If you’ve ever created a targeted Facebook ad, you are familiar with psychographics. Not only are you choosing the demographics (age, income, occupation, sex, marital status) and geographic of a target audience but you are also choosing keywords to drill down even further to target more precisely your client. These keywords are the psychographics. You can choose keywords that relate to interests, activities, hobbies, habits, lifestyles, attitudes, spiritual beliefs, famous people they follow, magazines, music preferences, even right down to restaurants and where they shop.
Psychographics is how you see sponsored ads in your newsfeed that seem custom made for you.
How can a social enterprise use psychographics?
Many of my clients are actually in the business of changing habits with a social enterprise service or product – eating better with plant-based foods, better coffee from small batch roasting from fair trade and indigenous sources, so look at changing habits; how do you market your product to a group of people and what they like to do, their culture, habits, etc. Social enterprises already have a leg up on traditional businesses when it comes to psychographics. You are already attracting a niche group of customers who most likely have a bit of a passion for your mission, at least enough to choose to do business with you over a competitor who isn’t socially minded.
Survey your existing customers through a free service such as Survey Monkey
And have conversations with your customers. Find out who they are and why they choose to do business with you.
Create an ideal customer profile
An ideal customer profile will help you piece together the demographics, their geographics and the psychographics. Here are some questions you’ll need to get answers to through your research:
• What’s your mission? Who does that appeal to?
• What are their goals and values? Of these goals and values, what are relevant to what you are offering?
• What are they interested in? What do they like to do? What are their habits? What is their culture? How do they spend their time outside of work?
• What are the niche publications, books, magazines that your profile reads? What conferences do they attend?
• What are they passionate about? What are their pain points?
• What social media channel are they using? Who do they follow on social media?
Once you have your psychographics narrowed down you can begin to create your marketing copy more precisely and strategically. You’ll understand how to clearly articulate your mission and your unique selling proposition in a way that resonates with the values and goals of your ideal client. You’ll be able to create a doable marketing and sales plan knowing where you should network, where you should advertise, as well as how to overcome any potential objections in your sales process.
Using psychographics is well worth the time and thought you’ll need to put into it. Nothing else will help you focus on creating new business and retaining existing business like knowing and speaking to your clients in a way that resonates with who they really are.
