What Type of Learner Are You (And Your Buyers)? This [Flowchart] Will Tell You.

Throughout my school career, I must have taken about a dozen quizzes, tests, and assessments providing information on how I personally learn best.

In fact, this topic fascinated me so much, I actually completed my college senior thesis on visual-spatial learning.

But why is it so important to know how you learn best? Or have some insight into how your colleagues, clients, family, or friends learn?

Your understanding of how you learn can impact your efficiency, motivation, attention span, memory, and more. It can also heavily affect the way you speak, read, and write throughout your personal and professional life.

A person normally has a mix of learning styles, with one or two being more dominant than the others.

By discovering your main style(s), you can work on improving how you obtain and retain information -- a skill that is critical for excelling in any career.

What’s more, if you take the time to find out what type of learners your buyers are, you can use this to your advantage when it comes time to presenting effective messaging and content, as well as communicating with them in the sales process and beyond.

Entrepreneur recently highlighted an infographic provided by UK company, Pound Place, that includes a flowchart to help you figure out which type of learner you are.

Once you’ve landed on your style, you can read more about what that means for you as an individual.

5 Major Learning Styles

Although there are many theories on the number and different types of learning styles, we can generally put them into five major groups.

Each uses a different part or parts of the brain. By involving more of the brain while we learn, we can remember more.

1. Visual

Directed by the occipital lobe at the back of your brain, when you’re a visual learner, you prefer absorbing information through pictures, images, and spatial understanding.

Maps, diagrams, and body language are also extremely helpful.

A visual learner often loses interest in reading big blocks of text with minimal imagery, as well as listening to long, unbroken lectures, audio books, or tutorials.

From a marketing standpoint, if your buyer is primarily visual learner, it makes sense to create content that includes meaningful and informational imagery to help convey your message and make it easier for them to digest (i.e. infographics, videos, etc.).

2. Aural/Auditory

If you’re an aural or auditory learner, you learn best by listening.

This includes via music, audio-translated books or messages, or simply lectures or verbal information.

The temporal lobes are responsible for handling auditory content, and the right side is especially important for processing music.

As a marketer, for this audience, creating content in the form of webinars, podcasts, or sound clips could be an effective way to communicate.

3. Written

These types of learners love -- you guessed it -- reading and writing.

It’s easiest for them to process and retain information when it’s presented in some type of written format.

They often take lots of notes, and they can become anxious about forgetting certain things if it hasn’t been put into text.

Both Broca’s and Wernicke’s areas are very active in the brains of read/write learners.

Blog articles, eBooks, quizzes, and assessments are great ideas of content you can create to relay information to written learners.

4. Kinesthetic

If you’re anything like me, you’re a kinesthetic learner.

You learn best by doing things and by being physical; actually applying theories and ideas helps you to understand them much better.

Think of the experiments or activities you would do in school.

Fueled by the cerebellum and motor cortex, if a kinesthetic learner encounters information that doesn’t use concrete examples, they may have a difficult time grasping it.

Marketers, if you discover your personas are kinesthetic learners, you may want to experiment with providing content that helps them understand your product or service on a deeper level.

For example, demo videos or tutorials can prove to be very helpful, or even physically sending them a sample of what you have to offer can aid in their decision-making process.

5. Multimodal

Most people have multiple learning styles, but if someone doesn’t have a distinct style that they can clearly identify, they are considered multimodal.

It’s best for them to try learning things in different ways to really nail down which type of style works best for different information processing

If you don’t know exactly which type of learner your buyer is, you can try creating different types of content, and then analyze the results to see what is the most successful, or what they’re engaging with most.

Take a deeper look into the five major learning styles outlined in Pound Place’s infographic below (and even find out which one suits you best).