Your Prospects Psychographics

April 23rd, 2008 | by Chris |

We’ve seen last time about the demographics of your prospects and how to find them. Let’s see today about another important factor which is nothing else but the psychographics. While the first one can help you identify who buys your product or joins your opportunity the latter can help you understand what makes them want to buy it or join your organization.

Essentially when we are talking about psychographics we mean classifying potential customers by their attitudes and values. It’s much more than lifestyle behavior that we may include in demographics. It’s about core values and hardwired behaviors to our brain.

Understanding why they want to buy is a very tricky part because multi-billion dollar companies may spend millions in such research that may be misleading. That can happen because they base the research to info from participants answering based on the conscious mind, the rational center of our brain. However buying decisions are made primarily at the emotional level which is housed at the unconscious part of the mind. Even today, getting such info is very difficult and you can’t be 100% sure for the data you are getting even if you happen to be a fortune 500 company.

Wall Street bull
Photo by Douglas LeMoine

As you can understand such in depth professional research is out of reach for any small business, let alone an MLM home based business run by a distributor.

In our case we have to depend on very basic research and assumptions. However one fatal assumption that you have to avoid is that prospects would think and act like you. While you may sometimes hit a jackpot by thinking like that, in most of the cases you’ll be proved wrong or only a tiny segment of the market is like you.

Now how much good assumptions can do to your business?

Actually, assumptions can do you no good and should be avoided unless you can put them to the test.

One of the good things of the direct marketing industry and especially in Internet marketing where you track your results is that you can always test the assumptions you have made by the results you are getting.

So guessing is allowed as long as you test, test, and then test some more again. The more data you have from the beginning and consequently the less guessing you have to do the more you increase the chances of hitting your target, which in our case can be seen in the number of sales you make.

Now all this jargon we’ve seen is of great use when we are trying to profile our prospects. This is where the true fun is and things would start clearing out. But more on this on Friday. And I have some very good resources that you can use to learn how to apply all this theory.