Are psychometrics the pathway to perfect personas?

How effective are your buying personas?

Buying personas are a great way to segment your target audience, allowing you to send targeted marketing messages, rather than the same blanket communication to everyone. By combining a persona profile with the relevant stage of the buyer’s journey, you can ensure content is delivered with the right message, in the best format, for maximum impact and engagement.

But while many have developed personas to achieve this, our experience suggests only a few are using them effectively. It’s not a quick job to create personas that are truly insightful and effective in helping you develop your content marketing and deliver a persuasive strategy.

To help you understand what target customers really need and want, it’s crucial to establish empathy that relates to their journey through the buying process. But what about looking in more detail at personality and behaviours? This is where psychometrics can help.

Personality and persona

The most effective buyer personas are founded on market research – like surveys and interviews – as well as insights into your current customers and prospects. Invest time conducting research, surveys and interviews with your target audience – including those outside of your contact database who might align with your ideal profile. Throughout the research stage, try to compile as much detail as possible to build a comprehensive picture of the persona you are building.

Another option is to dig a little deeper into the personality types of your target personas. How do different personality personas want to consume content, and via which communication channels? Personality factors can help build a more accurate picture of how your personas want to engage. For example, do they prefer to self-serve information or want to design solutions in collaboration, how do they want to interact and how often?

We can’t possibly know for sure, but we can start to be more aware of how to create content that serves multiple personality types, in turn delivering a better customer experience and an increased customer lifetime value (CLV).

Psychometric tools and frameworks

This is where psychometric tools and frameworks can play an incredibly important role in helping to build effective buyer personas. Combined with other research and insight, these tools can enable us to understand customer behaviour in a way that gives a richer, deeper understanding of their drivers. There are many coaching frameworks, models and psychometric tools out there that claim to be able to reflect our drivers, our personalities and in turn predict our behaviour patterns. So, let’s examine four well known options that you might consider diving into further.

Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) is based on psychiatrist Carl Jung's philosophy theories which profiles 16 personality types and defines four core dynamics:

• Introvert/Extrovert - gain energy primarily from inner self or outer world.
• Sensor/Intuitive - receive more sensory information or interpret its meaning.
• Thinker/Feeler - make decisions using more logic or emotion.
• Judger/Perceiver - desire more structure or spontaneity.

MBTI is often used during recruitment to determine fit and management styles. In this instance, when creating your buyer persona, consider which dynamic dominates your prospect's behaviour pattern from your observations. For example, do they primarily make decisions based on external, cold-hard facts? Or do they go with a gut instinct? Consider how you can integrate this information into your buyer journey and the content you offer at each stage.

DiSC Profiling is a personal assessment tool commonly used by individuals and organisations to help improve teamwork, communication and productivity in the workplace.

DiSC stands for the four main personality profiles described in the DiSC model: (D)ominance, (i)nfluence, (S)teadiness and (C)onscientiousness.

• D personalities tend to be confident and place an emphasis on accomplishing bottom-line results.
• i personalities tend to be more open and place an emphasis on relationships and influencing or persuading others.
• S personalities tend to be dependable and place the emphasis on cooperation and sincerity.
• C personalities tend to place the emphasis on quality, accuracy, expertise and competency.

Interestingly DISC is commonly used by sales teams to help them understand the behavioural styles of their prospects, and how they prefer to interact. Understanding a prospects drivers and preferred styles of communication can be hugely beneficial for building that all important rapport that can influence deals.

The Think Feel Know Model is essentially a coaching framework, typically used within organisations to understand how teams interact in order to maximise productivity and relationships. This model can also be a useful lens for understanding customer behaviour:

• Think is a way of communicating that revolves around data - words, numbers, facts, details.
• Feel is a way of communicating that revolves around energy - feelings, pictures, metaphor, narrative.
• Know is a way of communicating that revolves around instinct - very few words, almost no detail, short sometimes abrupt decisions. The nature of Know is very intuitive, and decisive.

This plays into the way people consume information, how they prefer to communicate and what mediums will resonate best. It tends to be the case that senior leaders are in the ‘Know’ space – especially entrepreneurial thinkers. Not surprisingly, people in creative roles are geared more towards ‘Feel’ – preferring a more kinaesthetic style.

Crystal Knows is an extension for Google Chrome that works alongside LinkedIn to deliver in-depth personality insights for the profiles you are viewing. Using AI and cleverly constructed algorithms it creates a personality profile based on the individual’s LinkedIn profile. Being armed with such knowledge allows you to adapt how you approach and interact with this individual dependent upon the traits identified.

What does this mean for Marketing?

Naturally, we aren’t able to ask our prospects or customers to take psychometric tests so that we can perfectly pinpoint their core drivers. But knowledge of these tools can help us to be more attuned to the information we can access, and start to apply this thinking to inform our future content strategies. If we can empathise with the pressures, challenges and motivations our target audience faces, then we can start to build emotional pathways in the way we connect through our content.

Taking into account personality types, preferred communication styles and the way in which certain personas digest information, you can repurpose your key content assets across different mediums to reach your target segments with more impact. For example – a whitepaper that might suit someone in the “Think” space can be sliced into more snackable content for a persona who prefers little detail and headline facts. And for those visual communicators – an infographic, a video or even an animation.

Creating a set of assets that suit your target personas can also create efficiencies for Marketing. You can make confident decisions about which assets to include in campaigns rather than “covering all bases” just in case. This in turn will be key in supporting sales teams with the right sales enablement content they need according to the prospect persona they are targeting.

You can even segment your personas in your CRM database so that they dynamically receive the right content pieces according to the actions they take during the buyer journey. For example, Hubspot smart content modules mean you can create specific parameters for your persona groups – which group they are in will determine what content they receive at each stage. The ability to personalise and segment is ready and waiting, it’s how you categorise that will make the biggest difference.

Want to know more?

Our latest eBook ‘Buyer Personas: A guide for B2B marketing professionals’ includes helpful tools and examples you can use to create content that resonates with your buyer, time after time. Talk to us to discover how to segment, profile and target effectively.