How to Use Target Market Psychographics in ABM
Your target market's psychographic information reveals your target audience's personality traits, values, attitudes, lifestyles, etc. This is different from demographic data, which considers tangible and observable characteristics like location and age.
Having insight into the subtle traits of your audience gives you an edge while engaging with them on any platform. This is particularly true if you are analyzing a particular profile and you want to be sure it fits your ideal customer profile (ICP) to send them a message they will instantly resonate with.
Psychographic information plays a pivotal role in ABM account research. It helps you customize the journey for your prospect to maximize deal size and lifetime value.
In this article, let’s learn how you can collect and leverage psychographic data for account research.
What is Target Market Psychographic Segmentation?
Target market psychographic segmentation is a process that collects and groups the target audience based on their behavioral traits and personal preferences. This can include moral values, interests in hobbies, and lifestyles.
The process helps teams running account-based marketing (ABM) campaigns personalize their messages and customize their offerings to suit user needs and align with their social interests and ethical standards.
When used in combination with demographic information such as household income and job title, segmenting the target market becomes more accurate, leading to higher success rates in not only identifying high-intent prospects but also converting and retaining them.
Let’s quickly look at how demographic and psychographic segmentation differ to perform them efficiently.
Psychographic Segmentation vs. Demographic Segmentation
| Aspect | Psychographic Segmentation | Demographic Segmentation |
| Basis of Segmentation | Personality traits, values, lifestyles, interests, and psychological characteristics. | Age, gender, income, marital status, education. |
| Purpose | To understand the psychological and emotional motives behind purchase decisions. | To categorize the market by observable, quantifiable characteristics. |
| Use in Marketing | Crafting tailored marketing strategies that align with internal motivators. | Understand audience categories. |
| Data Collection | Obtained through focus groups, surveys with open-ended questions, and in-depth interviews. | Collected via straightforward questionnaires, census data, and databases. |
| Outcome | Creates detailed psychographic profiles that enable highly personalized marketing campaigns. | Results in a broad understanding of market segments for mass targeting. |
| Impact on ABM | Enhances the precision in targeting and messaging, significantly improving conversion and retention. | Useful for initial market sizing and segmentation. |
Why is Target Market Psychographic Segmentation Important?
We briefly explained earlier the benefits you can expect from target market psychographic segmentation. This begs the question: “What does it really do?”
Broadly, these four things:
- A more personalized approach while writing your welcome emails and outreach messages on social platforms like LinkedIn. This can lead to more open and engagement rates.
- Increased accuracy in finding and targeting your target audience. You will not waste weeks or months with a lead only to discover their problems and differences in expectations. Consequently, as you might guess, this can also boost your conversion rates.
- You can gain insights into the market, such as learning why a particular group behaves the way it does in a situation. This will help you guide your product or business development, which can lead to higher retention rates.
- An in-depth understanding of your audience can help you make better decisions more confidently. This will help you allocate your budgets more effectively and ultimately decrease operating costs.
How to Use Your Target Market’s Psychographic Data For ABM Account Research
All of the benefits and advantages we’ve discussed so far will become a reality when you incorporate the psychographic data of your target audience into your ABM account research strategy.
In this section, we will explore how psychographic data can help you find the right audience, write more personalized messages, create customized offers, and deliver tailored experiences to your prospects and customers.
1. Identify In-market Prospects
Psychographic data about your target audience can help you pinpoint prospects actively seeking your company's solutions. Psychological triggers related to values, aspirations, and pain points can also help you assess potential customers' readiness.
Plus, you can look at their social media activity to know whether they are decision-makers in their organization. These insights can help reduce the guesswork involved while classifying your prospects or leads for targeting.
You can get started by tracking how your audience interacts with your business and content across various touchpoints such as blogs, LinkedIn pages, newsletters, etc. The level of engagement can help you learn how emotionally ready they are to make a purchase.
2. Use Lookalike Modeling to Discover New Account Segments
Audience psychographic data can help you deepen your reach in the market and identify new niches to tap into. The lookalike method analyzes the psychographic profiles of your current customers to find new prospects with similar attributes.
This method may require you to use custom machine learning algorithms to find new high-intent leads that are ready to purchase accurately.
Hence, you ensure you are collecting the right amount of psychographic data in the correct format (more on below). If the psychographic profiles of your customers you’ve collected are accurate, the chances of your lead classification model performing well increase.
An easy way you can get started now is by using the currently available psychographic data of your target audience to run ads on platforms like LinkedIn, Google, and Facebook.
3. Build Your Ideal Buyer Persona
Building a detailed profile that contains all the psychographic and demographic data of your target audience makes it easier for your teams to plan marketing campaigns.
The psychographic details about your target audience can help you build a better buyer persona by building a comprehensive image of your potential customers, including factors like lifestyle, beliefs, and values.
As you might imagine, this process requires you to conduct surveys, interviews, etc., to learn more about your buyers’ preferences, ambitions, expectations, and challenges. Tools like SurveyMonkey or Typeform can help collect this information, which can then be used to draft a detailed buyer persona.
4. Define the Buying Journey
The buying journey outlines all the crucial checkpoints your customer goes through since they are a part of your audience. These checkpoints often represent their phase in the buyer journey, such as audience, lead, and prospect.
These are often marked by actions such as following your social media pages, signing up for your newsletter, and requesting a demo.
Psychographic data can help you define these phases more accurately by analyzing your potential customer's emotions and their interactions with your brand. When you are assured that a person in your conversion pipeline is a prospect or a lead, you can nudge them in the right direction.
These nudges could be sending an email with more educational content or messaging them on LinkedIn to try to schedule a meeting. This will move them faster through the buyer’s journey, increasing your pipeline velocity.
5. Identify Relevant Marketing Channels
Throughout the article, we have discussed different customer and audience touchpoints, such as social media platforms and websites. Targeting all of these platforms can be difficult to manage and resource-intensive, something not all businesses can afford.
Psychographic data of your target audience can help you recognize the platforms your prospects and potential customers are most likely to visit regularly. This can further help with budget allocation and decrease customer acquisition costs in the long run.
You can begin by extracting insights from previous campaigns and customer data to recognize your audience's psychological traits and emotional inclinations. It is a good practice to begin small and test your insights on shorter campaigns before scaling up to maximize learning and minimize inefficiencies.
By following these steps, businesses can leverage psychographic segmentation to reach and resonate with their target audience, ultimately driving more effective marketing strategies and better conversion rates in their ABM efforts.
The Different Types Of Psychographic Data
Psychographic data is available in various forms, each offering unique insights into a target audience's deeper subconscious behavioral makeup. Understanding these kinds of data points will help you build efficient workflows to collect and use that information.
- Personality traits: Characteristics like conscientiousness, extroversion, or openness to experience. This can help predict behavior and preferences, enabling the design of personalized marketing messages that resonate deeply with the individual’s character.
- Core values: These drive a person’s actions in the broader sense of life. Identifying these values, such as a commitment to sustainability or a preference for luxury and status, can help businesses align their products and marketing messages with what is most meaningful to their target market.
- Attitudes and beliefs: This type of psychographic data gives insights into how a person might react to a certain situation and directs their social and financial actions. Marketing strategies that acknowledge and reflect these attitudes can create a stronger emotional connection with the audience.
- Personal interests and hobbies: What a person does during leisure can tell you much about what they might respond to positively. For example, targeting a campaign for athletic wear for those who enjoy outdoor sports.
- Lifestyle choices: These show how a person lives their day-to-day life and carries out their everyday actions and chores, including their behaviors and habits related to health, fitness, entertainment, and shopping. Understanding these can help marketers propose products and solutions that seamlessly integrate into the consumer's lifestyle.
Each type of psychographic data provides a deeper understanding of a target market, enabling more effective and engaging marketing campaigns.
By leveraging these insights, businesses can ensure that their marketing efforts are seen and felt by their target customers, enhancing engagement and loyalty.
How to Mine Your Target Market’s Psychographic Data
We touched upon briefly earlier how essential it is to collect accurate psychographic data from your audience to get the benefits it promises. Now, let’s look at nine effective methods that can get you the best results:
Ethnography
Identify locations where your target market frequently visits to learn about the significance of those places. You might need to visit the place physically or participate in the culture to get a nuanced understanding of your potential buyers’ ethnography.
This will tell you about their values and ethics, which can help you connect with them personally and make your brand appear more relatable. Using certain terminology or respecting a particular heritage can play a key role in further warming up your prospects.
Interviews
Directly talking with your audience, leads, and customers to learn more about their pain points, expectations, and ambitions within your niche can help you uncover their emotional journey while using your products or services.
It is crucial to write user-centric open-ended questions that allow the interview participants to fully express their views. While planning such interviews, it is important to choose a diverse group to gather a variety of data, which can give you a more qualitative understanding of your target audience.
Surveys
Interviews can get resource-intensive as you will have to spend a lot of time with each of the participants. Additionally, if your target audience consists of busy professionals, scheduling an interview with them can be quite challenging.
Surveys, preferably with fewer explanatory questions, can be quite effective in this scenario as this requires minutes from your prospects, customers, etc. Moreover, the psychographic data collected using this method can be easily analyzed and visualized, leading to faster insights.
Third-party Data Collection
Purchasing data from reputable providers can offer comprehensive consumer behavior and trends insights. This method is particularly great for enterprises and businesses with a budget and who need actionable insights soon.
While seeking third-party psychographic data on your target audience, researching and choosing credible data providers that comply with data protection laws is pivotal. It can help you dodge legal penalties and public relations (PR) disasters.
Market Research Studies and Reports
Various research firms, such as Nielsen or Mintel, periodically conduct in-depth studies on different audience groups. These reports often provide a wealth of information about the personal preferences, choices, and stances of your target audience.
Although this can be a reliable source of psychographic data about the minds of your target audience, finding the right study is challenging. Always go for recent studies that have researched a niche similar, or ideally congruent, to yours.
Online Tracking
Monitoring online behaviors and patterns can provide insights into consumer preferences and online journeys. You can learn how people browse the internet and react when they interact with a certain type of content.
This can tell you what soothes your audience and what motivates them to act immediately. You can utilize cookies and tracking pixels on your website to analyze visitor behavior and preferences and ultimately mimic those triggers to set off a desired behavior.
Social Listening
This involves monitoring conversations across social media to understand public opinion and topics of interest. The questions people ask in public forums and communities can also uncover your audience's psychological traits.
Of course, visiting each social media page to gather insightful psychographic data about your target audience that can shape your ABM account research efforts is next to impossible considering the sheer volume of information. Tools like Brandwatch or Hootsuite Insights can help you track mentions, hashtags, and trends related to your brand and industry.
Social Media Analysis
Analyzing interactions and engagements on social media platforms to gather consumer interest and behavior data. Looking at which kind of content your audience engages with well and which ones they prefer to scroll past can help you reach them effectively.
Start by posting various kinds of content to collect social media engagement data. Then, employ analytics tools provided by social media platforms to assess your followers' demographic and psychographic characteristics.
Government Data
Teams can access databases from government agencies like the U.S. Census Bureau to understand broader demographic trends that can be cross-referenced with psychographic traits.
Publicly available datasets are often diverse and are critically cross-examined by various regulatory bodies. Furthermore, you can get data from other researchers, which can further deepen your understanding of your audience.
Embracing Psychographics: The Future Of Targeted ABM Strategies
Leveraging psychographic data for ABM account research enhances the precision of your marketing campaigns and deepens your connection with your target market.
Throughout this article, we've explored the pivotal role of psychographic segmentation in identifying the core values, attitudes, and behaviors that define your potential customers. This nuanced understanding allows for the creation of highly personalized marketing messages that resonate profoundly, improving engagement and conversion rates.
We've detailed various methods for mining this data, from surveys and interviews to advanced techniques like ethnography and social listening. Implementing these insights can significantly refine your marketing strategy, aligning it more closely with your target audience's specific preferences and needs.
Finally, staying updated about modern marketing methods, industry standards, and audience preferences is crucial to making the right adjustments as you approach prospects to convert them.
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