Inbound lead generation works when you speak your persona's language

At the risk of sounding a bit obvious, the language you use can affect how people see you and how they choose to interact with your business. With this in mind, understanding your audience is the key to success when it comes to inbound lead generation. Believe it or not, emotions often override logic in the decision making process, even in the case of big financial choices. Gut instinct, or following your heart, counts for a lot.

Breaking up audiences and creating buyer personas based on simple demographics doesn’t cut it anymore. You can’t accurately target content towards all middle-aged males, for instance. This audience is just too vague. So how can you find out what kind of language is best suited to your inbound lead generation needs?

Give your buyer persona some personality

Personality type plays a massive part in an individual’s decision making process. Whether an individual is logical or emotional, cautious or spontaneous, introvert or extrovert, can have a huge impact on the way they will respond to your inbound lead generation efforts. 

The Six & Flow team has taken the Myers-Briggs test, and we all came out with different personality types. The fact that our personality types are so different actually works well when we discuss how to approach different buyer personas, because we all identify with different audience characteristics.

When we take on a new client at Six & Flow, we ask them to fill out ‘client homework’ in order to learn more about them. One of the questions we ask in this is, “what does your ideal lead look like?” Their answer can include job title, age, education, affluence, lifestyle… the list goes on.

Not only does this tell us the basic demographic qualities of their ideal lead, but it also helps us identify who they do not want to target. Using this basic knowledge, we build out different types of of personas that will support our inbound lead generation going forward.

But how do we add more detail and build out these personas? Well, we use a range of psychological methods which help us to identify different personality types, consider they approach buying and uncover how they would most enjoy “being sold to.”

Language - It’s more than just talk

After building out these personas, we tailor the language we use to each. Language plays a massive part in someone’s decision making process, and using language that resonates well with a particular persona will influence their decision to buy more than you might think.

It’s not just the tone of voice you use for different clients either. Some people like explicit persuasive language and a “hard sell,” while others prefer a softer and subtler approach. In addition to the words you use, your key selling points need to target your buyer persona too, so leads can justify why they are converting to sale.

Take financial services as an example. For some people, brand recognition may be a key selling point for Barclaycard or Halifax, while others may be more attracted to emerging market players like Monzo or Starling. For this reason, established banks often focus on trust, reliability and history in their marketing, while new digital offerings focus on innovation, industry disruption and exciting new upgrades to their services.

In short, it’s important to understand how your messaging speaks to potential leads on a personal level.

How to improve your inbound lead generation 

When we create a buyer persona, we break the process into the following steps:

• Demographics
• Personality type
• Their story
• Personality analysis (strengths and weaknesses, ambitions and barriers)

All of these factors help to direct our approach to inbound lead generation and structure our marketing content. When we write blogs, social media messaging or website content, we write with these personas in mind. Simple!

However, we don’t just focus our language on one specific audience’s journey. We also use tailored call-to-actions and personalised workflows to appeal to different personality types.

When we build out buyer personas, a lot of it comes down to client collaboration. This process can’t be done by an inbound marketing agency in isolation. The way we collaborate can vary – as I mentioned earlier, we tend to gather this information from new client homework. In other instances, clients have pinpointed their ideal lead on HubSpot, and we worked backwards to examine this individual’s personality traits and behaviour patterns.

If you’re still feeling confused, why not get in touch? The Six & Flow team are inbound lead generation experts, with heaps of experience in developing buyer personas across a number of sectors.