In today’s marketing world, brands can go beyond traditional segmentation and break customers into specific groups based on why they’re making purchase decisions.

Known as psychographic segmentation, this type of grouping includes factors like values or lifestyle choices to target buyers on a deeper level. 

A marriage between psychographic segmentation and mobile marketing is helpful because consumers leave cookies, personal information, and other crumbs of identifying information everywhere they go on the web. Mobile marketers no longer need to ask a lot of questions to identify their target audience. An algorithm can narrow that down based on what people voluntarily list publicly on things like social media, quizzes, games, browsing history, and surveys.

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Mobile marketers can take all of this information and use it to showcase products to niche customer segments. 

Benefits of psychographic segmentation

Psychographic segmentation has proved beneficial to marketers in multiple ways. The most obvious is in conversion rates. Those testing the idea saw five times the conversion rates of other marketing experiments that didn’t have the deeper context.

Other benefits of this type of marketing include:

  • Being able to narrow your focus to niche markets for particular products.
  • Being able to predict buying trends to keep customers active in future purchases.
  • Developing an understanding of who your customers are.

Mobile marketers can move quickly with the trends. Implementing psychographic segmentation in a mobile marketing campaign works because of pure numbers. Five billion people use phone messaging apps and 75% don’t mind messages from branded products. 

This makes concentrated targeting highly advantageous for mobile marketers.

Types of psychographic segmentation

There are multiple factors involved in psychographic segmentation, and marketers can get incredibly specific depending on how targeted they want to be for a particular product or service. However, there are usually five common types of psychographic segmentation, which include:

  • Personality

Personality can motivate purchases. Happy people may buy things they perceive to represent happiness like positive sayings or home decor made with brighter colors. Ambitious people may be drawn to things representing success or efficiency.

  • Social Status

A customer’s social status can define buying trends as well. A person who’s only seen on social media wearing designer clothes with full makeup and styled hair, for example, has a certain social status that can be targeted.  

  • Activities and Interests

A person’s browsing history often helps define this segment. A person searching for camping gear, sailing shoes, or craft supplies, for example, can all be targeted based on his or her hobby. 

  • Attitudes

Consumers look for companies that align with their attitudes and values. Customers that purchase shoes from the brand Tom’s, for example, know that the company donates a pair of shoes for every pair that’s purchased. 

  • Lifestyle

What does your family life look like? How do you maintain a balance between work and leisure? Are you retired? Do you live in the country or city? These lifestyle choices factor into purchasing decisions just as much as price or product function. 

Examples of Psychographic Segmentation

While psychographic segmentation might sound difficult to pinpoint, many marketers are using these segmentation techniques to increase brand awareness and sales. Take a look at these quick examples of psychographic segmentation in action:  

  • Baby boutique targets parenting lifestyle

When you have a newborn, there’s a certain lifestyle that goes along with it. From keeping odd hours to wondering when you showered last, there’s a comradery among parents with infants. 

Small boutique clothing retailers like Bitsy Bug Boutique leverage this lifestyle in its targeted mobile marketing to catch the attention of parents and pique their interest in products that can help at this stage of life. 

  • Coffee shop targets conservatives

Attitude-based segmentation is becoming increasingly important as people can divide themselves by culture, religion, and political views. A new coffee company called Black Rifle Coffee that supports conservative views found success by gaining the endorsement of popular conservative personality and Duck Dynasty star Phil Robertson.

  • Health food store combines attitudes with geography 

Psychographic marketing isn’t just for larger, brick-and-mortar companies either. Smaller brands can benefit from psychographic marketing too. 

Purple Mountain Natural Market in Rome, Georgia, for example, increased sales by targeting consumers with health-conscious values who live in and around the area. The store doesn’t even have a website. It simply focuses on social media and digital ads to drive customers to its stores.

There’s a lot of competition for consumers’ attention these days, so it’s more important than ever to create personalized marketing campaigns. Psychographic segmentation can be highly effective, but it can be difficult to implement. To do so requires robust customer data. To help, a mobile marketing platform like CleverTap can deploy machine learning to create micro-segments for you; making it as easy as possible to create highly targeted campaigns.