One of the greatest challenges of growing your business involves identifying and understanding your ideal client profiles (ICPs). Profiling, or creating detailed customer profiles, is one of the best ways to narrow down your ideal/target audience. By doing this, you can provide unparalleled personalized customer experience and drive conversions and retention.
What is a customer profile?
A customer profile is a document that describes a segment of your target audience in detail. It helps you understand their needs, buying patterns, interests, pain points, motivations, demographic data, interaction history (with your business or even competitors), and any other details that may be important to your business.
These details provide a look at how your customers are interacting with your brand—as a result, they also help you gauge and understand customer satisfaction.
Here are additional benefits of using a customer profile:
- Tailor your messaging.
- Customize your marketing materials.
- Personalize your conversations.
- Build a trusting relationship between your client and business.
Types of Customer Profiles and Customer Profiling
As you search for answers to “what is a customer profile,” you’ll also find different types of these profiles. Depending on the type of business you are in, your profiling technique will vary. For instance, if you have a dog grooming business, a customer profile will include the person and their dog, as well as their preferred products and services, such as shampoos and haircuts. You will also have details on the breed and weight, as well as vet information.
Here are a few different common profile types that apply to different companies:
1. B2B Customer Profiles
When creating a customer profile for a B2B or business-to-business company, you will typically map the businesses that use your services or purchase your goods. These details may include location, industry, company size, company revenue, target audience, and other details. The profile will usually include contact details for decision-makers in the company.
2. B2C Customer Profiles
These profiles are more about an individual client, not a company, and what their demographics are. These profiles will include details such as gender, age, purchasing behaviors, and specific pain points.
3. Geographic Profiles
The geographic profile will contain details about the physical location of your clients and their preferred shopping spots. Characteristics that can be used to segment customers into groups include:
- Language
- Culture
- Physical location
- Workplace
4. Demographic Profiles
These kinds of profiles define who the client is. These profiles separate your clients into groups defined by personal characteristics. Some details that could be included in this type of profile include:
- Education
- Job title
- Income
- Ethnicity
- Marital status
- Gender
- Age
These details are often used by marketing campaigns to personalize communication with their potential clients.
5. Behavioral Profiles
You can define how clients interact with your brand through behavioral profiles. These types of profiles group clients into areas defined by their:
- Spending habits
- Buying patterns
- How they use services and products
- Feedback types
A company may use this to cross-sell or upsell to clients and to generally improve the customer experience by making it more personalized. Whether a large company or a small business, knowing more about your existing customers and their needs will help improve your sales.
Why Is Customer Profiling Important? 4 Benefits
Customer profiling is important for understanding who your client is and what their needs are, but there are other reasons these profiles are important.
The following are different ways your small business or large company can benefit from customer profiling:
1. Target your ideal customers.
When you know who your ideal customer is, you are more likely to have a loyal customer. The more you know about your target customers, the better chance you have of solving their problems through services and goods. You can’t take care of something if you don’t know it needs taking care of.
Is your ideal customer someone who lives close and is a pet owner? Are you looking for a company that needs a particular tool or software you design? These are questions you may ask yourself when identifying your ideal client and creating their profile.
2. Increase efficiency.
Getting in touch with your ideal customer base, whether it is done through social media or using your customer profiles and CRM to know them better, improves your marketing strategy. This gives your marketing strategies a higher chance of success and increases your efficiency across the board.
Once you’ve created your customer profile, you won’t waste time marketing products and services to customers who can’t use them and instead streamline your advertising process. This improves your business’ efficiency and helps boost your overall revenue.
3. Improves sales.
A good customer profile ensures that your sales team has sufficient information on a client’s pain points. You understand their needs more, so you have the knowledge to meet these needs with the right product and service. This will lead to an increase in close rates and improved sales performance across the board, driving company profits up.
4. Identify better-fit prospects.
When you use good customer profiling, you will be better able to target prospects and leads that are more likely to use your brand. This makes closing deals and improving conversion easier for your sales and marketing teams. Once converted, these prospects and leads also become happier customers.
When you can personalize the interaction your customer has through a well-done profile, your customer experience is dramatically improved. This will also increase positive reviews, which leads to better sales.
How to Create a Customer Profile in 5 Steps
Learning how to create a customer profile doesn’t have to be a difficult or painstaking process. There are some things you can do that will help to ensure you have better information when creating your customer profiles. The following pointers can guide you in creating your customer profile in just five easy steps.
1. Use a customer profile template.
One of the easiest ways to get started with customer profiles is to use a profile template. There are plenty of one and two-page templates online that will get you started with what to gather about your data.
Some samples include:
Scorecard
With this template, your customer profiles vary depending on company preferences and needs. The customer profile is then scored on how closely it fits what the company is looking for. Rick Wong’s template, discussed below, is an example of the scorecard customer profile template.
Segmentation
In a segmented customer profile, the differences in prospects’ and customers’ needs are emphasized. What one customer needs, another one dismisses. Each customer type gets broken down into preferred communication, core values, and demographics.
Basic Information
With this kind of customer profile, you get the basic details. There are plenty of free templates out there to get you started in this direction. This gives you a list of essential customer information like demographics, background data, pain points, and more. You get an accurate idea of your target customer with this profiling template.
Buyer Persona
With buyer persona templates, you create a profile card that details the information about your perfect buyer. You also create or add an image that makes it more personal and easier to visualize your potential client for your salespeople. This is a fantastic way to engage salespeople that are more visually driven and get them to picture your ideal customer.
Psychographics, Demographics, and Behaviors
With this template, you will have something that looks like an actual scorecard and has a grid where your potential client can fill out short details about themselves. These questions may include details about where they live, what habits they have, and what forms of entertainment they enjoy.
There are dozens of free samples online for you to utilize. You can also brainstorm different questions that will lead you to get to your ideal customer. This list of questions is a great basis for creating any customer profile.
2. Analyze your customers’ background.
When starting down the path of developing customer profiles, you will want to examine your current customers as well. Talk to your marketing teams about what kind of details they need. Look closely at the details you have gathered on your clients and potential clients. Examine their backgrounds. These data points will help you create an accurate and realistic customer profile.
3. Consolidate your data.
Once you have gathered your customer data points, it is time to consolidate them. Gather all the information you’ve collected in one place and sort through the important details of your customer journey. With every bit of information laid out, you are better able to analyze your customer data.
4. Complete your customer profiles.
Once your customer data is organized, you can easily figure out patterns and get insights for your customer profile. Create your first draft of a customer profile. From here, collect feedback from your team and current customers. Check in with your sales team to make sure the details are accurate and represent some of your ideal clients.
5. Build your ideal customer profile.
Laying out what your ideal customer is like is the best way to visualize them. For instance, when marketing your dog grooming services, your ideal customer likely takes their dog to the vet regularly. These behaviors will be part of what you look for when creating your customer profile. You may also have a preferred geographic area that will make a difference in who your target customer is.
Keep in mind that the perfect customer profile is the result of continuous feedback from the sales and marketing teams and customers.
2 Customer Profile Examples + Templates
One of the best ways of getting started with building your customer profiles is to look at a customer profile example online. These may help you build your profiles and get in touch with your target customer.
Some of the following are well-known customer profile templates that are popular for their effectiveness.
1. Five Abilities Template: Rick Wong
One example of an excellent customer profile grid is from Rick Wong. It describes the five abilities. He does it like a scorecard around these five key criteria (need, time, success, budget, and winners) and three possible outcomes (no fit, workable fit, and complete fit). Each criterion gets a score of 0, 1, or 2 based on the outcome.
The grid provides a quick and easy way of gauging the viability of a customer. You can score customers through each criterion and add up their scores at the end. The higher the score, the better the fit. Once you have scored everyone, you can rank the customers and decide which score corresponds to your ideal customer. For instance, you may decide that your ideal customer scores above a seven.
2. ringDNA Template: Buyer Personas
With this profile, you see your ideal buyer persona. There is an actual image to help the salespeople get a better idea of who they are looking for. These profiles use firmographic and demographic data, so they can be used by B2B and B2C companies.
Once the buyer persona is complete, it can answer questions your team members may have about prospective customers.
How to Reach Your Ideal Customer
Once you get a better idea of who your ideal customer is, you have the tools needed to design a customer profile marketing campaign that reaches them. Here are some solutions to get you on your way to a fantastic marketing plan implementing what you have learned with your customer profiles. Podium also has several useful tools to help you implement a successful marketing strategy.
1. Collect customer reviews.
An increase in customer reviews correlates with an increase in business. After all, more reviews mean more business for you. One way to boost the number of reviews your business gets is to incentivize them.
You can also use a free Google review link generator to make it easier for your customers to leave reviews. You can send these links through text or email so customers can create their reviews in minutes.
2. Use text Marketing
Creating customer profiles will help you understand the best way to communicate with your clients in the best way possible. Some customers prefer to receive text marketing. Text marketing is an important way of getting your business known to a wider client base.
With customer profiling, you can easily tailor your marketing strategies according to your customers’ preferences. In fact, you can send one text that drives thousands in revenue to your business. You can also take advantage of ready-to-use texting templates to design your own text marketing campaign.
3. Include web chat.
You can learn how to make your website a conversation starter. The best way to do this is to start including web chat on your site. There are many ways to get info out to your clients, but none is quite as efficient as web chat. Questions are answered easily when you see Webchat in action on your site.
Start Using Customer Profiles
Creating an excellent marketing campaign is difficult. The best way to make sure you are making a quality marketing plan is to have a solid customer profile. This is easily done by a few different factors, such as creating questions that help define your ideal customer.
There are many tools you can use along the way to make the process easier. Podium offers a range of tools to help you understand your potential client base better, market to them, and run a more successful business.
