WHAT IS A CUSTOMER PROFILE?
A Customer Profile is a description of a customer or set of customers. Basically this includes psychographic, geographic and demographic characteristics. As well as buying patterns, purchase history and creditworthiness. Sometimes in business, the buying process can be long and complex. To pivot a lead to a customer it helps to understand why a customer buys, and what keeps them up at night. Marketing success starts with a genuine interest in your customers. With insights and knowledge about your customers, you can better sympathise with your customers. By creating your customer profile you will get a clearer understanding of what information your customer needs, what the relevant contact moments are. And it shows you which success factors, goals and challenges the potential customer has.
Why build a customer profile?
Getting a good understanding of your target audience will allow you to better understand and help your customers. How? By building up customer profiles. A customer profile is a detailed profile that represents part of your target group. Based on the insights of your customer profiles and customer journeys you can start developing your content promotion and your choice of (marketing)channels. Customer profiles also help with your decision-making regarding investments and partnerships.
4 easy steps to creating your customer profile
1. Listen and ask questions
Step into the shoes of your target customer. Try to gain an understanding of your customer’s priorities. Uncover what their success factors are and which barriers your customers have to overcome. In essence, look at the buying process and get to understand what drives their decisions. Digital data can be used as part of your research, and tools such as Mailchimp, SurveyMonkey, GetResponse, Facebook, Google Alerts and LinkedIn. Personal interviews are the real key to success. This way you uncover deep insights into your customer.
2. Analyse, cluster and unite information
After collecting the information search for patterns and similarities in the behaviour of your customers. Cluster the data on which you want to base your customer profiles. After profiling, it is important to create a customer journey map. This will help you set the foundation for your content marketing strategy.
3. Criteria and touchpoints
Create a story of each persona, and include a photo, name, demographics, challenges, and goals. Map their ‘digital body language’. What does your customer do on the Internet for both their work and personal life? How does he/she use a smartphone? Then validate and refine each persona at least once a year. By using personas as a guide, you can create relevant content that fits each stage of the customer’s journey, from awareness through to decision.
4. LAUNCH CAMPAIGN
Introduce your personas in your company. Ensure that everyone in sales and customer support understand the customer and their needs.
This helps to improve your marketing and communication at every touchpoint with your customers. Working with personas is a dynamic process. You must maintain, enrich, and change them as new information about your customer becomes available.
THIS IS HOW WE WORK
After a joint kick-off, Be A Legend will deep dive with you and your team into the world of your customer. We will mostly cover anonymous quality surveys, personal quality interviews, online and offline research. Together we bring your customer personas to life in just a few weeks’ time. The next step would be creating the customer journey. This journey is your blueprint for your future marketing allowing you to further develop your marketing and content activities.