data allows your marketing team to round out the ideal buyer persona as well as segment audiences based on personal preferences.
Along with segmentation, psychographics can provide valuable insights to inform your ideal customer profile. This big-picture strategy helps your company make overarching decisions around marketing, sales and product development.
The customer profile is created by assessing your product and the value it adds to the market, as well as defining ideal customer characteristics. By understanding the psychographics of your clients, this profile can be tailored to reflect real consumer behavior.
This data allows your organization to see the ‘why’ behind each purchase. Lifestyle data helps determine how customers are choosing to buy products and what motivates the purchase. This type of information can play a large role in any product updates or future rollouts.
Breaking Down Types of Psychographics
It’s important to realize there is a difference between behavioral data and psychographics within the B2B industry. Behavioral segmentation relies heavily on product and content engagement. Essentially, this category looks at the way customers are interacting directly with your brand.
Psychographics are still informed by consumer behavior, but it’s more about lifestyle choices. Rather than tracking product usages, this type of analysis looks at how consumer values and habits affect buying decisions. The daily actions of customers are studied to better understand what type of person may benefit from the solution your company provides.
The goal of this segmentation is to target leads who will be most receptive to your outreach. It can help foster strong customer relationships based on emotions and shared values. This can lead to stronger brand loyalty and potentially increase return on investment (ROI) by encouraging repeat purchases.
When gathering this data, it’s important to have a grasp on which factors fall under psychographics. Below are a few examples to help your team get started.
Lifestyle
This includes how a consumer fits into society and where their values lie. Characteristics for this category may include relationship status, type of occupation, or homeowners vs. renters. This data helps segment people based on what stage of life they are in.
Habits and Opinions
People tend to stick to their habits rather than breaking them. This is important for marketing to understand since many customers may have specific habits when it comes to content engagement and the sales cycle.
Understanding the makeup of a customer’s daily life can have a significant impact on advertising choices. For example, if your ideal customers prefer to do product research via social media rather than company websites, outreach can be tailored to better accommodate this type of engagement.
Behaviors
While segmentation can be categorized on behavior alone, it can also work in conjunction with psychographics. These characteristics can be studied through product usage, content engagement and purchase history. This data can help segment outreach by anticipating a timeline for when your leads may be most interested in making a purchase based on their prior actions.
Social Class
Economic status influences purchasing behavior. While social class may also be a self-identification for some people, this information does provide valuable insight for purchase capacity.
Personality Traits
Understanding the types of personality your products attract helps your marketing team develop content that will resonate with your leads. Not all of your customers will have the same personality traits, so this type of segmentation can make sure content reaches the right person. This can help increase engagement across campaigns.
Interests
Similar to personalities, a person’s interests can help steer the direction of your marketing. Segmenting leads and sending outreach based around clients’ interests helps form a strong connection with your brand. This can also help your marketing team avoid sending out fluff to leads.
Using the data found around client interests can make sure your outreach is relevant to the receiver.
The Importance of Audience Segmentation
Your marketing department’s ROI benefits from data-driven campaigns that encourage customer engagement. Before a lead can enter into the sales pipeline, it must be qualified and segmented into the proper group for continuous outreach. These efforts help nurture leads and eventually guide them through the buyer journey.
The goal of marketing efforts is more than just landing a sale. The department should be focused on creating lasting relationships to encourage repeat sales and promote brand loyalty. It can cost up to five times more to acquire a new customer compared to the cost of retaining an existing one.
By using psychographics to tailor content and segment target audiences, marketing can help strengthen client relationships. Using this segmentation helps break audiences down into more specific groups. Broad outreach may feel impersonal and doesn’t provide a unique call-to-action based on the customer’s current needs.
Instead, using psychographic segmentation ensures content is personalized and helps set attainable next steps based on a lead’s preferences. Overall, audience segmentation should help improve the relationship between leads and your company.
Psychographics help by providing a deeper understanding of customer needs and driving communication. By shifting the conversation to focus on customer interests, your teams will be better equipped to sell the product.
Sales pitches and marketing contact can feature ways your product is able to improve your customer’s life. Psychographic data allows for accurate examples of these improvements to be used based on lifestyle and habits.
This data can also help improve overall product features. By understanding why customers are using your product, features and updates can be created to meet their needs. Psychographics also allow your product to be customized based on different buyer personas, allowing for more options to choose from.
Gathering Psychographic Data
Once you have a grasp on the benefits of psychographics, it’s time to start gathering data to implement this strategy. While it may seem like a daunting task to try and understand the motivations of potential new leads, there are several approaches that can jumpstart the process.
Speak To Current Clients
You already have existing customers who use your product, so understanding their lifestyle is a great place to start gathering psychographic data. This approach allows your team to decide how many customers you’d like to speak with to gather this information.
First, make a list of your top clients. If you have a strong relationship with them already, getting to know more about them is a good way to figure out what your ideal client profile looks like. Schedule a time to speak with them, or create questions you’d like to ask next time they reach out.
These questions should focus on their lifestyle, hobbies and interests. They can be as simple as “What did you do this weekend?” or “What does a typical evening after work look like for you?” This can help create conversations around their lifestyles and provide insight into what motivates them.
Going further than a handful of top-tier clients, your marketing team can create a customer survey and send it out for feedback. If you choose to take this approach, try to be as transparent as possible with the recipients. Explain that your company is trying to better understand their clients to help provide the best experience possible.
Try Focus Groups
This is a way to gather unbiased feedback from participants that are not immediately familiar with your product and services. While this group does not include current customers, it is important to keep the sample size as close to your target audience as possible. Use demographic information from clients to model your focus group.
Create a questionnaire that helps provide the type of feedback you want to gather. For example, make sure that the questions you are asking focus on the participants’ lifestyle rather than just your product.
Utilize Third Party Research Companies
While handling the research on your own can help gather insight from current clients, consider sourcing this part out to a third-party company. Market research companies can focus on similar demographics to your target audience. This allows your sample pool to widen while still gathering relevant information.
Use Website Analytics
Content engagement can tell you a lot about a person. Information can be gathered from the type of content that gets the most clicks, the time of day purchases typically occur, and what website forms gain the most traction.
Data can be collected regarding the usage of discount codes to help segment those who prefer a bargain deal. Seeing which blog posts have the most visitors can determine what type of people are using your products and which areas they are searching for more information about.
If you’re not already utilizing the data provided by website analytics, now is a great time to get started. Software like Leadboxer can help track this type of engagement across platforms, while simultaneously uncovering new leads from website traffic.
Approaching Psychographics in B2B Marketing
This strategy should focus on motivating customers based on their current needs. Segmentation allows you to run multiple campaigns simultaneously while making sure content is tailored to the intended audience. Your team should work to provide any resources needed to complete a purchase.
Find ways to incorporate the customer’s priorities into all of the content they receive from your company. For example, if exercise is one of the main hobbies of your target audience, publish a blog talking about how daily exercise can lead to productivity at work. If possible, you could include pictures on social media that display these hobbies in a way that relates to your product.
Make sure the call-to-action is customized to encourage engagement from each audience. This can be as simple as including language that reflects their interests.
When planning outreach and applying psychographics, your team needs to determine which factors are going to segment the recipients. There are a multitude of options to choose from, so it’s important to narrow the scope before planning a campaign.
Leveraging Psychographics to Optimize Marketing Efforts
This strategy goes further than simply segmenting your email campaign lists. It can be used across your website and all social media channels. This content will help reach new leads, nurture relationships and encourage brand loyalty from existing customers.
Social Media
Chances are, your marketing team is posting content on social media platforms like Instagram and TikTok, as well as running targeted ad campaigns. Psychographics can help determine how to develop content that resonates with your intended viewers.
On social media posts, work to make content that goes further than a sales pitch. Not every post needs to invite a sale. Some of these posts can be educational, or may provide a behind the scenes look at your organization. This type of content can be used to address the lifestyle of your audience without overdoing the promotional material.
Utilize social media as a way to organically grow relationships with your target audience. Becoming a thoughtful leader within your industry that provides content based on psychographics can help promote brand loyalty and boost engagement. Your customers will be able to come to your social media channels for advice and share this content across their own channels when it aligns with their values.
Blogs
Using the blog space on your page should be a priority for your marketing team. This content is crucial for multiple reasons including SEO, website engagement and providing valuable information to customers.
This is a great way to create content that is tailored to specific groups of customers. Using psychographic data can help your team determine blog topics that will resonate with your leads. This helps your brand showcase your product and provide information that is relevant to your industry.
When creating these posts, find ways to incorporate psychographics into the title to immediately draw readers into the piece. Rather than simply writing about the ways your product is useful, tie it into your audience’s interests. For example, if your target customer works in marketing, including a piece about the “Top 10 Ways Lead Generation Can Improve Your B2B Marketing” is a great way to encourage engagement.
Testimonials
Encouraging buyers to purchase your product through other user’s experience helps build trust. If you have clients who are similar to your targeted lead audience, use their positive feedback to showcase the solutions your company has to offer.
This content can be created for different stages in the customer journey, which helps buyers who may be on the fence about making a final decision. Not only should this information discuss how satisfied current customers are, it should also tie into the lifestyle of your segmented audience.
Continuing with the marketing example from above, show your leads how the product has helped customers streamline their marketing efforts and increase ROI. This will entice prospects to either make a purchase or reach out to your sales team for more information on next steps.
Customer Appreciation
While psychographics can be used to uncover new leads, it can also help strengthen current relationships and encourage a continued partnership with your customers. Buyers who have already purchased your product will be more interested in remaining with your company when they feel appreciated.
Using psychographics can provide insight into the lifestyles of customers and shine a light on their current needs. This gives an opportunity for your brand to showcase how well they understand their clients.
Consider sending out appreciation gifts that are relevant to your customer’s interests instead of something with generic branding. The extra effort will illustrate the values your company has in common with these clients.
Key Takeaways
Audience segmentation can play a vital role in successful B2B marketing. Rather than simply grouping customers by demographics, using psychographics can provide valuable insight into the lives of your target audience.
This strategy is a great way to uncover new leads, strengthen existing relationships, and build trust as a key player in your industry. It can also work well with other types of segmentation to help build out your ideal client profile and inform the buyer journey.
Before incorporating this into your marketing efforts, it is important to have a grasp on the different categories of psychographics to determine which will benefit your audience the most. These include personality type, lifestyle and habits. Each can be utilized to create targeted content that encourages engagement.
Make sure to set aside the time and resources needed to successfully gather psychographic data. This can include customer surveys, focus groups or outsourcing to a third-party company. Most importantly, continue gathering this data as your customer base and list of leads grows.
Psychographics may change as your product continues to develop, and it is helpful to have up-to-date data to drive marketing efforts. Track website analytics to have accurate data that provides valuable insights into consumer behavior.
Consider using software like Leadboxer to uncover and qualify new leads as they interact with your site. This can help segment potential leads into audience groups as soon as they are introduced to your brand.
Allow this data to help inform your marketing content and create pieces that provide more than a sales pitch to prospects. Utilize social media channels and blog posts to create organic connections with customers based on their hobbies and interests. Use this content as a way to tie in your product or services with their lifestyle, but make sure the pieces aren’t full of fluff.
Make sure calls-to-actions are personalized. This encourages engagement from customers and can help your marketing team qualify leads by understanding where each prospect is within the sales journey.
Overall, psychographics for B2B marketing can help elevate your campaigns to the next level, as well as increase your ROI. Use these strategies as a way to nurture relationships and promote brand loyalty.
To begin incorporating psychographics and segmentation into your lead generation process, check out Leadboxer for a free trial!