How to create buyer persona psychographics?
Buyer personas psychographics research is a very important part of making an actionable buyer persona profile as it provides some insights into understanding motivations of customer’s purchasing behaviour.
Buyer persona psychographics definition
Buyer persona psychographics — a qualitative methodology of studying consumers based on their personal characteristics and traits such as their personal types, motivations, goals, values, interests and etc. By creating psychographics, you answer a question WHY somebody decides to buy your product.
Psychographic profile includes:
- Personality
- Customer motivations and interests
- Lifestyle
- Opinions, attitudes, and beliefs
- Values
Buyer persona personality
Psychological traits of a buyer persona, which should be studied, vary from business to business. The key part of a psychological profile is an information related to a process of making a decision about purchasing your product. If colour preferences or leadership ability is important, then you should include it into customer persona psychographics.
Big Five Personality Traits
One valuable classification is Big Five Personality Traits. By creating buyers’ psychological portrait, you understand if they are:
- Open to experience — ready to test and try new things, sensitive to culture and social events, music, art
- Conscientiousness — well organised or careless and extravagant
- Extroverted — full of energy, communicative, outgoing
- Friendly — easy to cooperate with
- Neurotics — emotionally unstable
Big Five gives you some hints whether your personas are easy to interact with, do they need a challenge, do they make a balanced choice, etc.
Carl Jung’s person types
Another useful classification is based on Carl Jung’s personality types:
- Introversion vs. extroversion — is person more introverted or extroverted
- Sensation vs. intuition — is immediate apprehension of the visible relationship or unconscious the main driver of person’s motivation
- Thinking vs. feeling — in other words, is a person rational or it makes decisions based on subjective estimation
- Judges vs. perceivers — does person stick to plans and follow rules or behaves spontaneously
It gives you some insights into consumer’s motivation, understanding of what drives his or her purchasing behaviour.
Buyer persona motivations and interests
It is absolutely important to understand what motivates your customers. Not only to purchase your product, but also to make other decisions which bring him or her from top to bottom of your sales funnel.
Four types of buyer persona motivations
Four types of motivations are:
- Extrinsic — motivation which comes from outside
- Intrinsic — a person does something because of internal reasons
- Introjected — the same as intrinsic, but a person feels guilty if something is not done
- Identified — a person knows that something should be done
Customer’s motivation based on personality type
Depending on a personality’s type you can guess his or her motivation.
For example, an extroverted and sensitive customer would be triggered by:
- Interest
- Getting new experience
- Public evaluation
- Communication
- Entertainment
Extroverted and rational persona with high self-expectation would be motivated by:
- Competition
- Empowerment
- Criticism
- Promotion
Sensitive and introverted buyer would be seeking for:
- Safety
- Security
- Trust
- Respect
Rational introvert would be looking for:
- Opportunity to train his or her skills
- Be risk incentive
As you see, for different buyer persona psychographic profiles you should look for different benefits which will trig their purchasing behaviour.
Lifestyle in buyer persona psychographics
By describing a persona’s day-to-day activities you better understand how she or he would use your product.
For example, you offer a diary digital app. You can think about how your target customer will use it during a working day. Will he or she start a day by using the app? How often will he or she add new notes? Will the consumer feel that the app fits into his or her life schedule?
Buyer persona opinions, attitudes, and beliefs
You can target customers by displaying your adoption of their opinions and beliefs.
For example, in a product for a company with high corporate values you can use corporate symbols and colours. For conservative audience you can show that you and your brand celebrate some traditional values, etc.
Customer’s values
That’s about buyer’s feeling of what is right or wrong. For example, you can target eco-activists who are against killing of animals. In this case you can show that you’re following their negativism about making harm to animals.
How to collect psychographic data for buyer persona profile
The most important information about your buyer’s persona you can get from real-time communicating with consumers and sales people. Quite valuable data are available on social networks as you can see people reacting on different offers, looking for a solution to their problems, leaving reviews, etc.
Brainstorming
Brainstorming is a good way to get some insights into your buyer persona’s profile. You can make it together with a group of people (for example, salespeople) who have a lot of experience of communicating with customers.
Interviews and surveys
During interviews you can have real-time conversation with your customers. You should try to understand how they perceive your product and why they choose it. For example, you can ask what problems they had before they started using your product, what did they make on a day when they first decided to try your product, etc.
In surveys you can check insights which you got from interviews. You can make better factorisation and segmentation of your target audience.
Social networks
Data from social networks can bring some valuable insights about your target audience. By following topics and discussions which are relevant to your product you can dig information about traits, problems and success stories of users who are looking like your buyer persona.
Online resource’s statistics
If you have an access to any statistics about how customers use your resource, you can gather very interesting data which allow to make better marketing segmentation based on typical buyer’s behaviour.
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