The practice of advertising products on television or newspapers has changed a lot. Many companies no longer think of advertising products to attract all types of customers together.
Rather, product promotion is now done at the individual level. Proper market research can be used to promote any product to the desired customers. And news of products or services that can meet their needs can be delivered.
But before they reach the buyers, they have to be found. And that is why it is necessary to create customer profiles in an effective way.
By creating customer profiles, businesses get detailed information about the customers to whom they are most likely to sell products and services.
What Is Customer Profile?
Customer profiling is an attempt to find out what a brand\’s ideal customer relationship might be like. A customer profile discusses many things like what are the main problems of the customers, their needs, likes, dislikes, their fears, interests or buying habits.
This makes the work of those in charge of the marketing department easier while doing the marketing campaign. They can easily reach the right customers for the brand.
Once you have a customer profile, you can make more accurate marketing campaigns using data-driven assumptions. Especially for companies that target different types of customers with multiple products, this strategy will be very useful for their campaigns.
Why Is Customer Profiling So Important?
Customer profiling is very important for deciding the marketing strategy of a business. It is more profitable to reach the customers who are sure to buy your product than to market to a wide variety of customers based on ideas alone.
So having a customer profile can create a marketing strategy for a limited number of customers. This approach will yield much better results than targeting a large segment of customers.
Marketing executives can use customer profiles to tailor the key messages of their marketing campaigns. This increases their chances of success. Again, sales executives understand what they need to present in order to win the hearts of customers.
On the other hand, employees working in the customer support department also understand which needs of the customers should be more emphasized.
Things To Add To The Customer Profile
Just as your brand is different from others, customer profile should also be different and unique. So don\’t be afraid to use new ideas in this case. Here are some examples of things you can add to create a customer profile.
• Segmentation
You can create profiles by segmenting customers into different groups based on demographics, values, communication, needs and characteristics. Marketing staff can use this information to create advertising strategies that will have a more effective impact on customers.
• Demographics, Psychographics and Behavior
Demographics and psychographics refer to factors such as age, gender, socioeconomic status or psychology of customers. When you understand buyer behavior along with these, you will have a holistic understanding of buyers.
So when marketers segment customers according to these characteristics, they can understand what products customers want to buy and how they want to buy them.
• Buyer personas
Buyer personas are a tool that can be used to answer some important questions when creating a customer profile. By analyzing buyer personas, an organization can learn about their target group and create solutions tailored to them.
• Scorecard
Customer profiles can also be created using scorecards. In this case, you have to focus on what you want to separate the customers based on.
As such they can be differentiated based on needs, time or budget. Then you can fix the score on various subjects like these three subjects. A lower score means less suitable for the brand, a slightly better one a somewhat suitable one and the best one means they are a suitable buyer.
Now you can determine the order or rank of ideal customers by calculating the score.
How To Create A Customer Profile
Creating a customer profile is much like creating a character in a play or movie. Creating a customer profile requires first creating a persona that closely resembles your ideal customers.
Yes, of course every customer is different. But for the sake of marketing, it is necessary to divide the customers into different groups according to the similarity of characteristics.
We will now see how to create a customer profile step by step.
1. Look at long-term goals
You have identified who the ideal customer is. But if this customer doesn\’t help you achieve your goals, it won\’t do any good. You have to see what the company is focusing on the most this year.
Is your organization looking to increase sales of a particular product? Want to bring more sign ups to the website? Or want to increase the number of followers on social media? Customer profiles will help you achieve these goals.
After identifying the goals, now focus on how to meet these goals with customer profiles. If the company wants to increase the sales of one product and the customers buy more of another product, then it will not be profitable. Your goals must match the goals of your customers.
2. Highlight what makes your brand unique
The hard truth is that only you are targeting certain types of customers, but that\’s not the point. Others are also targeting the same customers. Therefore, emphasis needs to be placed on how to differentiate your product and brand from the rest.
Think about the last product you bought. Bought the product because the product seemed different to you.
So how to differentiate your product from the rest is the first step to satisfying customers. If you can do this, you will be far ahead of the rest of the competitors.
3. Determine customer characteristics
After deciding what long-term goals you want to achieve and how to differentiate your product or service from the rest, work on promoting these issues among ideal customers.
Potential customers need to determine certain characteristics, which will help you create a customer profile. These factors can help you tremendously in attracting new customers.
Things to keep in mind for potential customers:
• Demographics
Demographics are general information about customers. You can see them with your eyes. Like their age, region, gender, nationality etc.
Let\’s say you want to sell CRM or customer relationship management software. Your ideal customer is someone who works in the marketing department. So you target the Chief Marketing Officer. He or she will understand your product and make a decision.
• Socio-social status
These include family income, educational qualification, area of residence, occupation etc.
If you analyze these data, you will understand in which profession your ideal customer actually works.
If you know your product is overpriced, targeting larger companies rather than smaller companies will have a higher chance of success.
• Psychology
Psychology refers to consumers\’ interests, hobbies, favorite TV shows, music, websites, media, how they spend their time, what worries them or what their ideologies are.
Let\’s say you know your customers frequent a certain blog or website. Now if you write a blog as a guest on that website, your company and your products will come to the attention of buyers. Again, you can build a relationship with your customers by regularly using social media.
• Brand loyalty
Why do customers use your brand? What do they get out of it? After how many days do they use your product or service? How loyal are customers to your brand, it is important to know the answers to such questions. And this is called brand loyalty. Because their loyalty will depend on how much money they want to spend.
How To Use Customer Profiles
Once you have the data about the customers, segment them based on their type. This will create multiple customer profiles for you. Here\’s what you can do with the customer profile:
- Public relations campaign After determining the customer profile, you can decide what type of public relations campaign to run. These campaigns will make your brand more familiar to people and bring you to new customers, whom you could not reach till now.
- Marketing plan Customer profile will also help in your marketing plan or marketing plan. You will understand how you can reach customers easily. These mediums may include TV ads, Facebook, direct-to-store promotions, magazines, direct e-mail, Twitter, radio, etc. In addition, customers will also understand which type of campaign they are most interested in. These may include events, freebies, new products, demos or discounts. And what kind of images, fonts, colors, stories and references will grab their attention.
- sales It will be easier to convince customers why your company\’s offering is the best if there is a customer profile. By offering benefits like product warranty, excellent customer service or guarantee, you can create interest among the buyers in purchasing the product.
