Understanding who your customers are is the key to understanding what they want. When you’re creating your next customer survey, consider asking psychographic questions. This marketing strategy is useful to segment groups of your target audience, based on demographic and behavioral data points.
Using psychographic questions can reveal in-depth information about your audience’s opinions, personalities, lifestyles, and more. Read on to learn about this valuable tool and get some helpful psychographic questions to ask your audience.
What is a psychographic survey?
Psychographic segmentation studies and classifies people according to psychological categories, such as values, lifestyle, personality, opinions, attitudes, aspirations, and more. For instance, questions about political beliefs could be part of a psychographic survey.
This is different from demographics, which is objective data like age, education level, race, religion, geographic location, income, or household size. This can be helpful for marketing, but it leaves much to be desired. For example, if you only segmented groups by location, your marketing would be the same for everyone in that group, regardless of generation, income, careers, and other important characteristics.
Psychographic questions can reveal a lot of information about your target audience, when used correctly. Because psychographic data is qualitative, using open-ended questions in customer surveys and focus groups is key—and it’s particularly effective when you can solicit in-person responses or, as with Voiceform, voice responses.
Why use psychographic questions in a customer survey?
Psychographic segmentation (also known as attitudinal targeting) is up to four times more effective than using demographic information. It’s particularly useful for predicting customer behavior, such as when a college student is most likely to buy a new laptop. When you understand your customers on a deeper level, you can tailor your branding, marketing, advertising, and future products to meet their needs.
Psychographic questions don’t just tell you who your customers are—they also analyze why they are the way they are, and why they do what they do. Understanding beliefs, personalities, motivations, lifestyles, and other personality traits is the key to revealing hidden motivations, assumptions, and attitudes. This allows businesses to specifically target certain segments of the population, which ultimately saves time, money, and other company resources.
Psychographic questions to ask
Here are some examples of psychographic questions you can use in your next customer survey.
Needs and wants
Understanding a group’s needs and wants can provide valuable insight. You can make your questions as broad or as specific as you require:
- Do you perform a caretaking role for anyone in your household?
- Who do you spend the most money on: yourself, friends, family, or others?
- Do you feel like you make ends meet each month?
- How do you budget/plan for the month ahead?
- Would you rather have more time or money?
- How would you rate your stress level?
- What’s your biggest source of stress?
- Do you get enough sleep? Why or why not?
- How often do you engage in self-care activities? What are they?
- How do you travel to work?
- How much time do you spend traveling to work?
Values and priorities
These questions will give you a better idea of a customer’s biggest priorities:
- Rank your priorities from most to least important: family, social life, work, alone time.
- What are your opinions on [political party/political issue]?
- What is the most important issue we’re facing as a [planet/country/state/city]?
- Would you describe yourself as more optimistic or pessimistic?
- If you were going on vacation, would you rather go with family, friends, a partner, or by yourself?
- What kind of role does religion or spirituality play in your decision-making?
Motivations
From political, religious, and other attitudes, find out your customers’ motivations:
- What makes you choose one [product type] over another brand?
- Have you ever boycotted a brand/political group/other organization? Why?
- What’s more important: price or quality? Why? Does that change, depending on the product type?
- When shopping for products, how important is a company’s [ethical/environmental/social/political] stance? Why?
- Would a company’s [ethical/environmental/social/political] stance ever keep you from buying one of their products? Why?
- How do you feel about giving to charity? How often do you give to charity? Which charitable issues are most important to you?
Lifestyle habits
Ask these questions to understand how your product might fit into your consumers’ lives:
- What hobbies or activities do you engage in most often?
- What’s standing in the way of you having more leisure time?
- What would you do with more free time?
- What was the last big-ticket item you purchased?
- How often do you research products before purchasing?
- How much time do you spend on social media per day? Which networks?
- How much time do you spend watching television each week?
- Are you more likely to cook dinner, order takeout, or go out to dinner?
- How much exercise do you get each week?
- What kind of physical activities do you partake in?
- How often do you travel for pleasure?
- How do you keep up with the news?
Industry and competitors
These questions reveal attitudes towards different products and brands:
- Have you ever used [product type] before?
- Are you familiar with [brand]? What have you heard about [brand]?
- How often do you use [product type]?
- How do you choose between different brands?
- What’s the most important factor when choosing between [Brand X] and [Brand Y]?
Consumer habits
Find out how and why a consumer shops and gets their information:
- How often do you shop for [product type]?
- How do you get information about products or services?
- Whose advice or opinions do you value when you research products?
- How would you find a new brand if you needed to?
Collect psychographic data with Voiceform
Creating psychographic questions is just half the battle—you also need a platform to collect the data. When you’re digging deep into consumer attitudes, opinions, lifestyles, and habits, voice responses can be especially illuminating. From expressions and body language to tone of voice, Voiceform’s multimedia survey platform allows companies to collect richer data for their psychographic segmentation. With automated transcription and data analysis, it’s easier than ever to create and launch psychographic surveys. For more information about Voiceform, check out our product overview, or schedule a demo today.
