by William Walsh | Oct 10, 2023 | 2023
As previously published on 9/21/23 in MarTech
By Scott Gillum
Estimated read time: 5 Minutes
Learn the benefits of AI personality profiling, from reaching a wider audience to honing in on what your audience values most.
Every day we form impressions of the people we meet. We assess their trustworthiness, credibility and level of friendliness based on our interactions.
In business, we often assess contacts based on how they will — or will not — support what we’re promoting. Will they be an advocate or influencer? Will they be skeptical or feel threatened?
This can extend to organizations or industries. We describe organizations as being “data-driven” or “research-based” and industries as “cutting edge” or “slow-moving” to help us understand how to position ourselves and improve our messaging.
With AI personality profiling tools, we can become more familiar with an audience, segment or industry before we even engage with it. B2B marketing, usually kept at arm’s reach from customers, can now know them as well as account managers who have long-standing customer relationships. Here’s what this means for B2B marketing organizations.
What are AI personality profiling tools?
When it comes to engaging with customers or potential clients, understanding preferences and behaviors is key. This has traditionally been done through surveys, focus groups or other forms of direct communication.
However, AI personality profiling tools provide a new and more efficient way to gain insights into your target audience. They use algorithms to analyze a variety of data points (i.e., social media activity, online searches, and even speech patterns) to identify patterns and traits indicating a person’s personality type. This information lets you create more personalized and effective marketing campaigns.
One of the biggest advantages of AI personality profiling is the ability to reach a wider audience while still tailoring your message to each individual. In the past, developing different personas and buyer journeys could be time-consuming and require a lot of guesswork. AI tools can quickly and easily identify commonalities within your audience and develop targeted content.
Another benefit is the ability to uncover hidden insights about an organization’s corporate culture. By analyzing its leadership team’s personalities and behaviors, you can better understand its values and priorities. This can help you tailor your messaging to fit the company’s culture and present your solution in a way that will most likely resonate with decision-makers.
How AI personality profiling can reshape your marketing strategy
We recently profiled the personalities of the C-suite executives at a Fortune 500 company. Although diversifying board rooms has helped bring a wider variety of individuals with different life experiences and points of view, one area has not been diversified.
Perhaps best described as “birds of a feather flock together,” an individual’s personality type often dictates their profession or the industry where they work. Of the senior executives we profiled, 21 out of 22 executives had the same personality type.
This is an extreme example of a concentrated personality type. Typically, we find only one dominant type in 60-70% of the executive team. We also found a dominant personality type of Fortune 500 executives, 58% of the CEOs.
A homogenous population is a marketer’s dream. It means a “one size fits all” messaging and content approach. The other benefit it provides is insight into the corporate culture. The company we profiled is in the construction industry, with the dominant personality type being analogous to a “project manager.”
Given the dominance of the personality type, it is safe to assume that the corporate culture is a “get it done” environment. That nugget of wisdom is gold for sales. This type of environment signals that if it isn’t broken, it will not get fixed.
Trying to sell a “nice to have” will be virtually impossible, but selling a “need to have” should be easier. In particular, if you can find a burning need or demonstrate an advantage gained by the new solution.
A chance to hone in on what your audience values
Finding the “pain” and then building the argument for the business case will attract your audience’s attention. The greatest advantage in understanding their personality is knowing their behaviors and motivations.
For example, the “project manager” mindset is motivated by achievement, career advancement and recognition. Their behavior is to be heads down, so you have to interrupt them in order to get their attention.
To do this, you’ll need to align to their personal content preferences (which are industry-specific case studies) and use and business cases. They also prefer references, especially peers in the same role and industry.
All of this can be known, created and executed without ever having a conversation with a prospect.
AI profiling tools are simple to use and can easily provide new insights into audiences. It opens the door for creating new personas, buyer journeys and, most importantly, better content.
And you know what loves a homogenous population and insights about them more than marketers? Machines. All of this information can be fed into AI content generators.
Birds of a feather do flock together, and with AI tools you can know exactly what type of bird you’re hunting and how to knock them out of the sky.
AI personality profiling alone is not enough
AI personality profiling has its limitations. It’s crucial to recognize that personality types are dynamic and can evolve. Moreover, exclusively depending on data-driven insights may hinder empathy and a comprehensive understanding of the human experience.
Leverage AI personality profiling if you’re looking to gain valuable audience insights and enhance your marketing campaigns. But for a holistic approach, make sure to complement it with other research and communication methods.
by Christina | Mar 22, 2022 | 2022, Insights
As previously published on 3/14/22 in The Drum
by Scott Gillum
Estimated read time: 5 Minutes
Let’s give credit where credit is due, most B2B organizations have made the transition from leading with products to being customer or market focused. Content is now shaped first with the needs of the target audience (industry, company and buyers).
Many companies make it a regular practice to research “hot topics” in the industry, the needs of those buyers and their channel preferences . Personas are shaped around the insights, and content and messaging are created to align with needs, then carefully aligned to the buyers’ journey.
So is that personalization?
What about the customer experience on the website? This is how Forbes describes website personalization.
Website personalization is the practice of creating a custom experience for site visitors based on who they are and what they want. Rather than providing a single experience for all site visitors, website personalization allows B2B businesses to create unique experiences for visitors based on factors like location, industry and even website behavior.
Ok, got it. Let’s add location, website behavior and personalized digital experiences, and we should be good. Does anyone see the problem here? Bueller, Bueller, anyone?
There is no “person” in any of this so-called “personalization.” There are personas, but they’re most likely role based. Web behaviors, yes important, but without understanding the motivations behind those actions, you only left to guess their intentions.
How do you begin to understand behaviors, motivations and preferences? Start with understanding audience personalities.
In almost every industry, there are only 1-2 dominant personalities. If you’re in the life sciences segment, there is a good chance you’ll over-index with “skeptics” and “status quo” seekers. Selling to a marketing audience? You’re going to find an overabundance of “influencers” and “champions.”
To truly create a world class customer experience, you have to be able to align to the preferences of your audience. Those preferences are not driven by a title or a role.
And it’s not just their preference for channel and content, but more importantly, how the content is packaged, how it’s messaged, and/or how it’s created.
Understanding your dominant audience provides the insight to set your marketing, digital and engagement strategy. It provides the level of insight necessary to take your existing activities and assets to the next level.
Webinars appeal to a certain audience, but only if the topic is research or data backed, and presented by a credible speaker. Animated videos are preferred by another audience type, as long as they are sharable and short.
Don’t rest on thinking you have the right content, at the right place (in the buying process), in the right channel. It’s not enough. Not all the buyers are the same, they all don’t take the same path, consume the same content, and/or prefer the same channel.
In fact, without really knowing their personal motivation and behaviors, most of this insight is based on previous experiences that happened randomly but is assumed to be true for all, and/or based on research with buyers who will say one thing, and then do another.
Deep down inside we know that to be true, because we know that buyers are people, and people are as unique as their personalities…just as no two buyer experiences are the same.
“Personalization” as it is defined for B2B today, is more about trying to get the tools to work better, than it is about improving customer experience. Technology is an enabler, but it is not personalization. Understanding what makes buyers human is. The process has to be flipped so that it starts with the goal of understanding buyers at a deeper level, do that, and the tools will begin to work better.
by scott.gillum | Nov 12, 2020 | 2020, Marketing
On Friday, November 13th at 10am EST Scott Gillum, Founder & Chief Executive Office of Carbon Design spoke with a panel of industry experts at The Drum Digital Summit. The panel fused real cases of success with personalization, helping the industry understand what is achievable today, while also taking a look at the risks and rewards of implementing personalization in digital advertising and online purchases.
The panel covered the importance of providing more meaningful engagement with potential customers along with best in class examples of:
· Personalization and relevancy in digital advertising today
· How direct-to-consumer companies personalize their product offerings
· Personalized Customer Experiences that DTC companies provide
The Drum Digital Summit was a five-day festival which kicked off on Monday 9 November and brought together key players from tech, brands and agencies. The APAC publisher and programme curator, Charlotte McEleny, picked out 10 must-watch sessions.
The core theme that ran through every session was ‘speed’, which is reflective of one of the words that is being uttered most regularly in conversations with the editorial team, in every country.
The event can he downloaded here.
by scott.gillum | Oct 30, 2020 | 2020, Marketing
Scott appears on Jason Swenk’s Smart Agency Master Class Podcast, the #1 Digital Marketing Agency Owner podcast for sharing the strategies and stories from real agency owners of what is working today in the agency world, and how they got to where they are now.
In this episode with Jason, Scott will cover:
- What is the “upside-down” approach to recruiting agency talent?
- Can an agency be successful with a team full of contractors?
- How you can keep your employees focused.
by scott.gillum | Oct 13, 2020 | 2020, Business Trends
Estimated read time: 5 Minutes
This post ran original on The Drum on September 30th it can be viewed by clicking here
Thank you Covid, we just broke the record for poor performance. According to Hubspot, the response rate to emails fell to a record low of 2.1% in April. Said differently, 98% of our efforts to reach new prospects failed.
With conversion down what did we do? You guessed it, we increased the number of emails sent during the same period by 50%, according to Hubspot’s survey of 70,000 customers. We are playing a zero sum game, and it’s literally a race to the bottom.
Why is this acceptable? Yes, the pandemic has had a dramatic impact, but even in good times, a 4% click through rate is the benchmark. Why haven’t we been able to improve?
Because the only real lever we really had was to increase volume as conversion rates declined. Now with the advent of new tools, we’re uncovering issues and learning new insights into how to improve performance. Here are 3 things we have discovered so far.
Issue #1 – The Wrong Objectives
Marketing has, because of the pressure from the rest of the organization (from mostly sales and the product organization) lost sight of its objectives. Marketing’s goal is to increase the awareness and interest in a company’s brand, product and/or services and get that prospect to take action. It’s to start the cycle, get a conversation going and drive interest.
A good marketing prospect is an information seeker. Employees who are on the constant lookout for information that benefits them personally, in their role, or for the greater good of the company. A great marketing prospect is someone who will bring our information into the organization, get the buying process started and advocate for your brand.
The point, what we are defining is a personality type, not a title. In the past that has been very difficult to identify. As a result, we have had to rely on mining the existing customer database or using a persona that was defined by the product or sale organization which has left us with senior level buyers.
The problem with that is many of these targets, who are decision makers or budget holders, are not present at the beginning of the buyer’s journey. And as we now know, they are also not interested in what we’re offering.
Issue #2 – The Wrong Targets
With the advent of personality profiling tools like Crystal Knows, IBM Watson, or xiQ, it is now possible to determine which personality types are most likely to meet the needs of marketing.
AI enabled profiling tools identify 4 personality types as defined by DISC (Dominant, Influencing, Steady and Conscientious). Of the four personalities, only 2 types of audiences are good for marketing purposes because of their behaviors and motivations.
Based on our recent client work across the healthcare, tech and professional services industries, we also know that at least 30% of a company’s customers will profile into one of the two categories that are either not active information seekers or are not active in the buying group.
They will not convert, but given our current practices, they still end up on the target list driving down response and conversion rates.
Issue #3 – The Wrong Type of Content or Marketing Assets or Both
The two key audience segments that are present at the beginning of the buying process and actively seek information have different motivations for why, and how they intend to use information.
When targeting titles, companies create one type of content based on that buyer’s role. With personality profiling we know that audiences have different preferences for content and how it’s packaged.
The first personality type prefers “big picture” highly visual content told in story form. These “motivators” are drawn to infographics, animated and testimonial videos, which allow them to grasp concepts very quickly.
Their personality type is “altruistic” and they use information to share with others for the good of the organization. Their motivations are deeply personal in that they like to be seen or perceived as a “thought leader” that others seek out for insight.
Contrast that with the other active information seeker. The “demonstrator” profile seeks information relevant to them in their role. They want “proven” information, use cases, case studies, and business case material (ROI’s). Content that is rich in information on how to implement and business impact.
Combined, these two groups will make up 70% of your responders to marketing activities depending on what it is, and you need to know how that mixes to build and align content. And here’s a hint, you only need two types of personas for marketing…the two I just described.
We are dealing with a future that is more uncertain than anything we have experienced in the past. Add to that an election, polarization and social justice movements we have one of the most emotionally charged atmospheres in modern history. ABM and personas do not delve deep enough into defining buyers interest, motivations and preferences.
To improve marketing performance you have to ramp up personality based marketing and that will require work. Not everyone will be willing to put in the effort, but the ones that are will break the chain of putting more in and getting less out.
