In the world of marketing, the concept of a buyer persona is not new. Since the age of mass media, marketers have been using demographic data to create profiles of their target customers. However, as we step into the era of digital advertising, it's becoming increasingly clear that traditional buyer personas, rooted in demographics, might not be enough. Instead, understanding the psychological triggers and levers that determine a prospect's response to your advertising is now key. Here's why.

The Birth of Traditional Buyer Personas: A Mass-Media Phenomenon

Let's start with a look back at why traditional buyer personas look the way they do.

For most of marketing history, marketers had limited options for where they could place ads, and the vast majority of those options were mass media like radio, newspapers, and broadcast TV programs. When you only had a few dozen magazines or shows to choose from, you challenge was to find the options that had the greatest concentration of your ideal customers.

Mass media outlets gathered demographic data to convince advertisers to choose them over their competitors. Request a media kit and you'll learn how many people on average the publication reaches, the gender makeup, income tiers, ages, racial distribution, geography, and a mix of surveyed characteristics, from professions, interests, politics, and more.

It's little wonder that marketers gravitated to the same demographic information when building their marketing strategies and working to understand their customers. Data points like age, gender, location, and income level were used to create broad customer profiles, which were then used to guide marketing efforts.

This approach was largely a product of necessity. With the limited data available, demographic profiling was the most efficient way to segment audiences and target marketing efforts. It allowed marketers to tailor their messaging to broad groups of people who shared similar characteristics, with the hope that this would resonate with the majority of individuals within those groups.

The Shortcomings of Demographic-Based Buyer Personas

While demographic data can provide useful insights, it has its limitations. For one, it assumes that people who share similar demographic characteristics will have similar needs, preferences, and behaviors.

This assumption is flawed. Two individuals of the same age, gender, and income level will frequently have vastly different tastes, interests, and motivations. And as digital media has fragmented audiences, people in similar demographic categories have fewer interests and psychological tendencies in common than ever before.

Furthermore, demographic data doesn't tell us why people behave the way they do. It doesn't reveal their motivations, desires, fears, or aspirations. Without this understanding, it's difficult to create truly compelling marketing messages that resonate on a deeper level.

Lastly, demographic data is static. It doesn't account for the fact that people's behaviors, preferences, and needs can change over time. This lack of dynamism can lead to outdated buyer personas that no longer accurately represent your target audience.

The Rise of Psychographics in the Digital Age

The advent of digital advertising has created new ways to define and understand audiences. Today, we can target people based on their behavior (what webpages they've visited, what they've purchased, how they've interacted with your ads), interests, and affiliations. This data provides more direct insight into the psychological makeup of prospects, allowing us to create more detailed and accurate buyer personas.

Psychographic profiling delves into the attitudes, values, and lifestyles of consumers. It seeks to understand their personality traits, interests, opinions, motivations, and lifestyle habits. This level of detail allows marketers to create more personalized and effective marketing messages.

For example, imagine you're responsible for marketing a ground-breaking new golf driver. Traditionally, a demographics-based persona would lead. you to discover that 60% of avid golfers belong to a country club, are predominantly male, between the ages of 40 and 60 (plus retireds), and are a high-earning professional or business owner, making more than $100,000 per year.

While that is somewhat insightful, a psychographic approach might start by revealing that avid golfers are desperate to add 20-yards to their average drive off the tee. They golf to escape the pressures of their job, widen their social circle, and network with potential clients and partners. However, playing poorly can be both embarrassing and deeply frustrating. They believe that if only they could strike the ball better more consistently, they'd get more admiration from their peers and have a lot more fun during the time they can get away on the course.

Compare the two buyer profiles. Which one is likely to give you more productive marketing ideas or create more persuasive ads? Is it any contest?

The Case for Psychographics Over Demographics

Given the limitations of demographic-based buyer personas and the rich insights offered by psychographic data, it's clear that the latter should take precedence in today's marketing landscape.

Psychographic profiling enables you to understand not just who your customers are, but why they behave the way they do. It allows you to uncover the psychological triggers and levers that influence their purchasing decisions, enabling you to create marketing messages that resonate on a deeper level and drive more meaningful engagement.

Moreover, the dynamic nature of psychographic data ensures that your buyer personas remain relevant and accurate, even as your audience's behaviors, preferences, and interests evolve. This allows you to stay ahead of the curve and continually optimize your marketing efforts for maximum effectiveness.

While demographic data can provide useful insights, the data we have available to us in our digital world today enables us to do better. To truly understand your audience and create effective marketing messages, you need to delve deeper into their psychological makeup. By prioritizing psychographics over demographics, you can create more detailed, accurate, and dynamic buyer personas that drive more effective marketing outcomes.

That's why our novel approach to marketing strategy begins by building a rich buyer profile that explores their psychological makeup in great detail. By focusing on the psychological triggers that can enable you to grab their attention and motivate their actions and the psychological levers you can use to transform their beliefs and behavior, you can quickly develop insights that enable you to reverse engineer effective marketing messages.