Customer personas and customer profiles are nothing new to the world of B2B marketing, but new innovations in artificial intelligence and natural language processing are now making it possible to combine an entirely new element to these profiles: psychographic behavioral analytics.
CaliberMind, recently named one of the Top 25 most innovative startups worldwide, says that it has developed a new B2B marketing technology platform that harnesses the power of machine learning and human language analysis to construct a 360-degree psychological persona, which can predict how a buyer will behave.
The underlying premise is an interesting one: titles, roles and functions in the business world may not be as predictive as commonly supposed. Instead, it could be more effective to think in terms of psychographic and behavioral profiles.
The goal, of course, is the same as that of any other B2B marketing technology — higher sales conversions rates and higher-quality engagement.
So how does psychographic behavioral analytics work?
The starting point is being able to pull out voice and email conversations from a company’s CRM database. Then, the next step is to pull in data from different marketing automation tools. For example, you can see how a customer responds to different emails or sales messages. The next step is to search the web for more information about the prospect, especially on social media and social networks.
Here’s where things get really interesting because psychographic behavioral analytics also has a natural language processing feature to it. That means it’s possible to understand how a prospect thinks, talks and responds online. And there’s a machine learning aspect to all this, which basically means that a computer system gets smarter and smarter, the more times it has to interact with prospects. Over time, it “learns” how to avoid making mistakes, and how to interpret ambiguous information.
And that’s what leads to the really revolutionary step – it may soon be possible to take all of a company’s marketing messages and marketing collateral to find a message that will “work.” In short, a computer will assure that you are talking to the prospect in a language and a manner that he or she understands, and that will make any message resonate and perform better.
There’s obviously a lot to unpack here. We are moving from an era in which only certain types of structured and quantitative data can be used to construct profiles – such as age, gender, income and title – to an era in which highly subjective, qualitative data can also be used to construct profiles.
It’s easy to surmise that, in the future, all B2B sales professionals will be amateur behavioral
analysts as well, carefully studying prospects for the way they think, write and respond to marketing messages. Over time, it would theoretically be possible to put together some remarkably sophisticated psychographic profiles of a prospect. Just by understanding how he or she uses social media, for example, it might be possible to come up with a winning sales message. It will certainly be interesting to see where this heads, especially as artificial intelligence and machine learning become ever more important aspects of the business enterprise.
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Dane
Dane Cobain is a published author, freelance writer, book blogger, poet and (occasional) musician from High Wycombe, UK. Before going freelance, he worked as a social media marker, now specialising in writing about publishing, technology and marketing.