by Scott Gillum
Estimated read time: 5 Minutes
If you are a business marketer and your organization has more than 4 personas, keep reading. Making things even worse, the personas you have are most likely sales personas or, more accurately, “selling scenarios.” I’ll explain.
Most B2B personas are built around a title or role and are constructed to identify the needs of the buyer in their role, which is helpful. They may align solutions with those needs, suggest the content that aligns with the buyer journey, and perhaps even identify the preferred sources of information they use.
All good things to have except that there is no “person” in the persona, which is what marketing needs in order to do its job right.
That job is to create awareness and drive interest in the brand, products and services of the organization. It’s not to sell. And this is where we run into problems. Most personas are built using the titles of buyers (budget holder, decision maker, user, etc) which may, or may not, be present at the beginning of the journey.
Marketing’s success is about finding audiences who are seeking information and getting them to do something with it. Share it, demand more of it, request to speak to someone about it. It may be too soon to know if that “someone” is a buyer, but what we do know is that it is a type of person. Two types actually, and it’s their personality type that determines it, and not their title or role.
Until recently, it was very difficult to understand the difference. In the past, we’ve collected engagement and/or intent information about buyers and guessed about their motivations and behaviors. With AI enabled personality profiling tools, we now have the chance to better understand our specific audiences, and when I mean specific, I mean down to the individual.
Personality based marketing (PBM) can help us understand how to write copy to attract these personality types. It can help us understand their content preferences for lead nurturing, and it can improve the overall performance of campaigns because we know which personality types will not engage or respond.
Why does that matter? Because according to Gartner, personally relevant content drives engagement, and that relevancy isn’t just about your job or role, it’s about you.
It’s about your personal preference for consuming content. Some people like “big picture,” quick to consume visualized assets such as animated videos. Others prefer long form white papers with details on how to use or implement a product. The difference is how those personality types intend to use the material and that speaks to their motivations.
For the big picture folks, the motivation is that they like to share new ideas with others. It makes them feel good about themselves. Others need information for their own purposes. To help understand how to improve the performance of their team, their platform, or their advertising efforts.
It’s why we created Carbon Quadrants. Our proprietary process for determining which personalities are most likely to match the behavior we need to improve response rates, consume or share content, and most importantly, play a critical role in the buying group.
Through our analysis we can also determine which audience segments are most likely to respond or not. Engage in the early stage of the buying process or skip it altogether. Through the use of AI tools we can know how to address audiences on a deeper, more meaningful level and as a result, improve the performance of marketing.
If you’re interested in improving the performance of your organization contact us to learn how Personality Based Marketing can help.
