Making a great product is one thing, but selling it is a behemoth on its own. Many people think that if you make a good enough product, people will naturally come to it. In the age of social media and increased internet use, that’s not the case.
However, let’s say that you’re doing everything correctly. You’re posting blogs that aim to educate people. You’re using the right hashtags on your social media posts, and people like and comment, but no one is buying or registering for your newsletter. In this situation, you’ll need to update your buyer persona and focus on psychographics instead of demographics.
What are psychographics?
When it comes to ourselves, we tend to think that we’re rational beings and buy with logic instead of emotion. However, the complete opposite is true. People buy with emotion first and then rationalize their decision.
Let’s say you’ve built a better VPN than everything else on the market. The ideal person to use your product is someone who has been hacked before and now needs a service to protect them from experiencing that again.
The ideal way to approach that is by focusing the narrative on how it happened and what hackers do and highlighting how your product will protect them in the future. That’s much better than writing an ad explaining VPN for dummies.
Psychographics represent your ideal customers’ goals, values, and beliefs. Combined with demographics, you can create the perfect buyer persona. Psychographics are the why, and demographics are the who.
How to profile a person based on psychographics?
Even though psychographics refers to the “why,” they need to be something measurable, and everything that is measurable can be improved. For starters, you can focus on interests, habits, and attitudes. These three things shape your buyer’s behavior, and poking each will give you a response. Let’s look at how that would look in practice.
For a VPN, the ideal person is somebody who has been hacked. The demographics could be male or female, aged 35-65, every marital status, and any income. If you go by demographics alone, this is too broad of a category to target. However, when you add the psychographics, things start to change.
The ideal buyer would be somebody dealing with cybersecurity issues, like spam ads and phishing emails. They are concerned with their device’s safety and don’t know what they did to be hacked. They want to browse the internet safely, but they don’t know how. They travel frequently and keep connecting to public Wi-Fi without knowing the risks.
Combining the two gives a specific person, and you start understanding their challenges. They’re not too tech-savvy, but you have the insight to target them in a different way than you did previously.
How to find data?
Everything that we mentioned above is pure speculation. However, getting accurate, hard data will help you make the most progress. If you have existing clients, you can interview them and pick their brains for a bit.
Take a few minutes the next time they purchase something, or call them to ask what they’re doing. What kind of movies do they watch? Do they go out on the weekends, and where? Are they buying into the hype during the holiday season? Are they traveling often?
Out of the blue, these questions might be a bit personal, but that depends on your relationship with the client. You can tell them why you’re asking them, and if they agree to answer, that’s perfect. If not, call up some of your friends similar to your ideal client and ask them the same thing. The results will give you a whole new perspective on your marketing campaigns.
The next thing you can do is monitor website analytics. You will see where your visitors are clicking and at which point they’re exiting the website. A person might think they never buy during sales, but a coupon might have brought them to your site. More often than not, people’s actions describe their personalities much better than their words.
Finally, find focus groups with people from diverse backgrounds and see how they talk about your brand. Think of a few thought-provoking questions and see how they respond when your solution to their problems is presented!