Psychographic Research Might Help Improve Response To Your Promotions
Consider, for a moment, that it were possible to precisely judge the effectiveness of a marketing campaign. Would that give you a competitive edge? When I was a director of advertising, seeing an agency’s creative proposals for the first time was one of the best parts of the marketing process. Closely followed by one of the worst; assessing whether their creative ideas were good enough and giving something that passed for intelligent feedback.
There was no such problem when someone presented a Media Proposal; there was research which had numbers and calculators that told me whether it was viable or not. And when someone presented an audience segmentation proposal; there were numbers and calculators that told me whether it was valid or not.
Might psychographic research be taught lessons from other marketers?
Online Marketing, Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is the discipline of making sure that a website reaches its maximum audience. As so much traffic on the internet is achieved through Search Engines such as Google, the key to being at the top of potential customers’ searches is to be conscious of and include in the website using the same keywords that customers may use in their search. Using psychometrics in research is no different.
So if you imagine creating a website to promote say, research you would prepare for ‘site optimisation’ before you even begin to design content. You could run a keyword search to analyse the words and phrases used by customers who searched for research and include the right proportion of them within the site. This ensures that your new website is most relevant to the Search Engines and results in a higher ranking.
No self-respecting Webmaster would start to create a website before being fully aware of these audience keyword ‘touch-points’. And, by the way, this process would also increase the likelihood of the website engaging more with the audience who reach it. Because its content and structure has been shaped in part to match the audience’s own keywords.
Using psychometrics to guide advertising communications
But unlike the SEO example, in conventional campaign development, we advertising professionals are assumed to be able to manage a much more complicated understanding of customer behaviours, ideas, attitudes and needs than that. The expertise, judgement, the gut-feel, the ‘soft data’ and post-rationalisation of Planning and conventional Market Research are contributing (somehow) to a decision not only on what the audience keywords and ‘touch points’ are but also leading us to a structure, to a format, to a personality and to a creative style that we hope will best connect that audience.
The only difference is that the Webmaster has access to online tools that actually quantify and analyse keywords that are easily identified. Whereas we are relying on much more approximate and subjective analysis of our audience key needs, motivations and preferences.
Wouldn’t it be useful we might use a type of ‘Optimisation’ tool for the development of our marketing communications? What if we could rigorously measure things, like psychographic profiles, that we thought were immeasurable? What if, like the Media Plan we could look at a campaign and have hard information that told us whether it will hit the customer buttons more effectively? And, more importantly why it does? And how to make it even better?
Applied psychographic research
If your background is like other advertising professionals then psychographic research was something that provided interesting academic information, but was hard to apply directly to influence advertising campaigns. More difficult still to find ways to evaluate the effect that research made, assuming that it made any at all. However there is a new specialist breed of research that has evolved in the last few years. It uses quantitative structures to gather measure and apply the qualitative information from psychographic research.
So if you would also like to be able to use psychographic research, to guide customer segmentation and guide marketing campaigns, ESP have a complimentary pdf report called market research which features some revealing case studies.
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