Psychographic Marketing for PPC

Psychographic Marketing for PPC:

Brands have rich ad targeting options.

As the Internet has grown, so have targeting capabilities within ad platforms.

Simple bid-based algorithms where the highest bidder was left behind.

Algorithms were forced to get smarter, so platforms could better handle the brands that appeared on them.

One notable way that PPC and paid social media have evolved is by targeting people, interests, and behaviors.

Appealing to potential customers on a personal level by aligning messaging and targeting culminates in what is called psychographic marketing.

Psychographic marketing goes beyond pointing an ad at a person who searched for something.

It takes into account factors such as the mindset, emotions, needs, wants and desires of the user, aligning the messages with a human.

Psychographic marketing focuses more on the psychology of buyer types than on superficial perceptions, such as a person's age or where they live.

Psychographic marketing goes deeper and examines things like:

Important for buyers.

Other brands love them.

Choose organic products.

A lifestyle choice.

Hang out and spend free time.

About hobbies.

This method of delving into the human side and aligning marketing is the psychographic model.

To discover psychographic makeup.

Facebook was the dominant player in psychographic targeting options.

It was the most powerful engine for targeting based on people types and for connecting with users at that level of mindset.

The privacy scandals faded a bit in the targeting options advertisers enjoyed.

Google began to get more involved in the game, and additional platforms such as Snapchat and TikTok began to take advantage of its user bases as well.

Psychographic goals in Google Ads:

Google provides tons of ways to incorporate psychographics into the campaigns.

While they have many different types of campaigns (Search, Shopping, YouTube, etc.), they all operate from the same database of user types to choose from.

Most users think of psychographic marketing in terms of their channels targeting people rather than keywords, but the same audiences are actually very useful for search.

Audience options can be found in Google Ads in the Audiences section.

Audiences are aggregated at the campaign or ad group level.

The targeting is that the ads will be shown only to those audiences.

The data to get can helps make marketing-based decisions about the ad purchase, rather than relying solely on keywords.

Determine that those audiences are the only ones actually converting and that the ads should only be shown to them.

Go from having those audiences as an observation to targeting.

Audience demographics:

All the major ad platforms offer similar ones, although the names are slightly different.

Many types of people buy the product, so creating a lookalike audience will likely mean needing to be more general in the messages.

By having G products that appeal to very specific types of users, psychographic messaging can play a huge role.

Target camping interests, the Lookalike Audience features take more than just one interest into account, using much more data about user behavior and habits to determine where ads are displayed.

This can be a great way to extend the reach beyond the available predefined buckets.

Psychographic options on Facebook:

In many ways, brands see Facebook as the harbinger of personal marketing.

Programmatic became a nice thing to have, with a lot of budgets being funneled into direct response media.

Aside from remarketing, Facebook's options are heavily focused on psychographics.

This covers not only the types of targeting (which include thousands of interests and habits) but also the ad units and how they can be best used.

Interest-based objectives:

Facebook has tens of thousands of interest groups that can target.

Many goals are closely related; they are not separate or distinct from each other.

In general, it is better to think of a psychographic cube as one big topic made up of many related interests, rather than separate and distinct entities.

Similar audiences:

Like Lookalike Audiences on Google, Facebook can search a specific group of users to find customers who behave like them.

These can be based on the custom audiences they can create on Facebook:

Snapchat psychographic guidance:

Despite its largely younger user makeup, Snapchat has plenty of targeting options.

They fall into two main fields: third-party-driven audiences and Snapchat's own user groups.

Audience analysis:

Many Facebook Ads users still mourn the loss of Audience Insights.

A useful tool that would give a lot of information on any specified audience, but nowadays it will only do it for people who like the page.

Google Ads and Snapchat still have this information, which is a great way to find affinities that the audience may not have noticed.

This can be found in Audience Manager within Google Ads, with a selector at the top for the audience to want to analyze:

Thinking about each goal and adapting the creativity accordingly is more important than ever. Beyond maximizing sales, what the platform looks at is also important:

All of these factors contribute to the cost of the media.

Platforms want user participation.

Psychographic targeting dates back to older school media purchases, where Nielsen's ratings were what helped determine the location of television commercials.

Psychographic options are common.

Becoming the dominant way to reach people, as seeing even Google being keyword-driven is gently moving brands away from the keyword focus to focus more on topics and buyers.

The advent of privacy laws will continue to make this an ever-changing environment, but one that will never go out of style for strong marketers.