In order to create a successful marketing campaign, you need to know who your audience is. This knowledge will shape everything from who you target, what you offer, how you design the creative, and which channels you use to reach them. You can learn about your audience through customer profiles which analyze thousands of data points and deliver key insights.
What are customer profiles?
A customer profile is a data analysis that examines who your current customers are across multiple different planes such as demographics, lifestyle, behavioral, and geographical information. The demographics portion will identify your customers’ age, net worth, marital status, family unit, dwelling type, etc. It builds out your audience framework.
Next, the lifestyle and behavioral study will add in layers, highlighting your customers’ personalities. These data points will identify if your customers like running, gardening, 80s rock music, or traveling internationally.
Finally, the geographical study will look at where your customers are coming from. What do we know about their neighborhoods, zip codes, city, and state. All total, customer profiles will analyze over 5,000+ different data points and then produce a detailed report, painting a clear picture of who your top customers are.
What can you do with customer profiles?
Find Look-a-Likes
Once you know what your best customers look like, you can use the customer profile information to find prospects who look just like your consumers. This allows you to be more strategic about who you target and enables you to reduce marketing waste.
Tailor Offers & Creative
In order to stand out from all of the marketing noise, you need to send offers that resonate with your audience. Study your customer profiles. What do you notice and learn about your customers? What matters to them? Build your campaign with the end recipient in mind. What do they want or need? Think: if I were them what would get me to say yes. People want to buy from companies that know and understand them. Use your customer profile results to tailor your offers and guide your creative design.
Choose the Best Channels
Once you know who your customers are, you need to figure out how to reach them. What social media channels should you add to the mix. Will they respond better to email or direct mail? Should you advertise in a fishing magazine or partner with a local coffee shop? Maybe you should set up a booth at the next big 10k run in your city. Take what you know about your customers and look for opportunities to get your message in front of them.
How often should you create customer profiles?
Customer profile information is incredibly useful, but it’s also important to keep in mind that the information can grow stale. Your customers will change. They will get older, go through different seasons of life, or the next generation will have different likes and interests. You need to stay on top of these changes, so you do not lose their attention or become unrelatable to your audience. When determining how often you should update your profile take into consideration a few things.
- How long is your sales cycle? The longer the process, the longer your profile will stay relevant.
- Are your products/services seasonal? Do your winter customers look the same as your summer customers?
- How many customers and locations do you have?
If you have a longer sales cycle or a smaller customer base, your profile should be good for 12 months. If you offer drastically different items depending on the season or have a high volume of customers and locations, then you should look into updating your customer profile each quarter or with each mailing. This will enable you to keep your eye on different trends and quickly adapt to changes in your audience.
Next Steps
If you would like to receive a new customer profile, let’s connect. We enjoy helping businesses know who their customers are and grow their business.