Feb 07, 2018

How to Build a Customer Profile for a Solid Marketing Base

Every marketing strategy, without exception, needs a customer profile to be as efficient as possible.

A customer profile is a detailed description of your ideal client, and it tells you everything you need to know about the audience to whom you’re marketing. The profile should show you how to make your product or service appeal to them successfully.

If you haven’t already created a customer profile to base your marketing on, you’re behind the curve, and your marketing efforts are substantially more difficult than they need to be. But no worries—in this post, we’ll discuss how to create these customer profiles by going over each of the primary elements that make up a solid buyer persona.

Step #1: Discover Demographics

First and foremost are demographics. In order to have a stable customer profile, your marketing team must ask themselves questions such as:

Who is your target audience, exactly? Is your ideal customer male, female, or does gender not make a difference? Where do they live, what’s their ethnicity, where do they come from?

What age range do they fall under? Are there any defining physical attributes or character traits that make them more likely to purchase your product?

All these questions give you the demographics of your ideal customer—information that is essential for most marketing efforts.

Example: Let’s take, for instance, a company that sells leaf blowers. They could find that their customers are generally male, from various ethnicities, and mostly located in northern parts of the country where the fall season is more pronounced. Deeper digging could also reveal that their customers are often middle-aged, own a home with a decent-sized yard, and may have an injured or weak back that keeps them from being able to rake up leaves.

Step #2: Uncover Background

One of the most critical facets here, obviously, is career-related information (particularly if you’re a B2B brand). Knowing the kind of job title, company size, education and experience level, years in the industry, etc. that your best customers come with is crucial to completing your buyer profile.

Example: A brand that sells corporate accounting software could do a study on their customers and find that senior accountants generally purchase their products in companies with 250+ employees. These accountants would probably have a master’s level education and multiple years of experience.

Marketing strategy can now be tailored accordingly to a person who holds those qualifications and that specific job title within that size company.

Step #3: Find the Locations They Frequent

Probably the most crucial aspect of your buyer persona is the locations that your ideal customer frequents. After all, you’ll never be able to accurately market to your audience if you’re not targeting in the right areas.

Find out where your ideal buyer’s online watering holes look like. Do they spend a lot of time on blogs or social media? Or do they not spend a lot of leisure time on the web, in which case you’d have to rethink your online strategy altogether?

Example: Let’s go back to the earlier example of the brand that sells accounting software to senior-level accountants at mid-sized companies. The company could find that its target audience of these senior-level accountants often spend their time browsing industry-specific blogs or magazines.

Knowing this information reveals a new objective for the marketing team to get featured on or better yet, endorsed by those publications.

Step #4: Identify Pain Points

The primary function of your brand is to solve your customer’s problems. For instance, the main problem that accounting software companies solve for its customers is organization—a way to keep track of finances.

Now, however, it’s time to find your customer’s pain points. These aren’t the main problem—instead, pain points are the little niggles that annoy and inconvenience your customers.

Once you understand a customer’s pain points is when you open up some powerful marketing opportunities.

Anyone can offer a product. But when you incorporate just the right features and upgrades that your audience may not need, but sure does want, that’s when your sales could explode.

Example: Going back to the accounting software example, there’s no doubt that within a job like accounting, there’s going be a lot of little areas where customers will be inconvenienced and annoyed. For instance, the senior accountant may be particularly unfeeling for taxes at the end of the fiscal year.

Marketing the features of the software related to taxes—such as easy built-in access to tax laws in the customer’s region, or even functions that automatically set aside appropriate amounts for taxes—would thus hugely appeal to that target audience.

Identifying the pain points and capitalizing on how your product removes those annoyances for customers will revamp your marketing.

Get Started with Your Customer Profile

You may be wondering how to find all this information to build your ideal customer profile. There’s a very simple way to answer that question: your current and past customers.

Ask them to fill out a survey to get the required data. You could do that in conjunction with sit-down interviews with a few of your very best customers (highest value and easiest to work with).

The information that goes into a customer profile is not difficult to accumulate. If you don’t have one yet, the time to start working on it is today!

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