Understand Customer Profiling Before You Regret

Understanding who your customer is one of the most essential issues of any business, and therefore, customer profiling can assist you in defining the “customer types” which represent the usual users of your product or service.

Now, these profiles are intended to assist in making customer-focused decisions without merging work plans with individual opinion providing them a customized experience and making consumer profile that in turn converts customers into your brand’s advocates

You most likely would have heard these phrases when you entered the marketing business.

“Happy Customers Stay Around,”

“The customer is always right”

“The customer is number one”

These quotes worked in the physical shops and now, with creations of online ecommerce sites, these so much more true as according to SuperOffice’s data,

“86 percent of buyers are willing to spend more for a fantastic customer experience.”

So, as your Google algorithm is customer-centric, the metrics such as bounce rates, CTRs, anchor text and others have direct dependency on customer experience with products and services within your website.

This gains your business website’s visibility and assists your ranking on the search engine.

As a result, with the concept of customer experience in mind, any business that focuses on the interests, demands, or intentions of customers and fulfills them through their product or service generates a much greater chance of income and revenue.

What Is Customer Profiling?

Customer profiling is the process of categorizing your customers into groups with similar aims or traits, based on their profile.

These are based on a variety of factors, including demographics, location, passions, preferred social media channels, likes/dislikes, purchasing behaviors, psychographics, and credit history, as mentioned previously and seen in picture below.

This grouping helps in the targeting of products, services, and links in a systematic way that appeals to a certain customer segment.

Learning what is a consumer profile helps you record, file in, make databases or any other type of storage system that contains information about individual customers, like age, gender, spending habits, decision making.

All of these characters are to be used by your business to determine who is targeted with your specific products and services.

With the clarity of customer profiling and creating ideal customer profiles for better prospecting.

Let’s dive into the importance of customer profiling to reduce the number of potential categories which are relevant and targeted as per the client base and product offerings.

Let’s start.

Why Is Customer Profiling Important?

Customer profiling is ideally used to characterize a group of customers rather than individual purchasers or users and helps your company in categorising your customers by same preferences, pain points and even sometimes services.

In this way you can select the best products or services to explore or create for relevant marketing campaigns, and attract specific targets based on your customer profiles.

Here, I have provided you with some important pointers regarding customer profilings.

know Why Customers Left Your Business

If you know what your customers find dull or what is not according to their whims, it would help you greatly to change your methods that are actually causing problems such as an annoying salesperson, a technical fault, etc and perform better SEO practices.

These problems recorded could help future prospecting. Look at the graph below.

Also, you need to understand that not all customers are genuine, that is, You cannot please every customer. So, rather than taking input individually, consider the feedback collectively.

Customer’s Considerations Are Taken Into Account

The profiling of customers requires the knowledge of consideration about your website, company and products and services.

Your customers with the ideal customer profile made some choices to use your business that may be a specific feature, a unique video, an advertisement or even a quiz your company put on social platforms such as Facebook, Instagram.

That is, they would want to continue business with your company for future projects, so you provide them with constant contact and communications, which in return, helps you profile a type of customer and you can customize communication, products and services for them.

Read this: Tips To Make A Successful Social Media Campaign

Make You Anticipate Your Customer’s Regret

The products and services are tested by you but you sell these to your customers. The point is your customers uses them in daily life and regular updates from them would help you improve your product for making it more relevant to the ideal customer profiles

In order to get your consumer preferences and feedback, you can take the path of occasional surveys, quizzes and regular emails to the blogs that would interest them could help you analyze them.

Even their regular queries regarding your product and services help you assess the problems easily and be ready with the solution for your next customers.

The Profile Helps In Targeting The Audience

For your business, what is considered to be the ideal profile for your customer, gives you the benefit of word-of-mouth advertisements.

That is, your customers become your advertisers and promote your services and products without you encouraging them with incentives of free products or services. The customers show gratitude for your understanding and readiness to resolve their issues.

And lastly helps you build your brand with SEO practices such as testimonials, reviews, ratings and other such techniques.

Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) Elements

You need specific customer profiling to lower campaign costs while creating natural CRM (Customer Relationship Management) solutions.

This is done by making regular contact with customers, doing personalized conversations, and keeping their experience authentic.

Now, these procedures help you in categorizing customers on the basis of their demographics and futuristic goals which you obtained while having conversations and discovering more about them.

Keeping their today’s needs in mind and their behavior in check, you have to obtain their other information such as geography while providing a constant flow of relevant information about your products and services.

This helps you lessen your response time and effectively increase proper attention that your ideal customer requires.

Now, as you are thorough with why customer profiling is important for CRM.

You need to know that your profiling customers are the performers in the ICP sales, so do take care of these elements before you start profiling.

1 Clear Line Of business

2 Customers’ Patterns

3 The Customer’s Journey

4 Forces at Work in the Market

5 Lead Generation Methods

6 Frustration & Issues in profiling marketing

7 Customer’s emotional evaluation

8 Attend to customers Needs

Steps To Client Profiling

Client profiling uses elements that are mostly available in your business like your client data, team reps reports about clients which includes most of all the criteria that were included in a client’s journey to convert them.

As per the picture given below that shows 5 ways of profiling your customers.

Here, I have added another important one, so the 6 steps to create your client profile are:

Analyze Best ICP Sales

Your database is the best place to start profiling.

Through various communication channels that you used to drive your customers to your website aids your data needs.

Now, the processes and elements that helped you convert them is an advantage that provides you with enough info to form a base of categories to put your customers in.

Your customers should be relevant to your company and have futuristic goals in collaboration with your company’s services. They can aid you by providing information about their customer journey before, during and after closing a deal with them.
Survey, reviews and customer data as shown in picture below are some means to collect data for analyzing and profiling your customers.

The picture shows three to get information about your consumer profile from customer data that your company has of customer’s journey through ICP sales.

By interviewing customers that had used or are using your products and services and at the end of the request to perform a survey about themselves and how they liked the product.

Prepare Consumer Profile (Demographics)

When the customers first came to your business they must have filled forums that asked for personal details regarding what, whys, wheres and whens of their personalities.

These basically define the demographics of your customers such as

1 Age

2 Gender

3 Geographical location

4 Education level

5 Marital status

6 Household income

7 Occupation

8 Hobbies

Any other direct knowledge about the customers that you can use for categorizing depending on your niche.

As Sue Unerman who is the Chief Transformation Officer at the MediaCom UK states that,

“Success lies in understanding deep down what motivates the consumer and what levers to press,”

Meaning learning what customers’ ultimate desires and goals are, help you formulate the solution for ‘issues they would face’, ‘products they would want’, etc. So, that you could provide all their requirements as per your niche to them.

Understand The Product And Services (Psychographic)

Narrowing down your customer profile through demographics, marketing factors and trends aids your company’s prediction level and you can basically track

1 Which customer is just exploring,

2 Which is at the stage of trust issues,

3 Which person is willing to BUY, and

4 Who is on their way to convert completely with your services.

Your customer behaviour is a recurring process. And happens to each customer profiled with your company, that is they have similar traits when subscribing to your products and services.

So, generalizing their behaviour would provide you with a system. This system helps you understand how your target customers notice your products and what turns them to your services and buy them.

For example,

When a targeted customer goes to an online shopping platform such as Amazon.

They are mostly categorized by what they carted, wishlisted or bought previously.

Now, you must have noticed how the advertisements on the site change to similar products that you may have visited the previous month, week or days. This is basically done to customize customers preference.

If you are an Amazon user,

“You are among those 197 million people that visits amazon everyday” as per a report by bigcommerce.com

But if you are not, here is another example for you of how Google, through your history data, shows you results of previous searches which have the same initials that you are trying to search now. Look at the picture below.

Other Marketing Factors (Sociographic)

Social Media and other platforms are the natural extensions of ecommerce marketing today. They have been changing and become the methods of promotion for your businesses and brands collectively.

Look at this graph showing consumers’ shopping via social media,

You can clearly see how it has been increasing for the last 3 years. So, engaging your customer through blogs, posts, videos on social platforms have become the holy truth of ecommerce marketing and is performed by essentially every business online.

Profiling every customer coming to your business website and then categorizing them to accomplish further engagements are accomplished with this placed system of social interactions.

This profiling would later help your reps in dealing with customers before and during working a deal.

Though, take care of what your content marketing strategy attracts and see to it that only your targeted, profiled customers are attracted to your business profile.

Because it’s not about what you promote but rather what you won’t, this information should be used with other marketing aspects to help you grow your business.

Client profiling aids you with personalised products/services through automated means of online marketing by just identifying a model representative client that best fits in your target audience character.

So, creating an ideal customer profile with generalized traits and quotes from databases is quite helpful and success savvy.

Consistent Updates, Feedbacks And Engagements

Whether it’s through gifts cards; anniversary tweets; a newsletter or blogs with product and service updates; or an occasional email to thank them for their trust and support with your business, customers require consistency.

Customer Profiling helps you target users that are more likely to reach for certain products and services on your website and once they are collaborating with your services that are buying and using your services, you have to categorize them as “to be nurtured”.

Nurturing involves reaching out to the customers for updates, feedback and keeping them engaged with your business and brands.

Feedback provides you with useful and actionable data in the form of detailed reviews and suggestions that to from your customers,

Improving customer experiences demands a focus on this process of feedback – ratings, surveys, and so on – which are accessible through the Customer relationship management system.

Because testimonials and reviews have a significant impact on the purchasing decisions of your target customers and what could be better than organic results generated by customers and for customers.

Read some of statistics given about “testimonials and reviews”

“92% of customers read online reviews before buying” – Big Commerce

“72% of consumers say positive testimonials and reviews increase their trust in a business” -Big Commerce

“70% of people trust reviews and recommendations from strangers” -Nielsen

Also, if you are not fresh in people’s minds, they are more likely to seek out another firm to meet their demands.

So, keep updating and reaching out to your customers through emails, social media, personalized messages, updated products and services.

So, creating what is considered to be the ideal profile of a customer, your need to study their behaviour over the website and platforms is important along with the constant contact through updates, feedback and other means of engagements.

Buyer Persona Revisions

Now to the additional profiling step, revising buyer persona.

Buyer persona is the result of categorising, analyzing, nurturing information of a customer’s journey to avail a detailed description of someone – a fictional character- whose characteristic represents your target market.

Now, if you think the ICP marketing is limited to your client profiling at regular intervals of time for creation of categories.

Well then, you are wrong!

The targeted market shops online and have been deriving, dealing and discovering new trends everyday.

So, they are a little too difficult to understand. The new business and its type making their mark online every single day. You have to understand that keeping your buyer personas engaged and updated with your brand is required.

The regular influence of media has made them picky and demanding and so their choices are pretty unpredictable, especially the Millennials, their needs have become pretty difficult to Analyze for marketers today.

Look at the data below that shows pretty similar choices made by younger, adults and old generations of the 21st Century.

This concludes that revisions of your buyer personas are a must along with the collection of data and analysis, taking care of changing trends while keeping in perception of the future of your company.

Bonus: Ideal Customer Profile Template

When gathering data from your customers and creating customer profiles, you’ll need to have knowledge about previous customer journeys as well as fresh tested bits in hand ready for processing data and analytics elements.

Let’s work out some ideal customer profile examples with images for Customer Profile Template.

This template is the simplest customer profile example which answers the most basic question of customer profiling in ICP marketing.

In the template below you can read some basic question that your ideal customer profile must answer about customers:

1. Who are they? Your customers?;

2. Purchasing decisions? That they have to make and what affects their decisions;

3. Sample Quotation. The words that you can use or the conversations that you would have;

and other such points about customers that your profiling should answer.

For examples:

Robert is a buyer persona of my company, Incrementors

He runs a business and is enthusiastic and passionate about it too. Maybe married, Robert might also have one or two kids.

Now, Robert knows some things about digital marketing but is unsure about the words such as backlinks, crawls or deindex, where we as a service provider comes in.

Right?

Yes, so, this is basically a raw form of detailing about our buyer persona which is a description of a genuine buyer. Look at the information below.

Now, you as a company must do your homework with complete expertise and know your customer through any and every means.

Conclusion

Customer profiling is having an idea of “who your business customers are”, “what your ideal customer’s needs are” and “which type of problem they would face”.

Now, the point of learning about all this is to prepare a buyer persona and have practical knowledge through data and analysis of customer journey for preparing your company’s reps and team members.

“With around 74% of businesses believe that their customer data has witnessed improvements due to the use of customer relationship management (CRM)”

This stats basically proves that your sales process completely depends on the idea of the customers that your company targets.

So, for your customer profiling, it is required to deal with your right customers and incline them towards conversions while keeping them engaged, requesting feedback and being updated with trends.

For more marketing tips and services, you can schedule a free-of-cost 30-Minute Strategy session with our experts. In this call, our experts would discuss your business and provide you with the free strategies that you can use to boost your sales and revenue.