The Magical Customer Profile And What It Can Do For Your Business
You might have made a mistake that a lot of people make in sales and marketing - targeting the wrong customers. Your website is up and running, but no one is coming. You're scratching your head trying to figure out what went wrong.
The reason might be that you are targeting the wrong customers. Traditional marketing techniques don't work anymore because people have adblocker extensions and ad fatigue. Marketers are constantly experimenting with new techniques to engage their target customers and provide them with something worthwhile.
Nowadays, content marketing is not just about making funny videos or memes. You can create valuable content for any type of industry.
To market to customers well, you have to understand them. You can do this by creating a customer profile and then developing a system for creating and evaluating those profiles. In this article, we'll go through what a customer profile is and how to start making your own.
What Is A Customer Profile?
Let us start from the very beginning.
A customer profile is a document that includes information about your current customers or customers you want to have. It includes data about their pain points, purchasing behaviors, occupation, and income.
In other words, creating a customer profile helps you understand your customers better so you can figure out what they need and offer them something that meets their needs.
Is It Necessary?
You can use the information in your customer profile to know who your target customer is. This way, you can run better marketing and ad campaigns which will increase sales and profit. If you don't have this information, you might end up marketing to just about anyone and everyone, which wastes time and lost deals.
Benefit Of A Customer Profile
Better Lead Generation
If you know who your target market is, you can find people more likely to buy what you are selling.
Spend Less To Acquire New Customers
If you know who your customers are, you can target them specifically with your campaigns. This will help you get better results. You don't have to run multiple campaigns when just one will be enough to convince them.
Serve Existing Customers Better
It would be great if you could know what doubts your customers had. Then you could give them solutions. That is why it is important to know your customers.
Reduce The Number Of Customer You Lose
Create profiles of your customers. This will help you attract the customers who want to use your product. This can help reduce customer churn in the long run.
Increase Customer Loyalty
If you can provide good service that meets your customer's needs, they may become a customer for life. You should always try to understand what your customers want and make sure you are providing the best service possible.
How To Come Up With A Customer Profile
The best part is that you already have everything you need to start working on a customer profile of your own. You can either use your existing customers or think about your business in general to get started. We first need to understand the different types of customer profiling so we can create our customer profile.
Types Of Customer Profiling
Demographic
Demographics are the actual characteristics of your customers that you can use to understand what drives their behavior. This includes, but is not limited to, the following:
- Age
- Sex
- Occupation
- Income
- Education
- Family status
If you're like us, you might want to know other things about a company before deciding to work with them. Things like their company size, what industry they're in, and how well they're doing. You can find this information from documented sources like their annual reports.
Psychographic
Psychographic profiling is different from demographics. While demographics can tell you some concrete information about people, psychographics look at people's inner thoughts and feelings. This includes, but is not limited to, the following:
- Lifestyle
- Goals
- Pains
- Habits
- Values
- Interests
This analysis helps us understand our customers. We can see what made them decide to buy our product or service.
From a marketing and advertising perspective, this information can help us create a story that is more attractive to them. We can understand their situation and develop new products or services that meet their needs.
Here is a quick illustration to help you understand the difference between demographics and psychographics.
Behavioural
This type of profiling goes further than just understanding your customers' psychology. It also looks at how they act or react. This includes, but is not limited to, the following:
- Engagement
- Readiness to Buy
- Purchasing History
- Product Usage
- Satisfaction
- Loyalty or Account Age
- Attention Required
These profiles from customers can help customer service teams understand customers better. This makes it easier to keep them happy and satisfied.
Geography
Location is important when selling or targeting a certain area. The way customers interact with your brand also depends on location. Location can affect things like this, but it is not limited to these examples:
- City
- Area
- Region
- Country
These bits of information can help you think of ways to make your home look good and how to find people who might want to buy it.
Steps To Constructing A Good & Detailed Customer Profile
Now we will go through the steps you’ll need to create a customer profile using the types of profiles mentioned earlier.
Start Broad
We start by looking at what your business is. What is the problem/need/want you are trying to solve?
Then we go to the first aspect - Demographics.
Age
Who is your product or service for? Who are you trying to serve?
Let’s start with something that you’ll know right off the bat - what age range is your product meant for?
Gender
Are you selling something that is gender-biased? If so, another factor to consider is whether you are selling to a man or woman, or a gender-fluid person?
Education
What kind of people do you want as customers? University educated people, those with diplomas, or fresh out of high school?
Occupation
What type of people would be interested in working at your company? Would they be students working part-time to make money? Or full-time professionals? Or even labourers?
Income
What you want is to know if your product or service can be afforded by your target customers. This means that you need to think about what your target customer can afford. You should aim for someone who has at least $500 left every month after they pay for rent and food.
Put It Together
We will now use what we have learned to create a customer profile for our business. Our business is selling wireless earphones for $50 each. We want to target people aged 18 to 25 years old, because they are more likely to be interested in our product and are more likely to be able to afford it.
We want to target all genders in that age range.
We want people who have already graduated and started working to buy our product. They don't have to then ask their parents for money.
As for their income, since our product is $50, as long as they have a disposable income of around $2,000 a month, that should be enough to cover their rent, living expenses, and afford our earphones.
We have finished our first part of the customer profile. We are looking for a person who is 18-25 years old, working, and has a monthly disposable income of $2,000.
You might want to put your information in a chart so that it is easier to see.
Get More Specific
It is important to have a general idea of your customer profile. This will help us understand them better and create a more detailed picture.
Psychographics is another way to figure out who your target market is.
Lifestyle
How well does our brand fit with the customer's lifestyle? Do they like to be active and do our designs fit their taste?
Pains
If people can't afford Apple's AirPods, they might look for other options. One pain could be that the new AirPods have an in-ear design, which some people find uncomfortable after a while. Another pain could be that our earbuds are not shaped the same way as the new AirPods.
Habits
Do they need to have music or some form of white noise playing in the background to sleep more comfortably?
Interests
Do they like jogging, are they music fans, do they like swimming?
Put It Together
Our earphones are for people who are 18 to 25 years old and have a job. They make at least $2,000 per month. These people like to jog and listen to music while doing so. They also want something that they can use while they sleep without spending too much money on it.
You could choose to get more information about your customers. The more detailed the information, the better.
However, we are quite happy with the profile we have made so far. We will continue to work on it and make it more accurate. Then we can use it with customers.
Customer Profile vs Customer Persona
A customer persona is a term you may have heard a lot when researching customers.
We understand that it may be easy to confuse one for the other. Sometimes it can be hard to tell them apart.
The main difference between a customer profile and a customer persona is that a customer profile is an example of your target market, while a customer persona is more specific.
Yes, customer, just one. You will now think about all the qualities you want your ideal customer to have and write them down.
We'll name this person a gender-neutral name like Jessie since we cater to everyone.
Jessie is a 23-year-old who recently graduated from law school. They have student loans to repay. Right now, they are living with their parents to save on rent.
They were offered a job in a law firm starting at $3,000 per month.
They often jog in the evening and listen to music while they do.
At night, they listen to audiobooks while trying to sleep.
For social media, Jessie likes to scroll through Instagram.
They have an average monthly expenditure of $1500 on repayment of student loans, food, transportation, and saving some money. This still leaves them with $1500 that they can spend.
Let's pretend Jessie is a person who enjoys spending money, but is careful not to spend too much.
You might be asking what the use of all this imagination is about. It’s actually like so - How can you use your customer persona? It's useful to know what people want so you can make things they will like. Sometimes, this requires a sprinkling of imagination.
Testing Your Customer Persona
Now that you have your persona, it is time to test it against reality. How well do you match up?
The first step is to see if you can get information about your customers from Jessie. This will help you see how many of your current customers match up with Jessie's preferences.
If you do not have the information for your target demographic, you can find ways to get it. You can ask your customers to fill out a survey with information about their age, gender, and hobbies.
You could also ask people to sign up for your subscription list to get more information.
Conclusion
Once you have all the information from your customers, you can compare it to your customer persona. If they match up perfectly, then you know they are the same people.
If you don't have any data about your real audience, you can figure out who they are by looking at data about other people.
Understanding your customers is important when you want to send them messages. You can craft messages that are more appealing to them or that they can connect with more easily.
More articles please read The Comprehensive Guide To Finding A Product To Sell.
