Patient Profiling Using Psychographics: Demographics vs. Psychographics and Why Culture Matters Most

Psychographics Versus Demographics

Demographic information includes the basics: age, gender, race, address, insurance information, phone number, e-mail address, and occupation. Although demographics are still valuable and can be used as a starting point, they don’t shed light on the attitudes and the mindset of your ideal patients. The demographics are merely the dry facts.

Practices are used to thinking only in terms of demographics, because dividing a market up by age, gender, ethnicity, and other broad variables can help to understand the differences and commonalities among patients. The thinking was “our target audience is 45- to 65-year-old women” or “we are launching a marketing campaign aimed at urban Latinos.” Today, that thinking can be limiting your marketing efforts. Demographics only segments the patients that you are interested in attracting, but it isn’t specific enough to be maximally effective.

Psychographics, on the other hand, focuses on the interests, attitudes, and emotions of a segment of potential patients—exactly the things practices need to understand to best promote their services to a particular segment of the population that the practice wishes to attract. To reach these ideal patients, you must know what or who they value most, where they get their medical education and medical information, and what content appeals to them.

Psychographics are like demographics on steroids. Psychographic information might include your patients’ habits, hobbies, health-related experiences, and values. Demographics explain “who” your patient is; psychographics explain “why” they become part of your practice.

Psychographic segmentation divides the market into groups based on social class, lifestyle, and personality characteristics. It is based on the assumption that the types of products and brands and individual purchases will reflect that person’s characteristics and patterns of living.

You can only reach your target audience effectively when you understand both their demographics and their psychographics. The combination of both sets of data starts to form your patient persona—a detailed picture of the patients you would like to care for in the future.

Example of Psychographics and Demographics in a Primary Care Setting

Let’s look at a 45-year-old woman with multiple medical conditions. Her demographic information might include the following:

• Female;

• Aged 45;

• Address, telephone number, e-mail address, and insurance information;

• Married, with children;

• Dealing with issues of weight gain, diabetes, lack of energy or hormonal imbalance; and

• Household income $100K+.

Her psychographic information might include the following:

• Concerned with health and appearance;

• Wants a healthy lifestyle, but doesn’t have much time;

• Enjoys going online in the evenings, big fan of Pinterest;

• Tends to favor quality over economy;

• Finds fulfillment in her career and family; and

• Values time with a small group of friends.

Looking at the two data sets, it’s easy to see why you need both psychographic and demographic information. By using demographics alone, you have only a vague picture of your patient—you understand her challenges, but not where to find her and what really moves her to action. Psychographics gives you so much more understanding of the patient!

If you collect demographic information alone, you will have only a very hazy picture of this patient. Demographics provide you with information on how to find her and whether she has insurance to cover her healthcare costs. However, it is through psychographic information that you understand her challenges, and what really moves her to action. It is the combination of psychographics and demographics that gives you much more insight into your patients.

Obtaining Psychographic Information

There are two effective methods for obtaining psychographic data: (1) interviewing your current patients; and (2) investigating your website traffic or analytics.

Interviewing Existing Patients

Start by thinking of your best patients. Next time you talk, ask them for a few more details about themselves. You can ask what they did over the weekend, if they have seen any good movies lately, found any great holiday deals, made any New Year’s resolutions, and so on. Because we are physicians, we have the luxury of probing a patient’s clinical, social, occupational, recreational, and emotional history.

Depending on your relationship with the patients, you can tell them exactly why you’re asking and be more direct. In more than 40 years of practice, I’ve never had a patient fail to answer these questions or be upset about being asked for more information than their clinical history.

Want a larger sampling? Send out a patient survey and be honest—tell them you want to better understand what they care about. Most people are more than happy to share. This survey can easily be created on surveymonkey.com. The website is free, and it is easy to create a useful psychographic survey. You probably have collected e-mail addresses as part of your demographic queries, and you can easily send out your survey to your existing patients.

Psychographic segmentation starts with development of a questionnaire that uses attitudinal, values- and belief-based statements, to which patients react. Consider providing a range of responses—for example, from “Strongly Agree” to “Strongly Disagree.” Once survey responses are gathered, a factor analysis using statistical clustering is used to identify response patterns that indicate natural clusters based on similar answers.

Once all survey data are analyzed, consistent groups—psychographic segments—are defined. Additional social media monitoring and analytics (discussed in the next section) can provide added insights based on trends in consumer interests and attitudes. Of course, the very nature of answering a survey requires respondents to consider their thoughts and choose an answer. When survey questions are focused on a specific topic, such as hours of operation or use of ancillary services, as with attitudinal segmentation, the results may be skewed because many respondents rationalize their answers based on societal norms or, in the case of healthcare, published facts.

Psychographic segmentation, on the other hand, may include completely unrelated and discontinuous questions about personal values or beliefs, so respondents are less likely to rationalize. However, the research team must make the effort to draw connections between psychographic insights and the topic of focus to make these insights actionable, which may require additional research.

After using quantitative marketing research to identify psychographic segments, conducting qualitative research (e.g., focus groups and one-on-one interviews) with members of each psychographic segment can help interpret the quantitative data from the perspective of each segment.

Investigating Website Analytics

If you prefer a more behind-the-scenes kind of investigation, there’s no better way than using website analytics. The Internet has made capturing psychographic data much easier and relevant to both patients and practices alike. The Internet also makes it easier to find like-minded patients, even if they’re from a different community or even a different country.

Using analytics, you can determine what has moved patients to click, call, or schedule an appointment in the past.

One of the best is Google Analytics, which also is free. Look at your existing website and see what the landing pages are where patients will start to look at your content. You can also see the bounce rate or how quickly the viewer left your site without looking at the content. Using analytics, you can determine what has moved patients to click, call, or schedule an appointment in the past.

Using Psychographics in Your Marketing

Getting the psychographic data is important, but really applying it to your practice is how you make it effective.

We’ve gathered some hypothetical data using the techniques outlined in the previous section, so now let’s apply our data to our marketing strategy!

Once you understand what is important to the target patient, you’ll know where to find her and how to motivate her. You’ll know how to give her what she wants—that offering deep discounts isn’t going to motivate her.

When developing and executing campaigns, content, messaging, and so on remember this: communication resonates with people that share the same psychographics (passion points, interests, and beliefs), not demographics. Getting the psychographic data is important, but how do you apply the data to your marketing and make it effective?

Let’s continue with the example of the 45-year-old female with diabetes and obesity. Once you understand what is important to her, you’ll know where to find her on the Internet and how to motivate her. You’ll know how to give her what she wants—that offering free WiFi in the reception area isn’t going to motivate her to be part of your practice. Instead, she wants to hear that your nutritional counseling service has worked for others in your practice with similar medical problems and how it will give her better health without a huge time commitment. So make sure you highlight customer comments to that effect.

When you know that she’s spending her free time on Pinterest, you can stop spending money on Facebook or newspaper and magazine ads. Instead, use her love of Pinterest and share time-saving household and nutrition tips and give her ideas for fun things to do with family and friends.

Watch what gets repinned and analyze what that tells you about her. Did she love the one about the smiley-face veggie platters for an after-school snack? Give her more ways to help keep her kids eating well. If the “girl’s night out” inspirational quote went over big, give her more ways to have fun with her friends.

When you know that career and family are important to her, you’ll want to create content on your website or your blog that highlights the impact that good health has on job performance and also help with her self-esteem and confidence both at the job and when off the clock.

Knowing more about her hobbies and interests will help you when you need to choose a prize for your next contest, what to blog about, and what sorts of images to use in your next ad.

Using psychographics allows you to do smarter keyword targeting and move your website to the top of Google using search engine optimization. For example, targeting one message about your weight loss program for teenagers to parents who are searching for “childhood obesity” and another message to parents who are searching for “nutrition for teenagers” is likely to be one of the options that parents will discover if they are searching the Internet for solutions for their children’s obesity. Once you know the key differences in what your patients care about, you can target Facebook ads to parents who’ve liked specific pages or identified particular interests; you can figure out the hashtags that different psychographic groups use on Twitter and target differently to those groups.

As with other forms of market segmentation, psychographic segmentation enables practices to identify patient groups based on shared characteristics. One key distinction is that psychographic segmentation focuses on what motivates individual patients—which can be more informative when developing marketing plans, wellness initiatives, or disease management programs.

When used in conjunction with demographic or socioeconomic data, psychographics enables practices to gain a clearer picture of both internal and external factors that influence patients’ behaviors. These insights can also be helpful for hospitals and other healthcare organizations to understand patients’ decision-making processes better and to improve the relevance of communication—whether designed to boost brand awareness and loyalty or increase patient engagement with the practice.

Bottom Line: It is critical for practices to invest in and understand the psychographics of a patient population rather than concentrating only on age, gender, location, and so on. The use of psychographics will help you develop not only the messages and marketing campaigns but also the services that your practice offers and that specific patients want and need.