Customer Profile: Creating and Targeting Ideal Customers
Glory-Anna Oshafi
Ever heard the saying, “If you try to market to everyone, you’ll end up marketing to no one”? Many marketers have found this to be true.
While it’s natural for companies to want to market their products and services to every potential client, not everyone will be interested in your business. A good percentage of accurate target marketing requires you to create customer profiles that align with your sales goals.
Targeting is the only way to ensure your marketing strategies always attract and align with the right customers for your brand. If you’re wondering how to create a fitting customer profile for your business, this guide will show you how.
Here, we share the nitty-gritty details of creating and targeting the ideal customers your business needs.
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What Is a Customer Profile?
A customer profile is a document or platform that contains relevant information, such as the likes, dislikes, interests, pain points, priorities, buying behavior, demographics, purchase history, etc., of a customer or potential customers.
It is a template that shows your business the ideal type of customers you should market to so that there’s clarity when making customer-centric decisions and no interference from personal opinions. It refines and streamlines your marketing and sales efforts so that any campaigns you run are more effective in converting leads, increasing sales, and attracting the right customers.
A customer profile is also known as a customer persona, buyer persona, customer type, or customer avatar.
Why Is Customer Profile Important for Businesses?
Many businesses often create one-size-fits-all strategies for their campaigns, hoping to attract as many potential customers as possible. But various types of customers are attracted by different things and have diverse aspects in life, so they won’t always relate to generalized campaigns. A campaign that’s not targeted at a defined customer profile would hardly produce any tangible conversions or even attract any leads.
When you analyze customer data based on the customer profile you’ve created, there are better campaign results. Knowing and understanding who your ideal customer is, gives you a competitive advantage because you know the right tactics to draw them in.
For example, if you run a sports shoe brand and want to market to your ideal customer — high school male students — having a customer profile helps you understand which marketing tactics will appeal to existing and potential customers that fit that category. The more specific and aligned your marketing campaign is to your ideal customer, the better your chance of making a sale.
Let’s see a few benefits of creating customer profiles for your business:
- It makes it easier to find new leads since you can identify specific characteristics that your potential customer should have. For instance, if your customer profile lists web developers as the target career niche, you can quickly visit communities with web developers to find potential customers and market your business to them.
- It gives you clarity on the leads to nurture. Not every lead that your campaign attracts will make a purchase. Out of 50, there may be just 15 qualified leads who will eventually buy your product. With your customer profile, you can sift through the crowd to find perfect customer matches and target them without wasting resources on others.
- It helps drive customer loyalty. A customer profile enables you to understand your customer and their preferences. This helps you provide them with personalized experiences that increase customer satisfaction. Customer satisfaction helps boost retention and loyalty significantly.
How Do You Create a Customer Profile?
If you’re still creating campaigns and making customer decisions based on guesswork and inaccurate estimates, your business is missing out on so much vital data. Here are the steps to creating your ideal customer profile to help you target them accurately based on the concrete info you have garnered.
1. Identify the Need Your Business Seeks to Solve
Every business is created based on a need to solve a problem or a pain point. Netflix started to help users enjoy movies and shows from the comfort of their homes without visiting the video rental store. The main solution it provided was convenience.
Based on this info, one of the key behavioral traits of Netflix’s customers’ persona should be prioritizing convenience. Identifying the solution your business brings gives you an idea of the types of customers who need your services.
Your business’s solution can often be found in the type of products and services you create and your mission statement. So, the first step to creating an accurate customer profile will be to fully understand your business and your offerings and how it aligns with your customers’ needs.
2. Collect and Critically Analyze Your Customer Information
Many businesses use CRM software to manage their customers and provide better services. The benefit of these tools is that you can use them to gather a good amount of information about your customers, which can be used for your profiling benefits.
CRM tools track demographic, behavior, psychographics, and environmental data about a customer. This includes age, gender, location, device, preferred means of communication, product preferences, etc. A tool like Juphy, for instance, has a reports feature that helps you to see which social platforms your customers prefer to contact you on.
Analyzing data and details like these give businesses context to the type of customers that frequently purchase their products, as well as their interests and buying behavior — resulting in a better-defined customer profile.
3. Carry Out Surveys To Generate Audience Feedback
You only really know what a person thinks about you when you hear their unbiased opinions about you. So, collect customer feedback if you want to find out your customers’ actual perception of your brand and whether you’re providing the solutions they need. They also help you determine changes in customers’ preferences and habits, so you can find out if your strategies are working or if it’s time for an update.
Use survey tools and forms to collect the information, then analyze it to see where you can improve your campaign or if you’re attracting the best customer matches. Many times, customers may need incentives to spur them into taking surveys, so you may need to provide one to get a good amount of responses.
A discount or freebie can make great incentives for most customers.
4. Research Your Potential Customer Type
Having a ton of customer-related data is useless if you don’t make the most of it. So, build a better customer persona by digging as deeply into the data you’ve gathered.
Of course, not every customer will like to fill out your survey, but you can find out even more about your customer type through research. This research is fruitful when you need to create campaigns that will convert attracted leads. Suppose the customer type you want to convert is a professional, for instance. In that case, you can spend time on LinkedIn researching the type of professional lingo they’re familiar with.
Creating a campaign that’s infused with their everyday professional vocabulary will catch their attention immediately, convince them that your product or service is a good fit for them, and inspire them to make a purchase.
5. Create a Customer Profile Database
After you have used relevant information that you’ve gathered to create your customer profiles, you need to set them up in databases that any team member can easily access. Compile similar customer preferences, behaviors, demographics, etc., into specific models and then assign them names for easy recognition.
Each model should have the same attributes to ensure consistency across customer personas. Tools like HubSpot allow you to name your customer profiles and tag them in your CRM database, so your team can quickly access them. For instance, if one of your customer profiles is for marketing managers, you can name it “Wanda, Marketing Manager.”
Named profiles come in handy when creating marketing campaigns or improving sales and marketing strategies.
How Do Customer Profiles Help You Target Your Ideal Customers?
Now that you have your customer profile(s) set up, how do they ensure you always connect with your target customers? Here are three main ways:
1. Personalization Increases and Leads to Better Responses
Building customer profiles helps you better understand who your company is marketing to, so you can set up campaigns that speak directly to them. Personalized campaigns predict what customers need and offer solutions, making you an instant or closely related fit they can’t resist.
2. Gives You a Clearer View of Your Industry or Market Potential
Without accurate data, businesses rely on guesswork to make marketing decisions. When you eliminate guesses by collating and analyzing customer data, you get a holistic picture of unexplored potentials and opportunities in the market, opening up the business to untapped customers who need your services.
3. Helps Teams Tailor Marketing Efforts to the Right Audience
Customer profiles help you figure out the right marketing tactics to use, depending on the customer, resulting in more clicks or open rates. You can identify whether your marketing tactic was successful when your ad’s majority of clicks and interactions come from your ideal target customer.
Final Thoughts
Customer profiles help marketing and sales teams close more deals and attract more qualified leads. The more information you can gather about your customers, the better you position yourself to provide them with satisfactory experiences.
The three major ideas behind creating a customer profile include customer data gathering, customer data analysis, and customer feedback implementation. Working with CRM tools like Juphy provides you with that much-needed insight into your customers’ preferred communication methods during your data-gathering processes.
You, too, can get started creating the perfect customer profile today. Sign up for a 7-day free trial from Juphy to get insight into the data you seek.
Even While You Sleep
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Related Article – How to Create a Customer Journey Map
A customer journey map empowers you to create a better customer experience at every stage of the sales funnel. Find the steps to create one here.