Does Your Marketing Appeal to Every Learning Style?

Effective marketing these days is more about teaching than selling. Every seasoned teacher will tell you that people learn and consume

information in different ways. Even within a narrowly defined, ideal target market there exists many different personalities and just as many different learning styles.

The problem this presents to the marketing folks is that you can no longer strive to create the brochure or web page, with stunning images and evocative stories, and hope to appeal to someone who is a “just the facts ma’am” kind of person.

The web has raised the bar and when a prospect goes out there online they expect to find lots of information, in a variety of formats, packaged for the way they want to consume it. Your marketing materials must come in many different flavors and offer something for every buying style.

I’ve always promoted something I call a marketing kit approach. This can pertain to online of offline materials because it’s as much about what the information is as how it’s presented. The idea behind the kit approach is that you create various forms of content to appeal to different needs.

There are a number of personality profile tools that validate the learning style theory and if you could just have each of your prospects and customers complete one of those for you life would be great.

You may never have that luxury, but you can learn from what these personality instruments teach about how to interact with different learning styles.

One of the more popular tools is called the DISC profile. You may have seen or taken the DISC profile. DISC is the four quadrant behavioral model based on the work of William Moulton Marston Ph.D. to examine the behavior of individuals in their environment or within a specific situation. DISC looks at behavioral styles and behavioral preferences.

DISC is an acronym for:

• Dominance – relating to control, power and assertiveness
• Influence – relating to social situations and communication
• Steadiness (submission in Marston’s time)- relating to patience, persistence, and thoughtfulness
• Conscientiousness (or caution, compliance in Marston’s time) – relating to structure and organization

My take on this when it comes to marketing materials is that different behavioral styles need different marketing messages and forms of communication and content.

In our marketing kit example a

• D – needs the facts, the quick rationalization of benefit that a case statement might make, case studies too
• I – loves a good story, relates to more classic marketing messages of difference, loves images
• S – likes volume of content, frequency and consistency of content and message, full feature dumps, white papers
• C – responds to FAQs, testimonials, case studies – proof, checklists

Also consider that nobody is strictly a high D or high I, we’re all made up of mixtures.

Create lots of marketing content, package it in different formats (including audio and video) and offer it up for all to consume, knowing that how it’s consumed will differ from prospect to prospect.