Connecting on A Deeper Level: Maximizing Lead Generation with Personality Modeling

Take your lead strategy to the next level with personality modeling.

How Would You Define Your Buying Decisions?

Imagine yourself walking past a shiny-glitzy showroom when an outfit on a mannequin catches your eye. Are you the type who, a few minutes later, is walking out holding a shopping bag with your new acquisition?

Or maybe you are the kind who will not settle until you have visited every brick-and-mortar store and scoured every ecommerce site to find that one product that ticks all the boxes for you?

Or are you the online shopper who takes their homework seriously? You browse multiple sites, compare similar products, read reviews, ask friends for recommendations, list all the pros and cons before you zero in on the one product that delivers best value for its price range?

Why We Behave The Way We Do

We are all different in the way we approach purchases – our behavior is conditioned by our experiences, upbringings, values, attitudes and beliefs.

Some of us are impulsive, some cautious, others watchful. Still others are focused on value and want to be sure of getting their money’s worth before they commit to a purchase. While our thought processes could vary depending on the value of the product, our innate behavior remains more or less the same.

Which is why marketer researchers spend serious amounts of time and effort in trying to understand the psychological profiles and buying behavior patterns of prospective buyers.

How Does Personality Relate to Marketing?

The connect between marketing and personality runs deep. Business people since time immemorial, have leveraged their positions by picking up on subtle tells to negotiate better.

In face-to-face interactions, individuals convey nonverbal messages through their body language, facial expressions, eye contact , gestures,or  voice modulations. But in the digital marketplace,  the buyer’s face is hidden behind a virtual smokescreen with no access to these physical cues.

And that’s where digital psychometrics comes in.

AI in marketing

Advanced businesses harness AI to gather data to help build personality based on the signal collected. The data collected is a mix of inputs gathered through questionnaires, surveys and trackers(with consent of course) and tracing online buying behavior to understand customer needs and wants better.

How personality models benefit both businesses and prospects

The intriguing aspect of psychographics and psychometrics is that it is beneficial to both, the businesses and the buyer.

For marketers and salespersons, understanding personality traits of the prospect leads to insights that have a direct impact on a sale.

Here are five broad ways that psychometrics, the identification of traits, can help marketers. Audience segments can be pitched according to the emphasis they lay on a specific feature.

1. Hyper focused target audience segmentation. When an audience can be categorized based on a specific dominant trait, the marketer can use this to create personalized messaging. For instance, a group that shows a strong ‘leadership’ trait can be the perfect audience while launching a new product. Most leaders are eager to be first ones to try a new offering, and love to explore new options.
   
   Thus while launching a new offering it is best to craft a message appealing to the ‘leader’s need to be the pioneer or “the first one” and their natural need to lead and be early adopters.
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2. Accurate Brand Positioning. Luxury goods are targeted towards high performing individuals. These are people who are ambitious and love to maintain a larger-than-life image. Once again products targeted here should focus more on the personality rather than pure demographics since not everybody in the said demographic segment may be attracted to luxury goods.
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3. Establishing Emotional Connect. Extroverts and naturally empathetic people who rely on human connections relate well to emotions and feelings. Certain brands use nostalgia, or situational memories to invoke  feelings of warmth or safety as a medium to connect with their target audience and build a brand that forms an emotional bond.
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4. Work on an inclusive and socially aware image. As the world evolves, ideas and values are also changing. Awareness of the latest ways of thinking in terms of societal norms and environment concerns is another strong characteristic expected by the consumer - especially among the younger generations. Technology and new age products must conform to the values of Gen Z if these need to succeed in the market.
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5. Data driven,facts based identity. When selling to large businesses, the final decision makers are more often a group of people and the onus does not lie with one individual. While each individual will display different characteristics the combined decision will flow more easily when confronted with hard facts and data. Individuals also display this bias. When dealing with this segment or type of individual it is in your interest to use  messaging that highlights facts and figures and provide proof as social and hard data.

Personality models

Psychologists who  have studied human behavior have created various personality frameworks. Among these, the most well known is the Big Five personality model. This model uses behavioral cues to identify personality traits based on five fundamental dimensions. The five key traits are : openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism.

The Big Five is also known as the OCEAN personality model, based on the first letters of the traits they identify. Given the complex nature of people , several researchers have worked on this and this dynamic model has evolved over time.

One version uses a more nuanced personality structure that identifies eight traits. These are:

• Leader
• Conservative
• Experience Seeker
• Risk Taker
• Inspiration Seeker
• Innovator
• Socializer
• Adaptor

Once marketers are able to identify the personality type they are able to use psychological profiling to identify the right buyer. When these MQLs are identified, businesses are able to approach these prospects with customized messaging at the right time and close sales with higher levels of accuracy and frequency of success.

If you are curious to know more about these personality types, follow us for more as we reveal the traits and tells of each of these types in the upcoming blogs!