Eight Steps to Create Your Ideal Customer Profile

Creating an ideal customer profile is something that will help you market better to your audience, create better products and services, as well as improve existing products and services. Not only will it help you with your marketing and product production efforts – it will also help you with improving your delivery systems by learning more about how your customer chooses what to buy as you learn about their product-buying process.

1. Understand Your Products and Services

The first step to creating an ideal customer profile is to truly understand your products and services. You need to know everything there is about each product or service that you provide. Whether you outsource some of the work or not doesn’t matter; you need to be able to walk the walk and talk the talk clearly and intelligently.

2. Stay Aware of Your Industry

No one is still making VHS tapes. Did people stop watching movies? No, of course not, but the technology changed. Smart companies and business owners who stayed on top of the technology didn’t go out of business, instead they just changed their products and services to fit what their current audience needed.

3. Describe Your Customer

Write a full description of who you believe is your ideal customer. What are their ages, sex, income group and other demographics? What are their fears, needs, and what problems do they need to have solved? Write it all down, and be ready to alter it later as you learn more about your audience or as your audience changes due to technology.

4. Determine Where Your Customers Come From

How are you currently getting customers? What links are they following online? What are you doing right now to attract them, and what’s working? Did they see something you wrote, or shared, or said in an interview? What makes the current customers you have buy from you? Ask them. Send them a survey.

5. Identify the Process They Use to Make a Purchase

Every customer has a process they use before, during and after making a purchase. They usually research a problem they have as they look for solutions. Once they find them they evaluate each solution in order to choose the right one for them. Then they determine if they can afford the solution, and if so, they make their purchase. After the purchase, they either become a lifelong customer or they go elsewhere.

6. Ask for Feedback from Current Customers

One of the best determinants of what is going to happen in the future is by studying what has already happened. Once your customer has made a purchase, or signed up for your list, or somehow connected with you, it’s imperative that you always follow up.

It’s a lot less expensive to keep a customer than to get a new one. Ask for feedback right after the purchase so that you can improve the process. Right now, if you bill via FreshBooks as a service provider, they have a great addition where you can get feedback when your client pays your bills. If your customers purchased a product from you, you can set up an auto responder to deliver a survey right to their inbox.

7. Create Customer Profiles

From the information you collect, keep creating customer profiles. You may end up with as many as five different groups and customer profiles for each of these groups, based on their demographics and what they have or have not purchased. For instance, if you watch TV ads, we all know that everyone uses laundry detergent, but the commercials are targeted to the people who make the purchases.

8. Be Consistent

Make it a habit to continue customer profiling so that you can always stay ahead of your customers’ needs, desires, and problems. You want to be the first to offer answers and solutions over the competition and you can only do that if you always keep your customer first and foremost in your mind and marketing practices.

Don’t rest on your laurels and stop there. Keep your ears to the ground in order to continuously improve your customer profiles so that you can always be at the top of your niche and industry. Profiling what your customers really need to solve their problems and fulfill their expectations is something that you must do to stay ahead.

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!
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