By: Sammy Harrison, Bay Tek Entertainment

As we all know, demographics provide vital information for marketers and researchers. It’s statistical data that tell us important information about the population we’re targeting; things like, age, gender, race and income. It’s crucial for marketers to know these things about the people they’re targeting. But this statistical information is somewhat limiting when building audience profiles. How, as marketers, do we differentiate our messaging so that what we’re saying really resonates with the people we’re targeting?

Psychographics is the study of consumers based on their activities, interests, and opinions (AIOs). It focuses on understanding cognitive aspects of an audience’s personality; such as emotions, values, and attitudes. More qualitative in nature, psychographics shed more light on the “why” of consumer behavior. What drives them? What matters to them? And conversely, what doesn’t matter to them? How do they spend their time and money? What are their pain points? What gets them off the couch and into the store/restaurant/FEC?

Facebook has developed some great tools for marketers based on psychographics.

  • Facebook’s Interest-Based Targeting
    • When advertising on Facebook, marketers set up audience profiles. And within these profiles, they can choose between various interests that Facebook’s algorithm has deemed popular enough to have its own categories. These interests are based on Facebook users’ likes and interests, apps they use, pages they’ve liked, and more. Adding more than one interest will target people with at least one of them so you’ll make your reach broader.
  • Facebook’s Behavior-Based Targeting
    • Behaviors allow you to target people by purchase history, events they like, personal anniversaries, etc. This data is gathered by Facebook analyzing many factors and also using external data sets. As an example, you can target people currently traveling or planning their next trip – priceless if you’re in the hotel or event booking market.

Psychographic data creates more of a personality to the person you’re targeting when you’re curating content, making your messages more personal, more compelling and therefore more effective. When psychographics along with demographics are available, a marketer is unstoppable. Now we can create a customer profile that can be tailored to be as effective as possible. We know their stats, but we also know more about their activities, interests and opinions, so our messaging can be curated to resonate with them on an emotional level. And, as we all know, that is key, because our buying decisions are largely based on emotion.

Graphic source: CB Insights