Psychographics Guide: Definition, Examples & Marketing Strategies

This gives marketers deep insights into what drives purchase decisions. These let customers share their problems and goals openly. Decision criteria are what buyers see as essential in a product. Priority initiatives explain why buyers spend on solutions. Knowing these helps target marketing messages more effectively to match consumer preferences.

They gather data from representative samples and analyze it using advanced statistical methods. And by putting yourself in someone else’s shoes, you’ll build a connection that goes way beyond making a sale or achieving quarterly goals. That’s why many companies use demographic segmentation to divide their target market into groups based on gender, household income, social status, and location. Most companies understand that the more they know about their customers and consumer behavior, the more effective their marketing campaigns will be.

The mindset of a basketball player vs. a yogi vs. a runner are all different, and Nike's sub-brands and ads reflect those nuances. It might help to see how psychographic segmentation manifests in real brands and campaigns. The big picture here is holistic segmentation, using multiple lenses to see your customer fully. As you gather data, ensure you have user consent where required and that you're using data in accordance with privacy laws.

• It’s a good idea to start with broad questions about participants’ values and experiences.
• Core values are the fundamental beliefs that guide people’s decision-making.
• By combining both sets of data, you can garner a detailed picture of potential customers within the market, and those that may have interest in what you have to say but haven’t yet discovered your brand.
• Instead of sending them general tips, they send "The Early Bird" campaign.
• Digital relationships between prospects/customers and brands can often feel disconnected and inhuman.

Activities, Interests, and Opinions (AIO)

These insights guide product development and marketing strategies to ensure they’re relevant to a target market's desires and other internal motivators. Start with personality traits, lifestyle choices, values and beliefs, social status, attitudes, and the AIO framework covering activities, interests, and opinions for the most complete psychographic picture. Psychographic segmentation variables include personality traits, lifestyle choices, attitudes, values, interests, opinions, and social status, each revealing a different dimension of your customer’s inner world. Retailers and brands can utilize psychographic data to understand what drives consumer behavior and better serve their wants and needs. Psychographics is an exciting field of study in marketing that has benefited multiple brands in gaining more significant insights and reaching their target markets. Here’s how you can start gathering the data that reveals what drives your customers.

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These traits include lifestyle choices, consumer behaviors, social status, demonstrated interests, and similar categories. Join 140,000+ marketers and get a weekly expert-led newsletter focused on helping marketing teams overcome growth challenges, punch above their weight, and crush their competition. Parents who actively guide and encourage their kids’ technology use typically look for purchases that offer a balance of fun and educational value, and that offer ways to engage and play as a family.

Example: Using segmentation to build target market personas

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. As long as there is marketing to be done, the trusty audience profile will be there to help you reach the right audience. Use these content pillar examples to guide your brand’s approach to effective social media messaging. Understanding your audience is one thing — knowing what drives them is another. Create segmented campaigns that emphasize different values — then monitor what drives engagement, conversions or retention.

Checklist for credible, respectful psychographic research

Instead of basic outreach based on job titles, you can build targeted campaigns that address real pain points and purchase reasons. For example, two leads might share the same title and work at similar companies. If software buyers regularly attend SaaS events, they may respond well to deeper educational Can you explain psychographics in marketing? content and peer insights. A prospect identified as innovative will likely try new, unproven tools, making them a potential startup customer.

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The ultimate goal here is to develop a company culture of customer centricity, helping to keep the customer (and different customer types) at the forefront of all strategic decisions and in everyday operations. Think of each persona as a “best fit” characterization. One of the major pushbacks we experience when helping clients during buyer persona development is the view that each persona must perfectly describe an individual customer (or worse, perfectly describe every customer within the chosen segment). Any insights should be made available and descriptions of the segment/groups should be present and widely understood. Rather than the “Performance Seeker” segment, we have Emma the chemicals buyer, who happens to prefer to procure top-end services for a premium price. We call these characters personas and we need to build a picture of them before we start marketing to them.

Canva isn’t just a great tool; it also boasts a solid B2B content marketing strategy to support its business users. Even more, we produce downloadable templates so b2b buyer persona you can instantly get started with our tips and advice. These reports provide actionable data that guide business decisions and back up claims. Of course, we may be a little biased, but our content marketing strategy is first-rate. Check out these B2B content marketing examples to give you a jump-start. Once you’ve got businesses interested or even onboarded, the process doesn’t stop there.

• Ensure the messaging is aligned with the target audience’s needs and pain points.
• HubSpot's Make My Persona tool generates personas that are immediately usable across inbound marketing strategy, sales enablement, and product development — no reformatting required.
• When done well, lead generation aligns marketing and sales teams, ensuring both are targeting the same high-potential accounts.
• This approach works best when your target list is well-defined and your outreach is deliberate.
• Exclusive AI insights, search trends, and brand strategies, delivered to your inbox.
• Learn how lead generation fits into your inbound marketing strategy and easy ways that you can start generating leads for your company

Lead generation is the strategic process of identifying, attracting, and converting prospects into potential customers. At this time, the rep would up-level this customer to the appropriate sales team. Service-qualified leads are contacts or customers who’ve indicated to service teams that they’re interested in becoming paying customers. Let’s say I take an online survey to learn more about how to take care of my car.

B2B Buyer Persona Examples

Besides considering what your prospects sell or offer, be on the lookout for contextual information about how business is progressing. Take time to figure out what companies fit your buyer persona. Begin the B2B sales process by performing high-level market research to understand the current state of demand for your offering.

The Financial Reality: What Poor Persona Work Costs B2B Companies

Schedule a free consultation with Peter Geisheker of The Geisheter Group, Inc., explore how a Fractional CMO can build the persona research and go-to-market framework your business needs. A VP of Engineering approving a $150,000 software contract is thinking about technical fit — and about what happens to their credibility if the implementation fails. Update immediately after a major product pivot, a market shift, or a significant change in win/loss patterns. Schedule a free consultation with Peter Geisheker to discuss your B2B marketing strategy. If you don’t know where your personas research solutions independently, you cannot create content that reaches them before they’ve already shortlisted your competitors. Layer 4 helps you proactively dismantle objections before they derail a deal.

On the other hand, an Ideal Customer Profile defines the type of company that would most likely buy your product or benefit from your service. Marketing materials aimed at Ian would include detailed technical blogs, whitepapers, and invitations to webinars that delve into complex cybersecurity issues. A buyer persona is a semi-fictional representation of your ideal customer based on real data and some select educated speculation about customer demographics, behavior patterns, motivations, and goals. While they are complementary, understanding their differences can significantly enhance targeting and messaging strategies.

Strengthening your B2B buyer persona process

That’s right — social media marketing isn’t just for brands targeting individual consumers. It’s important to note that content marketing is most effective when brands align content with the various stages of the buyer’s journey. Target relevant categories and pain points within the brand rather than promoting products directly. They’re searching for a solution to their problem or a specific feature. A brand-new prospect who’s never heard of the business isn’t searching for its exact product.

93% of companies that exceed their lead gen and revenue goals also use B2B buyer personas to guide their marketing and sales prospecting strategies. Peter Geisheker is a Fractional CMO and founder of The Geisheker Group, Inc., specializing in B2B and B2B SaaS marketing strategy. Peter Geisheker is a Fractional CMO who helps B2B and B2B SaaS companies build the buyer persona research, messaging strategy, and go-to-market systems that drive sustainable revenue growth.

By focusing on attracting people already seeking solutions, businesses build genuine relationships that drive sustainable business growth. This can include ROI calculators that show impact in real time, short assessments that benchmark their business, or interactive tools that guide them toward the right solution. Reference past interactions, highlight relevant solutions, and provide actionable insights.

When prospects request a callback or download gated content, telemarketing sales teams can follow up promptly. These campaigns re-engage prospects who have shown interest but haven’t yet converted. Designed to identify and engage new prospects, these campaigns focus on booking meetings or demos. Different campaign types serve different stages of the buyer journey and business goals. Track average call length, common objections, and outcomes by persona or industry.

For instance, if you’re targeting an entry-level employee aged at a small business in North America, you can likely use social media to reach them effectively. Marketers can use demographic and psychographic data to identify individual prospects they’ll be marketing to. Then define the target audience — that is, the specific human prospect looking for the brand’s products or services.

Many B2B sales go down the gutter simply because salespeople fail to show what sets them apart from the competition — and what value they bring to the businesses who buy from them. In the past, salespeople could close B2B sales by pitching the benefits and features of their products. It will provide valuable insight that will aid the B2B sales process because you can speak to how your offering will help your prospect serve their customers.

Sprout Social’s software covers many industries and businesses of various sizes. Featured businesses represent your various target audiences, and the reader can easily identify themselves in at least one of the case studies. Let’s take a look at the various content types that you can use for your B2B content marketing strategies.