Customer Profile Defined: 7 Tips for Creating Customer Profiles

The definition of customer profile is somewhat malleable, but it generally refers to a collation of data about a company’s most desirable or most consistent customers and end users. By defining what appeals to this group of people specifically, business owners can gain real-time insight into how they can attract similar customers into their orbit.

Customer profiles help companies of all sizes and types. Both small businesses and large corporations can use the info provided by these touchpoints for their advantage. Customer profiles can help businesses identify who their products and services naturally appeal to in the real world. From this data, they can extrapolate how to better target, entice, and retain similar individuals through both advertising and new product development.

Business owners need a lot of information to build accurate customer profiles. The data you collect might pertain to these three fronts:

1. 1. Behavioral information: To better understand a group of customers, analyze how they behave when interacting with your products or services. See which marketing channels seem to most positively influence their marketing decisions. For instance, maybe you see more engagement through influencer endorsements rather than traditional advertising. Optimize your business plan according to these newfound data points.
2. 2. Demographic information: By paying attention to demographics, you can start to build a general consumer profile before moving on to specifying further. Every company will appeal to different customers. See if you notice people of specific ethnicities, job titles, and so on interacting with your goods more than others. Start to consider what might be behind these buying patterns.
3. 3. Psychographic information: If demographics specify the general type of customers you’re attracting, psychographics specify what makes those people unique on an individual basis. The more you know about your customers’ individual likes, dislikes, desires, aversions, and overall personalities, the easier a time you’ll have with lead generation and messaging. Understanding psychographic information helps you build more accurate customer profiles and longer-lasting customer relationships.

Customer profiling helps you better understand the type of people engaging with your products. Keep these seven actionable tips in mind as you build your own customer profiles:

1. 1. Analyze data. The more customer data you have, the easier it will be to build a customer profile. Customer profiles can be more generalized (focusing on an entire group of people) or more directly targeted (focusing on a specific customer), but you should collect as much behavioral, demographic, and psychographic data as possible in either case. Building marketing campaigns tailored to this informative trove of data is one of the main benefits of customer profiling.
2. 2. Build a buyer persona. To supplement your consumer profiling, consider creating a buyer persona, too. While customer profiles revolve around real data, companies design buyer personas as fictionalized profiles to address potential customer needs in the abstract. You can also combine the two in an ideal customer profile (or ICP). This style of profile combines the more hypothetical aspects of a buyer persona with the real-world data of a customer profile.
3. 3. Create a customer journey map. This type of map indicates all the steps a customer can take while interacting with your company’s goods and services, from initial advertising and engagement to completing a purchase and becoming an end user. Marketing teams can then see how the potential goals listed on the buyer’s journey map relate to the conversions noted on customer profiles. Maybe your target audience will download your app but won’t sign up for a subscription. Comparing a customer profile with a customer journey map can give you an idea as to why.
4. 4. Define your business goals. To create accurate customer profiles, you need to know what your marketing and sales teams should be trying to do in the first place. Decide what pain points your business wants to address and how you hope to meet your current customers’ needs. This sort of early decision-making allows you to compare how well your idealistic goals match up to the reality depicted in your customer profiles.
5. 5. Identify individual customers. At least occasionally build your customer profiles based on actual individual customers. By focusing on key target customers, you can extrapolate out to what makes for loyal customer types as a whole. This ultimately allows you to offer the best customer experience possible to as many people in your target audience as possible.
6. 6. Survey customers. If you want to take a broader approach, soliciting a wide array of customer feedback will give you a clear picture as to how your consumers think about your new products and services. Couple these marketing efforts with incentives to encourage greater engagement.
7. 7. Update the profiles regularly. Make sure to put your basic customer profile template to good use as often as you can. Add more data as you learn more about your target market. Reward customer loyalty through perks designed to appeal to the very people you’ve homed in on as your main consumers through your profiles.

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