Identify customer personalities to get your message across – Here’s how to map your customer personalities 

Hello, can anyone hear me? Many companies are united by one single problem, or rather a challenge: How to hook potential customers to your content and where to find them? Customer loss is not limited to a few and select, almost all companies regularly struggle with these same issues. Problems don’t exist without solutions – when a company maps and surveys customer personalities, the light at the end of the tunnel starts to get much brighter.

It’s easy to say that of course we know what kind of customers we have, but at some point a superficial acquaintance is not going to be enough. If a company wants to make a profit and gain a competitive edge with their marketing, they must get to know their customers thoroughly. Before continuing the discussion, you need to understand a thing or two about customer personalities.

What are customer personalities?

On a shopping trip, the different customer personalities of Hannah, Mary and Jennifer are influential throughout the whole shopping experience – Hannah finds herself a wonderful summer dress that Mary showers with praise. Jennifer decides to surprise Hannah and buys the summer dress for her as a birthday present. In this case, the customer personalities of the trio have the following effect: Hannah is the user, Mary is the recommender or in other words, the influencer, and Jennifer is surprisingly the buyer. Which of the three do you want marketing to affect and whose needs should the design meet?

When surveying customer personalities, the aim is to find out a broader understanding of the customer. What are his needs and what is his usual buying path and buying behavior? It is a question of how different customer personalities spend their time online and on what they base their purchasing decisions on.

Marketing can work once customer personalities have been mapped and internalized. Hannah nonetheless is a different shopper than Jennifer – the marketing message that affects Hannah, might not have the same success with Jennifer. If you don’t know this, you’re wasting your time and money on Jennifer with a marketing message that has no effect. It’s pointless to focus your energy first on choosing a social media channel and only then wonder where your customers are. Step 1 is always the mapping of customer personalities. Step 2 is selecting a suitable channel for marketing, based on customer personalities. 

In summary, customer personalities are an important factor for every company to address and map.

Map customer personalities step by step

Knowing customer personalities helps you tailor and target your marketing message effectively. This helps in developing products to meet your customers real needs. It’s not just a nice-sounding term, but a really useful tool. So how are customer personalities mapped then? Read our concise guide that helps you complete step-by-step mapping! Good luck.

Step 1: Create a fictional character based on fact

You will need factual information from things like marketing, sales and customer service. Information that broadens your knowledge about what kind of people customers are. When mapping customer personalities, the aim is to learn the customer’s thought process. To get inside their head and figure out what they would want, need and what are their shopping behaviors. Once you have gathered reliable data about the customer, it’s time to create a fictional customer character. Your first task is to name your customer. You can then define his or her background, life situation, hobbies, interests and needs that you are looking to satisfy. A handy way is to draw a character on a piece of paper and list aside all the essential information.

The customer personality could be, for example, 47-year-old Matthew. Matthew has been divorced for a year and is now looking for a new partner. Matthew loves motorcycles and wants everything running smoothly with little effort. If something doesn’t work out, he won’t wait long. What can you offer Matthew? You have an app, through which you can search potential dating partners or the love of your life. Matthews impulsiveness and impatience must be taken into account in the marketing message that is addressed to him. Messages targeted at Matthew should be kept short, easy to read and concise. Additionally, make sure that CTA or Call-to-action is right in front of his eyes. Matthew wants to get to his destination with one click, instead of three.

Step 2: Bring the character to life by interviewing a real customer

A stick figure on a paper won’t of course match exactly the real customer you are looking for. However, it is important to identify possible factors beforehand and then seek confirmation from an actual customer. Interviewing real customers is a good indicator in ensuring you have defined customer personalities correctly. It’s a miserable feeling to notice only after several marketing measures that customer personalities are actually something completely different from what you thought they were. 

Tip: Interview five genuine customers. This is enough to create an idea of whether or not the defined customer personalities are correct. If the defined personalities and reality do not match, make a few improvements with your newly improved knowledge and voilà!

Step 3: Follow in the footsteps of your defined customer personality

Customer personalities give an idea of what the customer is thinking. The customer’s purchasing journey must be specified to get the right message to the right channel at the right time. The starting point is often that there is no connection between the customer and the company – so the first meeting point must be created. In order to create this, you must think about what keywords your customer is searching for on Google, what kind of content they want to see, and on what channel. To be able to answer these questions, you need to establish deeper knowledge of your customer and get to properly know them.

As the customer is reaching the final meeting point, i.e. a Facebook advertisement, for example, they have already been prepared with previous meeting points to complete the purchasing decision. Different customer personalities require different approaches along the way – knowing what kind of content they would like makes it much easier to create compelling content and the whole buyer’s path.

Read more about customer research in our blog: What SEO research can tell us about our customers 

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