Psychographics Killed the Demographics Star

Hmmm. Sounds like a song I once heard?

Technology, shopping and doing business have evolved rapidly in the past 10 years - and so too has marketing. Integrated marketing strategies focus on ensuring that all customer interactions with your brand are consistent. Combine this with Psychographics and what you have is a brand that resonates with your ideal customer on every marketing channel and through every device.

Utilising demographics alone to target age, gender, location and job simply doesn’t speak to your customer on a level that engages with their inner being.

INTRODUCING PSYCHOGRAPHIC SOCIAL MEDIA AUDIENCE TARGETING

WHAT IS PSYCHOGRAPHIC TARGETING?

To quote wikipedia, “Psychographics is the study of personality, values, opinions, attitudes, interests, and lifestyles.“https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychographic

Psychographic Targeting is therefore creating content which resonates with your audience on a personal level. In order to reach the audience, we leverage the massive amounts of data that have accumulated in social networks and digital advertising platforms. This then allows us to pin-point the eyeballs who will see our content with awesome precision.

Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Youtube and Google all have our marketing focus as of August 2015, because these channels have the most users and the most data. We absolutely love Pinterest and Instagram, but tactics differ for these channels so we’ll leave these for another discussion.

HERE’S HOW TO BEGIN BUILDING YOUR STRATEGY:

1. Develop one persona profile for your ideal customer.
   1. You may create additional persona profiles for alternate ideal customers and influencers, however it is best to start with one first.
2. Develop some ideas for content that align with your and your customers core values and for different stages in your marketing and sales funnel.
3. Create a marketing plan that indicates which channels you’ll share your content on.
4. Create a current marketing calendar that details when your content will be created, published and shared. NB. Be specific down to the time of day.
5. Build your target audience on your social channels of choice. Let’s use Facebook as an example.
6. Share your content on Facebook.
7. Create an Ad and pay to boost / sponsor the reach of your content using Facebook Ads Manager.
8. Steps beyond this need to focus on your sales funnel again. So make sure your blog has a sales purpose.
9. Another stage beyond this post today is to setup Google and Facebook retargeting.

WHERE TO BEGIN WHEN CREATING A PERSONA PROFILE

The simple answer is, “With your existing customers.” This can be done by asking your existing ideal client questions about themselves. Such as:

• Interests
• Dislikes
• Married or Single
• Kids or no kids
• What kind of car do they drive and why
• What do they like to do on weekends
• How often do they travel and where is their favourite holiday destination
• Where is their next ideal holiday destination
• What is one of their most favourite material possessions and why
• Do they watch sport
• Who is their favourite team(s)
• Do they have any life habits which they wished more people shared
• Who is their favourite author
• What is their favourite movie or type of movie
• Who is their favourite band
• Do they listen to radio, read magazines, watch TV and when
• Who is their favourite celebrity, entrepreneur or thought leader
• What is their favourite restaurant and why
• What is the ideal time of day to call them regarding business
• What is the ideal time of day to call them regarding personal things
• What devices do they own and when do they use them
• What social channels do they use personally
• What social channels does their wife, mother, father, brother or sister use regularly
• Why do they love doing business with you

Some of you might feel this is challenging but you can get creative with how you approach your customers. Send them an email survey for a gentle approach or if you can - take them to lunch to discuss their interests. And if you run out of options, bribe them. One important note though; don’t ambush your client. Make sure to give them a heads up first.

HOW DO I CREATE A TARGET AUDIENCE ON FACEBOOK?

Facebook is constantly updating their application so I don’t really know how long these screenshots are going to remain current, but I hope this helps for you for at least the remainder of 2015.

STEP 1. ACCESS YOUR BUSINESS PAGE AND CLICK THE BUSINESS MANAGER LINK

STEP 2. CLICK “ADS MANAGER” IN THE LEFT MENU OF THE BUSINESS MANAGER OVERVIEW

STEP 3: SELECT “AUDIENCES” FROM THE TOOLS DROP DOWN MENU

STEP 4: CREATE AN AUDIENCE. CHOOSE FROM CUSTOM AUDIENCE, LOOKALIKE AUDIENCE OR SAVED AUDIENCE.

WHAT IS A FACEBOOK CUSTOM AUDIENCE?

The most popular Facebook custom audiences are Customer List and Website Traffic.

WEBSITE TRAFFIC

This list is based on people who have already visited your website and can be tracked via a cookie. Once you have setup a tracking pixel on your website and facebook starts receiving data for people who have visited your website, you can then ads to this list.

This is digital stalking at it’s finest and admittedly can and does freak some people out. One of the best things it does do, is keep that intention to do business with you alive for longer. So for those who are taking some time to “think it over,” they’re not going to be too freaked out and will absolutely keep you in their thoughts for days or even weeks after they’ve visited your site.

CUSTOMER LISTS

Customer lists are so awesome for retargeting customers who you have already done business with, or that have become part of your email marketing subscription database and/or have made an enquiry or purchased something from your website.

For B2B marketing, the team at MeMedia love this type of list because if we are looking to engage with somebody on Facebook that we have a business email address for, it’s highly likely they are either a decision maker or influencer for their business because there is no differentiation between a work and personal email address. Alternatively, they could have a profile created just for work. This means that they will more than likely be using the same business email on Facebook that they’ve used to sign up to business related newsletters.

For B2C marketing, the same theory applies. If they’ve used a personal email to sign up to a newsletter or to enquire on your website about your product or service, then they’re also more inclined to have used that same email address for Facebook.

CREATE A SAVED AUDIENCE

This is definitely the most popular Facebook Custom Audience to create. This is where you will build one of your unique customer persona’s based on research performed while creating your marketing strategy.

Understanding who your ideal customer is prior to creating a Saved Audience will save you plenty of headaches and time.

As you can see, demographics like location, age, gender and income can still play a part in developing your audience, however sometimes it is better to leave out any one of the audience targeting parameters like (gender, income or age) to allow you to test different levels of reach.

One challenge we sometimes find for Australian audiences is that we simply don’t have the required level of reach to enable an ad to run when getting too specific. So it’s important to be creative and test multiple audiences that still target your specific persona but utilise different parameters.

MeMedia wish you all the best when creating your persona profile and audience. If you get stumped, please give us a call.

HERE’S HOW MEMEDIA START THE PROCESS OF DIGITAL MARKETING YOUR BUSINESS.

MeMedia prefer to follow a simple process centred around you, our client. MeMedia like to:

1. Get to know each other and who your ideal client is
2. Get to know (analyse) your existing website and what is required to make this perform
3. Discuss and create a strategy
4. Execute the strategy
5. Communicate regularly