As marketers, we are great at communicating with our audience and creating compelling content that just clicks with our customers. Making a successful content strategy, seeing results in our KPIs, and watching our brand come to life are what drive us to feel like successful marketers. But one of the biggest steps to reaching that point is researching our target audience.

Questions like how do I find my target audience or how do I do market research are commonly asked when first defining a brand identity. Whether you’re a startup or have been doing business locally for decades, it’s always important to take a step back and view yourself from the perspective of a customer.

To effectively understand your customers, you need to dig into their minds. Beyond their demographics, behaviors, and preferences you need to identify their personality. Using the common Big Five personality traits psychological theory, we can break down a customer into different categories. Let’s approach this with an analogy and acronym — think of yourself as a fisherman building your understanding of the OCEAN:

1. Openness

2. Conscientiousness

3. Extraversion

4. Agreeableness

5. Neuroticism

Openness

The O in ocean stands for openness. This refers to the openness of new experiences and how willing your audience is to try new things. An individual with high openness is likely to get creative, experiment, and be interested with trying new things. Someone with low openness will likely refrain from those behaviors.

How do we measure the openness of our audience?

We can take a look at a few behavioral patterns to measure the openness of our target market. One approach is to look at the ease of conversion — are our new leads quick to convert?

Of course, there are many factors that could influence this: such as price, elasticity of demand, uniqueness. Therefore, it’s important to observe these conversion rates relative to industry expectations. If you’re noticing that your family-owned coffee shop has many more tourists stop by and your neighboring competitor has more locals, that could be a great sign of your audience having more openness.

How can we use a customer’s openness to our advantage?

Implementing a communication style to highlight your unique selling proposition (USP) can be highly beneficial to reaching new leads. Since your business attracts customers with a high openness, it’s likely that you’re offering something that satisfies their sense of adventure.

Use this to your advantage — your messaging should embrace your unique qualities and focus more on reaching new audiences than pushing recurring purchases.

Related: The Risks and Benefits of Cross-Posting on Social Media

Conscientiousness

The C in ocean stands for conscientiousness. This refers to how organizer or spontaneous someone is. It’s great to know this trait of your customers when figuring out your messaging because it can drastically change the framing of your product’s use. You can sell the same product, for example an iPhone, to both a spontaneous and organized individual in two completely different ways.

Marketing Communications to a Spontaneous Audience

An audience with low conscientiousness can be seen as spontaneous or disorganized. They often lack structure and are very impulsive. How do you curate your messaging to target an impulsive audience?

The best way to convince an impulsive lead to buy your product is to show the ease of use and flexibility. Going back to the iPhone marketing example, it would be a great idea to highlight the iPhone’s near-endless catalog of apps within its App Store. A spontaneous consumer who is also already within the Apple ecosystem may enjoy the comfort of staying within that ecosystem. Reducing the thinking time to convert a lead and have them doubt themselves makes these purchases almost autonomous and reduces the friction with your marketing communications.

Marketing Communications to an Organized Audience

The same autonomous decision making can be applied to an organized audience with the previous example, but the intent behind the purchase is different. A conscientious individual is likely not purchasing an iPhone solely because it’s what they’re used to. It’s likely that they have found an organized workflow within the Apple ecosystem and are choosing to stick with it because of that.

Within your own brand, you should be using the level of conscientiousness amongst your customers to communicate the value of your product. Changing the messaging from “we have a quick and simple upgrade process” to “we can transfer your data exactly the way it is” can be the difference maker when catering to the desires of your target market.

Related: Turn Reel Views to Followers: The Instagram Funnel Secret

Extraversion

Directing your marketing towards introverts and extroverts can be a tough area to understand. It seems like a much unrelated trait that shouldn’t be considered in your marketing communications, but it makes a big difference in how your audience perceives your messaging.

To understand how to communicate to each of these individuals, we have to take a look at their behavior patterns.

Extroverted Purchase Patterns

Extroverts are defined primarily by their dependency on external emotions. Outside of purchases, we can find most extroverts looking into the emotions of others and being driven by others’ behaviors. What separates extroverts from introverts is the source of energy and motivation.

As a result of this external drive, you can find the most effective mode of marketing communications is through referrals and third-parties. Having a spokesperson sharing their opinion on why they love a particular experience can trigger the emotional connection that extroverts long for.

Introverted Purchase Patterns

On the other end of the spectrum, introverts depend most of their decision-making on internal and intutive traits. Looking at details like product qualities, strengths, and benefits can help convince a customer to make a purchase or book that trip more than referrals.

Tailoring your messaging more towards the tangible qualities rather than emotional benefits can give you a great boost in your communications. Using specifics, and providing all the details for your customer to work with on their own, is key to a successful marketing strategy targeting introverts.

Agreeableness

Agreeableness can be the measure of perspective and opinion building. The two ends of the spectrum are often labeled as hostile vs agreeable, but some label it as friendliness or antagonizing. The approach to your marketing should remain relatively consistent to both of these audiences, but should almost always be worded in a way to avoid hostility.

Tailoring Marketing Communications to “Hostile” Customers

A target market with a more optimistic or agreeable personality is less likely to address issues before a purchase. Consequentially, the opposite trait of hostility keeps you on your toes and ready to stand for your product (in a non-agressive way, of course).

Ensuring that all of your wording, messaging, and images aren’t inflating or manipulating the potential lead into thinking your product is something different than in reality is key. The more defined and clear your messaging is, the less room there is for questioning the validity of your product. One specific question I like to ask myself before finalizing any social media post or ad is: “What would my first impression of this be if I didn’t know what was being sold?”

Neuroticism

Neuroticism refers to the emotional stability of an individual. Someone with high neuroticism is more unpredictable, can see changes in mood easily, and may struggle to bounce back frrom stressful situations. How do you use this to your advantage in your marketing efforts? You realistically can’t, but you can use it when assessing the potential reactions to major changes.

If you’re implementing a new product, changing a service, or altering a product, it may benefit you to be wary of its impacts on your existing customers. Now, this should be considered regardless whether the majority of your audience has high or low neuroticism. There aren’t many benefits to targeting your marketing towards neuroticism (or lack thereof), but it’s important to keep it in the back of your mind when connsidering the potential downsides of changes.

Conclusion

These big five personality traits are a great tool to help you categorize and put some identifiers on your audience. Using these five traits are great starting points to understanding the behaviors and proactively assess reactions to certain marketing communications.

It takes time to understand your audience, so patience is key here! Establishing a direction to approach your marketing can be a first step but truly listening and asking questions is the fundamental aspect at play.

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