Customer profiling is an essential part of your marketing strategy. Creating strong customer profiles means you understand who your customers are and what they need, and can sell to them effectively.
Great customer profiles can make the difference between a successful marketing campaign and one that falls short of your goals. With the right customer profiles, you can create meaningful engagement, build brand loyalty, and get results.
Keep reading to learn how to build customer profiles that work.
Customer Profiles Matter
Before you do anything else, having a customer profile is essential. Without one, you’ll be selling to a nondescript, unspecified audience. Not having a targeted audience for your campaigns means both your message and data are meaningless.
Benefits
Now that you know you need a customer profile, let’s dive into the specific benefits of creating one.
Find better prospects: With strong, accurate customer profiles you’ll be able to identify the best possible prospects for your product or campaign. You’ll be able to increase conversion and close rates and probably have happier customers down the line, since your product was a good fit for them in the first place.
Reduce churn: Churn happens when you lose customers. But knowing your customers from the start and targeting them and their needs will help you attract high-quality customers that are less likely to leave.
Lower CAC: Knowing your customers and targeting them using data will reduce the customer acquisition cost. If you’re spending the same to target people who are more likely to use your product, you are going to spend less to turn them into customers than people who are not as good of a fit.
Building Your Profiles
Here’s what you can do to build customer profiles that work, plus some tools to consider.
Demographics and Psychographics
When creating customer profiles, we often look to demographics. Facts like age, sex, race, education level, job title, etc.
While this is a good place to start, it’s not enough to understand purchasing decisions, which is where psychographics comes in. Psychographics is a segmentation technique that helps you break down audiences by lifestyle, habits, hobbies, values, pain points, and more.
Using these two techniques together can help you create a clear picture of your customer.
Focus on the Solution
If you’re trying to sell a product, it’s because you’ve identified a problem customers have, and you have the solution.
This should be the focus of your customer profile and guiding point throughout – remember the problem, and how and why you’re trying to solve it. This will help you keep the customer in mind throughout the customer profile-building process.
Understand the Journey
Your customer isn’t just buying a product – they’re on a journey. It’s your job to make sure they get from point a - first engaging with your product or brand - to their final destination, purchasing the product.
Take into account your customer’s demographics and psychographics, as well as their behaviors. Who are they, and why does this product appeal to them? What do they need to get to the point of purchase, and make a sale? You’re taking care of them on the journey, and you should plan accordingly.
Create Personas
Creating personas is one of the more fun parts of creating customer profiles. You can create these any way you want. Build characters, and base them off people you know. Draw them up and create their whole fake life. Act as that customer and go through the whole journey.
Remember, these are going to be live people you’re after, so make your personas accordingly. Avoid stereotypes and cliches, and think about all the specifics. Consider titles, age range, education level, and lifestyle.
Anything that helps you better understand the customer and build a strong customer profile is fair game.
Look Into Templates and Software
There are tons of great templates and programs out there that can streamline and automate this process, and provide data as well. Here are some of our favorites:
Make my Persona Tool (Hubspot): HubSpot’s persona generator is a fascinating tool that helps you create personas, map out your customer’s journey, and more. It’s intuitive and easy to use.
Salesforce User Personas: Salesforce is a widely used sales tool, and its User Personas tool takes you one step further in understanding your user data.
UXPressia: This tool is highly intuitive and has a ton of features.
SEMRush Persona: Known for its SEO capabilities, SEMRush also offers a free persona-building tool.
Customer profiling will improve your customer experience, and therefore improve your results. It’s one of the most important parts of establishing a marketing strategy and can be applied to campaigns, overall strategy, and more.
Happier customers and better leads will help you get to your goals faster and build long-term business success.
To learn more about how we work and what we can do for your campaigns, reach out now to talk to a member of our team.
