Your customers are your lifeline. Without them, your business fails. Knowing your typical customers and tailoring content to their needs helps broaden your customer base and ensures customer loyalty.
A customer profile helps flesh out surface observations. Also known as a buyer persona, a customer profile is a semi-fictional representation of your target customer based on research and real information supplied by your team and your current customers. You’ll likely have more than one customer profile since you probably have more than one ideal customer. A customer profile is important because it helps you send the right message to the right person at the right time — the crux of any successful marketing strategy.
With buyer personas you learn:
We’ve created a guide to creating personas to jump start your work. In the sections below, we’ll walk you through the information you need to populate the customer profile template. With your completed customer profiles, you’ll be primed to sell to your ideal customers and better marketing to your ideal persona.
Demographics are the basic facts and information about your customer. Your customer’s most basic demographics include their name, age, job title, marital status and income.
To find your customers’ demographics, start by reviewing the information in your Google Analytics account. Here, you can find out where your site’s visitors live, their age, gender and more. More importantly, you can use this information to guide your created persona and better market to potential customers.
You can also use social listening tools on Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook. Analyzing your competitors’ social media pages is a smart way to learn more about your customers’ demographics.
Identifying the role your persona plays in the buying circle is often more important in B2B than B2C businesses, where supervisors or other departments need to be consulted on purchases. This is often the case when selling bigger ticket B2C products or B2C services. When creating personas for marketing in B2B and B2C businesses, consider the following:
For information about your different customers’ goals and responsibilities, try searching LinkedIn for users with your ideal job titles and learning their daily tasks and responsibilities.
Your sales team and your customer services team are also ideal resources for this because they hear straight from the customers what’s preventing them from buying and what problems they’re trying to fix.
Goals and challenges take you a little further into your customer profile.
With both goals and challenges, ask yourself, “How does my business help?” and “What’s motivating my customer’s change?” These questions help reveal the problem your prospect is dealing with and the unique solutions your business offers.
Pain points (real or perceived problems) are the key for differentiating between each of your personas. Once you differentiate what makes your customer tick, you can personalize your approach by relating it to their goals.
Your sales team and customer service teams will be invaluable when learning your customers’ pain points. Your business development team may also have insights into why prospects get in touch with your company and what problems they’re trying to solve.
Your customer’s watering holes are the places they go to gather information. Knowing their watering holes will help you learn the language that your customers use. You’ll also learn more about the influencers they respect.
Social media listening is the best method to learn about your customers’ watering holes. Check out which links they share or discuss, which groups they’ve joined on LinkedIn and which lists they’ve created on Twitter.
What’s stopping your prospect from buying your product or service? If you can learn this information before you engage with a prospect, you have a huge advantage when it comes to selling.
Schedule a meeting with your sales team to hear why prospects ultimately don’t purchase from your country. Sales typically have the most insight into the objections of prospects and what works (and doesn’t work) when addressing those challenges.
Qualitative insights are the deepest things you can learn about your buyers. These are things you wouldn’t know by looking at them or from a few minutes of casual conversation.
These questions might seem a little outside the realm of what you reasonably assume about your customers but with a little savvy, you can read between the lines. Social media listening gives you an idea of the language that your customers use and phrases that they commonly say. You can even see which links they tweet to learn which blogs and publications they’re frequently reading.
However, for truly helpful insights, it’s recommended that you speak with an actual customer and interview them. You’ll likely want to ask a customer that you know well who will offer valuable information. On the other hand, if you can get a newer customer to agree to an interview, you’ll get the bonus of a different perspective.
Spending the upfront time to create thoughtful and well-researched customer personas and profiles can more than pay off. Tailoring your marketing message to your customers, will help drive revenue and increase your customer base.
Don’t waste any time and get starting building your own customer profiles today. Check out our Customer Profile Template, you’ll find editable Google Sheet that you can copy and edit for your own use!
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