A Walker study completed at the end of 2020 found that 86% of buyers will pay more for a better customer experience. It’s important to understand this but how do you create a better customer experience that meets the needs of your target audience? You start by understanding them better and a good way to do that is to create a customer profile. So, what is a customer profile? In its simplest form, a customer profile takes a detailed look at your current customer base. By understanding their age, disposable income, buying habits, interests, and more, you can inform your marketing strategies and predict the types of clients that will buy from you in the future.
You’ll be exploring what a customer profile is in more detail as you continue to read this article. You’ll also find out more about why they’re important, how they’re different from a buyer persona, real-life examples, and how to create one for your business.
What is a customer profile?
You already know that a customer profile is a detailed look at your existing customers but what exactly should you look for? Some items are almost universal. You’ll want to investigate their age range, where they’re located, how much money they earn, what they enjoy doing, what they like to buy, where they like to buy, how they like to buy, how much money they have to buy, and a lot more. Compiling data on what drives them and what their biggest challenges are is essential.
It’s important to use the above categories to discover the attributes that are relevant to your specific business. For car sales, you’ll narrow down preferred manufacturers, for fashion brands, you’ll discover your customer’s favorite models and style icons. If you’re selling to businesses, you’ll take company size, revenue, and industry into account. Many businesses have more than one customer profile. Each one is individual and is based around your existing and target customers, and your business.
Why are customer profiles important in marketing?
When you start a new business, it’s common and understandable to want to solve the world’s problems but it’s also close to impossible. You will inevitably spread your resources too thin and end up helping nobody. Understanding your current customers better helps you to predict who will be more likely to buy in the future. This allows you to be more specific in your messaging and more targeted in your communications.
In every part of your business, having a customer profile is useful. For example, a customer profile in marketing allows you to create a better positioning strategy, in sales, it narrows the search for potential customers and when designers are developing a new product, they can model their designs to your customers’ wants and needs.
Benefits of defining customer profiles
If you’ve read this far and you’re still wondering whether or not it’s worth creating customer profiles for your business, the short answer is yes. Here are some critical reasons why:
Help to create targeted content
With a customer profile in place, you know what interests your customers and more specifically, how that relates to the products and services that you sell. That makes it so much easier to create copy, graphics, videos, etc. that are answering your customers’ questions and entertaining them in equal measure. A lot goes into good content marketing but having a customer profile in place is the perfect way to start.
📚 Further reading: Mastering Ecommerce SEO: How to Increase Online Store Traffic →
Aids in finding and qualifying new leads
Knowing who to speak to is often the hardest part of sales. Being a great salesperson isn’t enough to convert potential customers into paying customers. Having a customer profile in place means you’ll know where to look for leads and when new leads come in, you can narrow down which ones to contact first.
Lowers customer acquisition costs (CAC)
How much does it cost to acquire a single customer? When your campaigns are broad, it often costs a lot more than a targeted campaign, which increases click-through rates, form submissions, and eventually sales. A lower CAC is the sign of a more successful campaign.
Boosts customer loyalty and retention
Have you ever been treated like the most important person in the world by a salesperson, only to feel like you don’t exist once you’ve bought something? A detailed customer profile can help to prevent that from happening to your clients. By speaking to them about the things that they care about, you’re likely to increase brand loyalty and customer retention. The probability of selling to an existing customer is between 60% and 70% in comparison to a probability of between 5% and 20% for new customers so if creating a customer profile makes retention easier, it’s worth doing.
Reduces customer churn
It’s a simple equation but if you’re retaining more customers, you’re automatically reducing customer churn. Instead of attracting customers that are only interested in a special offer or a big discount, you are more likely to attract customers that are genuinely interested in using your product or service in both the short and the long term.
Improves personalization in marketing
Walking into a café and getting a cappuccino before you’ve placed an order makes you feel special. A similar feeling happens when you are sent offers and content that seems to be tailored to your exact needs. With a large customer base, it can be hard to send out offers to each individual but a good customer profile helps you to personalize your content based on shared pain points, desires, and some of the other important factors already mentioned.
Allows you to find product-market fit
It’s not unusual to have more than one type of customer. Their preferences, tastes, and behavior will differ but they can still be grouped into different categories. In fact, it’s vitally important that you do so that you can tailor your content and offers accordingly. Different products might suit different markets and sometimes, even the same product can suit different markets. What each market buys, how they buy, and why they buy is important data that you can use to ensure you’re offering the right thing at the right time to the right customer.
Enhances the customer experience
Everything mentioned above is important to the customer experience and having well-defined customer profiles enhances every moment from the first realization that your business exists to the first purchase, and the customer service that continues over time. You’ll be able to foresee any potential problems, provide effective resources, and be ready to serve their needs if they ever reach out to your customer service team.
Customer profile vs buyer persona: what’s the difference?
If you’ve ever created a buyer persona, a lot of the information on this page may seem familiar. That’s because it is. Many of the steps taken to create a great buyer persona are the same as the steps taken to create a great customer profile but there are a few key differences.
The main difference is that a great buyer persona will actually be built on a customer profile. A customer profile looks at the actual demographics of your current customers and finds the most common traits. It’s an aggregation of important data that helps you to split customers into some of the categories mentioned above.
A buyer persona uses that data to form an imaginary ideal customer. They will have the important traits mentioned in the customer profile but they will also have feelings, habits, routines, etc. that align to those traits. Creating a buyer persona is an important step in helping you to connect on an emotional level with your communication as well as on an intellectual level.
How to create a customer profile: 8 steps to follow
You know why it’s important to create customer profiles so the next important question is how do you create a customer profile? There are a few simple steps to follow, which are listed below:
1. Pinpoint who your existing customers are
Analyze who has bought from you. Think about where they made their purchase, when, how, and if possible, why. If you can, narrow down the customers who are getting the best value from you. Those that come back regularly, recommend you, and spend the most money are the types of clients you probably want more of.
2. Make a list of their characteristics
These are the core similarities and differences that define who your customers are. You can split these characteristics into different sections as I have below for a more refined understanding. It’s important to note that these lists are not in any way exhaustive.
Demographics. Characteristics that are clear and easier to define such as:
Age
Gender
Income
Family Status
Business size (B2B)
Business industry (B2B)
Job title
Psychographics. Harder to define but important in understanding why people make purchasing decisions. They relate to a customer’s attitude and psychological make-up:
Values
Activities
Lifestyle choices
Hobbies
Goals
Challenges
Hopes and fears
Behavioral. How does your customer put their psychological attributes into action? Think about concrete patterns such as:
Engagement
Previous purchases
Product usage
Loyalty to your brand
Level of attention required
Socioeconomics. What class does your customer belong in? This is a combination of income level, social status, and a few other predetermined factors that can be broadly categorized, from upper to unemployed class. These classes may also vary depending on geographical location.
Upper class
Middle class
Lower middle class
Skilled worker class
Unemployed class
Geographics. Geographical status can affect access to public transport, tax status, cultural norms, and regional specific laws to name but a few.
City
Region
State
Country
Online behavior. Related to the behavioral and geographical section but specific to the modern era. Where do they spend their time online?
Search engine
Social media
Websites
Blogs
Podcasts
3. Survey your existing customers
You might have heard this described as Voice of Customer or something similar but one of the best forms of research is still talking directly to your customers. If possible, speak to them in person as you’re likely to get a more honest answer than in a survey and you can read reactions, expressions, etc. If you’re unable to do it in person, a video call, phone call, or surveyed response will still give you crucial information. Below are a few examples of questions you can ask.
Demographics. It’s important to remember that customers might not want to be overly specific so closed questions with a range of answers can help.
What year were you born?
From 1920 to 1929
From 1930 to 1939
From 1940 to 1949
Etc.
What is your yearly income?
$0 - $10,000
$10,001 - $20,000
$21,001 - $30,000
Etc.
Psychographic. Open ended questions work well here.
What do you care about most in life?
How do you come to a purchasing decision?
Who are the most important influencers in your life?
Behavioral. Open-ended questions are good here too.
How do you spend a typical day?
Which products do you use more often than any other?
Which brands of x do you buy most often?
Socioeconomic. Multiple choice closed questions work well here as these are often quite personal.
What is your employment status?
Employed full-time
Employed part-time
Self-employed
Retired
Unemployed
What is your highest educational qualification?
Postgraduate
Master’s degree
Bachelor’s degree
Etc.
Geographics. Open and closed questions work here as the information is not overly personal.
In which region are you located?
Are you in a tax-exempt area?
Online behavior. Open ended questions can reveal a broader range of answers here.
Which websites do you spend the most time on?
How many hours per day do you spend online?
Which websites do you trust when making a purchasing decision?
4. Analyze the data you’ve collected online and offline
Not every customer will answer your questions and not every customer who does will be completely honest so it’s important to use the rest of the data you have to take account of how your customers currently interact with you. Research every tool you have including email data, website analytics, and social media analytics. Read the latest census and publicly available government statistics. Every piece of new information will help you to decipher traits and disregard anomalies. Here are a few great online tools:
Google Analytics. You can use this to discover who has been on your website, where they’ve come from and many of the demographics mentioned above.
Google Search Console. This can be used to get data on individual website pages and to see how customers move around your site if they come from the Google search engine.
Email marketing analytics. Depending on the provider, you can find out about open rates, click through rates, bounce rates, unsubscribes and a lot more.
Social media analytics/reports. Perfect for seeing views, likes, comments etc. and breaking these down into deeper demographics.
5. Review the current customer journey
Using all the data you’ve collected, put yourself into your customers’ shoes and see how they get from the first time they discover who you are to making a purchase and beyond. How easy is it for a customer to find what they want? How does the process align to their behavioral traits, their geographical statistics, and the rest of the characteristics you’ve defined as important?
6. Conduct market research about your industry
Who’s already talking to your customers? What are they talking about? How are they talking to them? What kind of response are they getting? It’s always important to do things your way but seeing how the industry works can give you a greater idea of how customers respond to different approaches. If a competitor’s approach works and it aligns with your business, you can tailor it slightly to make it work for you.
Looking at the industry as a whole can also give you an idea of where you sit in your customers’ minds and whether or not there are certain types of customers that could be buying from you, who aren’t.
7. Build your customer profile template
The exact details of what you put in your customer profiles will differ slightly but now that you’ve done all the research, it’s time to make something with it so let’s build your customer profile template.
Make it more personal by giving your customer a name and a face.
Add their demographic information.
Follow this up with their psychographic and behavioral information (some businesses combine these).
Include their socioeconomic situation.
Attach their geographical details.
Take account of their online activity.
Not every detail above will be useful to every business so choose carefully based on how relevant the details are to your company. You can add as much or as little detail as you like but remember, this is a guide to help you communicate better. It doesn’t have to be perfect so don’t worry if something is slightly out of place.
8. Review/update customer profiles regularly
Another reason why everything doesn’t have to be perfect is your business, your products, your services, and your customers will change regularly. That’s why it’s important to review and update your customer profiles on a regular basis. Remember, it’s likely that you will need more than one customer profile as you’ll probably have more than one type of customer. Find traits that are shared and group them where relevant.
Target customer profile examples
Need a little inspiration? Take a look at these target customer profile examples to see how others are doing it. Find the best bits and then you can start your own.
1. Minimalist
Minimalist have kept it simple, but the most important aspects are there to guide you while talking to or creating marketing campaigns for current and potential customers.
2. Research and Discovery
Research and Discover have another simple template that breaks down research into easy-to-digest chunks in order to make quicker and better decisions.
3. Creately
Creately have personified their customer profile to look a little more like a buyer persona but they are still using the details of their research to help with accuracy and forecasting.
4. Red Caffeine
Especially good for B2B, Red Caffeine makes detailed notes on the firmographics, AKA, the company details.
5. Fit Small Business
Fit Small Business’ customer profile template is another example that goes into lots of detail. It starts with the demographics as you can see in the image but it doesn’t stop there.
6. The Five Abilities
The Five Abilities have structured their template to help you make your customer profile into an ideal customer profile. This ideal customer profile example uses the demographics, behaviors, and the other attributes we’ve covered to create an “ideal customer scorecard”.
Make your first customer profile
Now that you know developing customer profiles is the best way to make sure you’re creating the right content for the right people at the right time, you’re ready to start building your own.
You’ve read everything, you’ve seen how to create a customer profile, you’ve taken note of the examples, so it’s time to get started. Start by doing the research, make sure you’re finding out the information that’s relevant to you, and note everything down using one of the templates above as a guide.