How to Create an Ideal Customer Profile

Before you can market to your ideal customer, you have to know who they are. Creating an ideal customer profile can help you zero in on demographics (age, education, disposable income) as well as psychographics (attitudes, interests, opinions). But how do you create such a profile, and how many should you create?

Let’s take a closer look.

Creating a Customer Profile — Step by Step

The good news is that when creating a customer profile, you don’t have to start from scratch. Your business has likely collected a lot of data about your ideal customer, you’re just not sure how to use it effectively. Fortunately, Workdom can help you make sense of it all.

The first step is to understand exactly what we’re creating. A customer profile is made up of both demographics and psychographics of your ideal customer. Having this information will help ensure that your marketing initiatives resonate more clearly with the type of people you’re trying to reach.

How Does a Customer Profile Differ from a Buyer Persona?

The best thing about a customer profile is that you’re not starting with a blank canvas, but rather using the information you already have about your existing customers. Conversely, a buyer persona requires you to create a personality from scratch and is generally used when you’re just starting out and don’t yet have customer details to draw upon.

In creating your customer profile, you’ll need to delve into the following information:

• Demographics — These are core characteristics about your ideal customer: Age, sex, income, education, marital status, etc.
• Psychographics — These are characteristics about your ideal customer’s personality. Their attitudes, opinions, perspectives, and beliefs in terms of their buying habits. This also includes what keeps them up at night, what they strive for, etc.
• Behavioral targeting — Behavioral targeting is much more than just where your users are in the customer journey, although that is also a part of the equation. It’s their readiness to buy, their purchase history, their brand loyalty, etc.
• Geographic targeting — Location matters, and geographic targeting is all about their city or local area, region and country.

Benefits of Creating a Customer Profile

Creating a customer profile allows you to achieve a wide range of business goals. It also delivers insight into who, exactly, you’re serving so that you can further optimize your marketing campaigns.

Beyond these core solutions, creating a customer profile also helps you:

Work with clients that are a better fit for your services
You want to work with the best kind of clients who are a perfect fit for your services, and creating a customer profile can help you do that. This helps you, in turn, manage expectations and overdeliver, resulting in a fantastic customer experience.

Lowers your cost of customer acquisition
You’ll want to do whatever you can to lower what it costs you to reach customers, and targeting your marketing to your ideal kind of customer is a great way to do that. When you target the right kind of people in your customer profile, your cost per acquisition goes down, increasing your profits and helping you attract even more of the right kind of people for your business.

Helps reduce customer churn
When there’s a mismatch between the customer and the company, it becomes apparent very quickly. Creating one or more customer profiles helps ensure your marketing initiatives are on track, on budget, and precisely targeted so that the best types of customers for what you have to sell don’t slip through the cracks.

Where to Find Customer Information

The best part about creating a customer profile is that you already have this information — you just have to find it and use it. Your CRM is a good place to start. Reach out to your customers and ask for their feedback. Even with a phone or video call, you can get deep and impactful insights that you can then use to further refine your advertising.

Also, take a look at where your customers are along the funnel. Make sure that every step in that funnel is essential for the profile of the person you’re trying to market to. Does your funnel have too few steps to where your ideal demographic doesn’t really know you? Does it have too many steps that customers may view as cumbersome and unnecessary? Take a good look at the customer journey and think about ways that you can optimize it to align with the values of your ideal audience.

And finally, don’t hesitate to reach out and work with trained, experienced professionals in creating an ideal customer profile. At Workdom, we have years of experience helping companies large and small create and market to their ideal customer profile. Contact our advertising professionals today and let us help you grow your business by targeting the right people with the right message at the right time!

Originally published at https://www.workdom.io on September 10, 2021.