Highly competitive marketing scenario today, is giving a tough time to brands that are trying to build an online presence. One major cause for this is the inadequate market research that ought to be done in the initial phase.
David Ogilvy, also known as the father of advertisement once said, “Advertising people who ignore research are as dangerous as generals who ignore decodes of enemy signals.”
Most of us conduct basic research about our target audiences’ demographics, for instance, age, gender, household income, education etc., and study this as the base for devising our marketing strategies.
However, we’re missing out on one major objective – ‘Why should our consumers consider our brand and convert with us?’
And as a result of this unawareness, our ad communication focuses on what our brand is offering rather than how can the brands’ offerings resonate with consumer problems.
Therefore, our marketing research must include Psychographic profiling of the audience which would in turn help find factors that compel or motivate users to convert with the Brand.
Now, what is Psychographic Profiling? It’s defined as studying consumers based on psychological characteristics and traits such as values, desires, goals, interests, and lifestyle choices and leveraging these characteristics further to market effectively to these audiences.
Psychographic Profiling, ideally, should focus on the following aspects –
1. Prospects’ Goals
2. Challenges/Pain Points
3. Brand Solutions
Let’s deep dive into these aspects to understand them better –
1. Prospects’ Goals –
For every brand trying to reach its potential buyer, the first point of intersection should be on the lines of demand and supply i.e. our target audience must have an affinity towards the product/service being delivered by the brand. Now, there can be two scenarios here, one wherein the consumer knows that they need/have a certain affinity towards the product/service being provided by the Brand and the second scenario wherein brand would first want to make the consumers aware of such need/affinity of that product/service which would require an altogether different approach. For now, let’s discuss the other aspects basis the first scenario.
2. Challenges/Pain Points –
Challenges or pain points are usually the problems a brand’s prospective customers are experiencing. Getting at the bottom of your customer’s pain points involves a degree of thinking outside the box and putting yourself in the shoes of your customers. It is a pre-requisite to devising the right strategies for the brand. These pain points can be broadly put under the following categories –
- Convenience or Productivity – The scenarios wherein a customer’s productivity and convenience is affected during the buying/converting journey would fall under this pain point. For instance, streamlining the user journey with an easy checkout process, easy access to required information on the website with minimum friction etc. Now as a brand, the key focus here would be to help customers manage time efficiently while alleviating these pain points through their product/service.
- Financial – These pain points would encompass scenarios wherein our prospecting customers are spending too much money at any point in the buying/converting journey which otherwise could be alleviated with the use of our Brand’s offered Products/Services.
- Support – The cases wherein our prospecting customers aren’t receiving the required support at critical stages of the buying/converting journey would be categorically put into Support Pain Points. Once identified, these should be highlighted through our ad communication for users to adapt to our brand over others.
3. Brand Solutions –
From the moment when the underlying pain points are identified the focus should be on positioning the Brand to solve for them because this is how we set our Brand apart from the Competitors in the market and evince the empathy card – ‘We care for you’. The products/services offered by the Brand should be analogous to the challenges faced by the consumers.
Extensive research, comprising these Psychographic profiling components, would lead to effective ad messaging addressing the pain points of a Brand’s prospective customers rather than plainly promoting solutions and features of the product/service. This would ensure, the content is mapped to the target persona which results in greater trust, higher conversions and better retention rates and all the more a reason for consumers to choose your brand over your competitors’.
Be it before launching the Brand in the market, acquiring new customers for an existing brand, convincing the one-timers or even retaining the existing customer base for the Brand– in all these phases, carrying out research and diving deep into the challenges faced by these users and mapping them back to the Brand’s offerings would eventually help build and or enhance a Brand’s presence in the market.
Image Source – Google
Content Source – WordStream, Commbox, Smallbiztrends, Freshdesk etc.
