Michael Epps Utley 
Personality-based marketing has become popular recently and is changing how small businesses promote themselves. By understanding how personality traits impact purchasing decisions, companies can run more effective marketing campaigns and build strong consumer connections.
This guide explains personality-based marketing and how to leverage it effectively.
Personality Marketing: The Basics
Personality marketing combines personality and behavioral science and applies it to marketing. It helps businesses deliver more effective, personalized campaigns based on the specific personality types represented in their consumer base.
What Is the Science of Personality?
Personality science (also known as personality psychology) is a discipline centered on understanding the psychological patterns that shape people’s personalities.
Personality governs many aspects of the human character, including:
Behaviors
Motivations
Thinking
Emotion
Attitudes
Intelligence
Temperament
Skills
And more
Personality science uses research and empirical studies to determine how these patterns are expressed in people’s lives.
The Benefits of Personality-Based Marketing
Incorporating personality traits and how they affect buyer behavior into your marketing efforts can help make them more effective, which can positively impact your business's bottom line. It can also help build stronger connections with consumers by enabling marketing and communication experiences that resonate with them.
How to Determine the Personality Types of Your Consumers
Here are four popular ways to figure out different consumer personality types.
1. The Big Five Personality Model
This five-factor model ranks individuals high or low on these five personality traits:
Openness reflects things like creativity, imagination, curiosity, and adventurousness. It points toward a thirst for new experiences.
Contentiousness corresponds to organization, hard work, dependability, and discipline. It is a sign that someone appreciates order.
Extraversion relates to qualities like friendliness, sociability, and high levels of activity. It describes people who crave connections.
Agreeableness is all about how cooperative and compassionate someone is. It demonstrates that they like group activities and are helpful.
Neuroticism is characterized by the tendency to experience negative emotions. It is often a sign of emotional instability and potential mental issues.
Reviewing these traits against your typical customers can help you gain insights into their personalities and preferences.
2. Leverage Web Analytics and Digital Habits
Use your visitors' website behavioral data and habits to learn about their personalities. This provides vital information about what interests them, the pages viewed, their path through your website, the content they interact with, their purchases, their time spent online, and more. Another thing to view is their social media patterns, including what people like, click, comment on, and share. All these things can point to personality attributes.
3. Use Market Segmentation
Market segmentation divides your entire consumer base into smaller groups based on select criteria, such as demographics, geography, psychology, and behavior. Separating your complete consumer base into segments will provide you with a more detailed look at the personality traits that make up your target audience. It will help you avoid coming to conclusions based on broad generalizations.
4. Conduct Surveys or Focus Groups
Conducting surveys or hosting focus groups are good ways to get to know your customers better. What’s critical is to come up with questions and topics for conversation that will provide you with personality-related information to help improve your marketing. Ensure surveys and focus groups are as simple and straightforward as possible to keep participants focused and insights clear.
How to Leverage Personality Science in Marketing
The consumer personality insights generated through the activities in the previous section should be used to enhance your marketing strategies. Here are four ways to integrate personality science into your marketing.
1. Develop Customer Personas
A customer personal (also called a consumer profile or target/audience persona) is a comprehensive document that provides a detailed description of your company’s ideal customer. It's typically presented as a complete description of an actual person. Personas usually go into detail about various aspects of an ideal customer, including:
Education
Work and income
Values
Life goals
Family
Where they live
Habits
Sports, hobbies, and other activities
Interests
And anything required to understand your ideal customer completely
Consumer profiles can provide direct insights into what your best buyers want and how they prefer to access it. With this information, you can better target your marketing so it resonates with prospective buyers.
2. Develop and Deliver Targeted Communication
Understanding your consumers’ psychological patterns can help you identify their preferred communication styles and methods. Traditionally, marketing communication was one-size-fits-all. It didn't consider personality traits and corresponding communication preferences. You can leverage personality information to create messaging and delivery variations tailored to the different segments of your ideal customer base. The variations should take into account messaging, language used, word choice, and distribution methods (for example, video versus print versus social media).
3. Personalize Visual Material
Leverage your personality information to deliver compelling visual content that will resonate with all the types of people you’re targeting. Consider font styles (traditional versus modern), color schemes (neutral versus bold), imagery (realistic versus abstract), and the overall layout of content (linear versus a more complex path).
4. Update Your Entire Buying Journey
Go beyond individual marketing efforts and leverage personality information to influence your complete marketing and sales cycle, from initial brand awareness to the decision to purchase a product or service and beyond. It could help prevent disconnects in the buying process that could turn off different consumer segments.
Personality in Marketing: The Final Word
In the past, people were willing to accept one-size-fits-all marketing. However, today, they expect efforts that speak to their individual needs and personalities. Leverage the information in this article to better understand the personalities of the people you’re targeting and create marketing campaigns and sales journeys that speak to their unique preferences.
