Automotive Sales and Marketing professionals should be knowledgeable about the demographic, psychographic and lifestyle profiles of their respective markets, but what about technographics?

Technographics is a way to understand your target audiences in terms of their level of participation online and the kinds of technologies they use. Understanding the technographics of a particular segment of your market enables businesses to logically plan online campaigns. For example, some consumers prefer not to get emails from businesses. They would rather get information about special offers in their news stream on Facebook. If you're only sending to your email and you don't have a Facebook Fan Page you will not be reaching these consumers. Automotive dealerships who are communicating with customers and potential customers on the social web can gear their messages more effectively once they have a good grasp of the technographics for each segment they target.

The Technographic Segments Forrester Research released their “Social Technographics” report in 2007 that grouped consumers into six categories of participation within social technologies (e.g., communities, blogs, social networks, etc…). They identified the broad categories of consumers as follows:

Inactives, Spectators, Joiners, Collectors, Critics, and Creators. The report features an infographic depicting the segments as rungs on a ladder with Inactives on the bottom rung and creators on the top rung.

Here's a breakdown from the Forrester report of how each segment utilizes online platforms: • Creators (13% of US adult consumers) – publish blogs, maintain Web pages, or upload videos to sites like YouTube at least once per month. Creators include just 13% of the adult online population. Creators are generally young — the average age of adult users is 39 — but are evenly split between men and women. • Critics (19% of US adult consumers) – participate in either of two ways — commenting on blogs or posting ratings and reviews on sites like Amazon.com. Critics on average are several years older than Creators. Two-thirds of them post ratings and reviews, but only 22% comment on blogs and rate/review Web site content. Four out of 10 Critics are Creators as well. • Collectors (15% of US adult consumers) – create metadata that’s shared with the entire community, e.g. by saving URLs on a social bookmarking service like del.icio.us or using RSS feeds on Bloglines. Collectors are the most male-dominated of all the Social Technographics groups. More than two-thirds tag pages, while more than half use RSS. • Joiners (19% of US adult consumers) – use a social networking site like MySpace.com or Facebook. Joiners are the youngest of the Social Technographics groups. They are highly likely to engage in other Social Computing activities — 56% also read blogs, while 30% publish blogs. • Spectators (33% of US adult consumers) – are slightly more likely to be women and have the lowest household income of all the social Technographics groups. The most common activity for Spectators is reading blogs, with only a small overlap with users who watch peer-generated video on sites like YouTube. In all, 31% of Spectators do not engage in Creator, Critic, Collector, or Joiner activities. • Inactives (52% of US adult consumers) – Do not participate at all in social computing activities. These Inactives have an average age of 50, are more likely to be women, and are much less likely to consider themselves leaders or tell their friends about products that interest them.

For automotive social media marketers this is really valuable information which can be used to provide logic in the development of online marketing campaigns. Knowing the general categorization of social technology use can help determine which social media marketing campaigns to target to which specific group. For instance if you were planning on holding a video contest to attract consumers' interest, you will probably get a better response from "Creators" as opposed to "Spectators". Therefore if your target market is relatively young, you will likely get a significant level of participation than you could expect from an older target audience who do not typically create videos and share them on the web.

We should however keep in mind, these profiles are not set in stone. As technology advances these profiles are in flux. It's fairly safe to assume that the increased adoption of smart phones, the lines of distinction described in this report will begin to blur.

If you what to explore the technographics of your audience, there is an online tool you can use to profile your customers' social computing behaviors here .

Are you looking for a knowledgeable team that is ready and willing to evolve with your dealership and automotive marketing campaign, visit this page to see more information and contact us now.

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