Customer Profiling – What Is It?

Creating customer profiles is something all serious business owners do before they develop their marketing plans. It involves studying their target audience in such a way that they can create audience personas to direct their marketing to. A persona is a picture of a particular audience of one; a typical person who might be in your target audience is described and defined down to their sex, income status, education, and more.

Customer profiling is an important way that you can improve your marketing so that it is more effective in capturing exactly the right person who is ready, willing and able to purchase what you’re offering. Without customer profiling you’re really just guessing at what marketing efforts will work. This guessing can cause you to waste a lot of time, money and effort which is unacceptable these days.

You have many tools at the ready to help you study your target audience. Try these important steps to help you with your customer profiling efforts.

Determine Who You Want Your Customer to Be

If you don’t have a product yet, it’s actually easier to choose your audience, figure out what they need, and then provide solutions to them. But, if you already have a product or service it’s important to figure out who you want to use those products and services and hopefully they also need them.

Segment Your Customers into Sub-Groups – Try to Create at Least Three to Five

Every product has many subsets of users, and it’s important for you to figure out who yours are. That way you can design different campaigns for each subset. You will want, for your first marketing campaign, to choose the largest and most likely buyers from your segments that you choose during your customer profiling exercise.

Create a Questionnaire for Each Subgroup

If you could ask them anything, what would you ask? Of course, ask the normal demographic questions but add in specifics to the questionnaire. Keep it short (about 4 to 8 questions) so that they don’t get tired or bored. And be specific about your questions so that the group can be specific about their answers.

Get the Questions to Each Group through Social Media

Once you create your survey using either Google Docs or something like SurveyMonkey, send them to your audience via social media such as LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter and so forth. Ask people you know to share your survey with specific people.

Get the Questions to Each Group through Whatever Means Necessary

If your audience often shops at your local mall, you can stand there and get them to answer your survey. For instance, if your audience is women between the ages of 22 and 30 who have kids, approach women who look as if they fit that group. Even if you want to reach these women online, getting answers from them in person will help you with your online marketing efforts.

Determine the Top Two Most Important Subgroups

Once you get some answers, determine which subgroup you’d most like to have as your clients or customers and start creating marketing plans that match their answers, needs and concerns. You don’t necessarily want to choose the largest of the subgroups but use an educated way to choose which are more likely to buy. A small group who will buy is much better than a larger group who won’t buy.

Create Marketing Plans Based on Those Two Subgroups

Start working on your marketing plans. You should know how to reach them, what their problems are, and how you can solve them. By providing solutions in your marketing program, mixing up the marketing channels you use to reach this audience, and by being aware of who your audience is you’ll succeed.

Knowing the most likely people to buy from you is part of customer profiling. Through your study you should be able to now create simple customer personas that you will now use to craft all your marketing programs – be they copywriting, videos, social media marketing, print ads or other. They will all start with what you know about your customer, and who you want your customer to be.

In case you're curious, I started working online in 1997 - in the dinosaur days of the internet. My purpose here at HomeFreeMedia is to help YOU build the business of your dreams by developing and recommending top quality products and tools. This will also result in profit and affiliate commissions for me, so we both win!
Sign up here for news and special offers.
Please note that some products are not exclusive to HomeFreeMedia so that you don't make duplicate purchases.