Within marketing, understanding your customers is key. Understanding your customer and knowing who the customer is is critical to developing effective marketing strategies. To better identify the customer, the marketing tool customer profile is used. What it is and how to create it we tell you more in this blog. We also give you a customer profile example for some additional clarification.
What is a customer profile?
A customer profile is also known as a customer persona. It is a detailed description of the ideal customer. It is used as the ultimate example of the kind of people you want to reach with your products or services. A customer profile contains demographics, psychographic characteristics, behaviors, and needs of the target audience. The purpose of a customer profile is to gain clear understanding and visibility about the customers. In this way, both more targeted advertising and more effective communication can be done.
Benefits of a customer profile
Creating a customer profile comes with several benefits:
Better understanding of target audience
Creating a customer profile helps you understand the customer better. It enables you to know who they are, what they do and what they want. This creates valuable insight when developing marketing strategies that correctly match customer needs. It can contribute to customer engagement. You can read more about that in this blog.
Targeted marketing
As soon as you have an overview of a well-defined customer profile, you can adjust your marketing efforts accordingly. In this way, the marketing communications can be targeted at people who are most interested in the products and services offered. Because this targeted marketing is made possible, you as a company do not waste extra money and time on people who do not belong to the target group.
Proper product development
With customer mapping, developing products and services also becomes easier. This is because you know what the customer wants and so the products and services can be aligned with customer needs. As a result, the products become more competitive.
Better customer service
With knowledge of the customer profile, employees within customer service can be better trained. By anticipating the questions and needs of customers, a more personal and targeted service can be created.
Creating a customer profile
Let’s say up front that the process varies depending on the type of business and industry. But in general, you can never go wrong with the following steps:
1. Map out the target audience
The first important step is to identify the target group. This group can be segmented based on demographic data. Consider such key characteristics as residential location, income, age and education level.
2. Market research
Next, conduct market research. This involves analyzing data from existing customers. Other types of research that fall under this include conducting surveys, comparing with competitors, and staying up-to-date on industry trends and developments.
3. Identify behavioral traits
In addition to determining the demographic data, it is also important to identify the behavioral characteristics. Behavioral traits include the customer’s habits, preferences, and needs. So, establish how the customer behaves in relation to the product or service.
4. Create customer personas
Now it’s time to visualize the information gathered. This is done by creating customer personas. A customer persona is basically a fictional visualization of the ideal customer. Therefore, give the persona a name, age and job.
Customer persona example
Max
- Age: 29 years
- Occupation: Brand Manager
- Location: Rotterdam
- Income: €40,000-€50,000 per year
- Behaviour: loves eating out and going out and is active on social media
5. Create a customer profile
After creating a number of customer personas, the customer profile can be created. The difference between a customer persona and a customer profile is that a customer profile is a document that contains all the relevant information about the customer.
Customer profile example
Max
- Age: 29 years
- Occupation: Brand Manager
- Location: Rotterdam
- Income: €40,000-€50,000 per year
- Behavior: Loves eating out and going out and is active on social media
- Needs: goes in search of cozy restaurants, faraway travel destinations and festivals
- Goals: to discover new experiences, to challenge themselves and to share these adventures on social media
Segmentation of customer profiles
As customer profiles are created, you’re likely to discover that there are subgroups within the target audience. Also, each subgroup has its unique needs and preferences. By using segmentation, highly targeted marketing campaigns can be developed. This ensures that the message is made even more relevant.
Efficiency of customer profiles
To truly benefit from creating a customer profile, they need to be actively used in marketing strategies. One way to do this is to tailor the marketing messages to the specific wants and needs of the customers. This increases the relevance of the campaigns, which also increases the conversion. Customer profiles are also useful for product development and customer service optimization. Finally, it is important to use customer profiles within content creation. When creating content such as blogs, videos and social media, customer profiles can be used to come up with topics that connect with the target group.
