In order to succeed in the business world, you have to sell your products or services. And in order to do that, you have to understand who your customer is and what they want. While most businesses can easily point out their target audience, a customer profile is an even more detailed look at just who your customers are.
Learn how to create an accurate customer profile so that you can produce, market, and sell the services and products that will fit perfectly with your target customers’ lifestyles.
Understand What You Are Trying to Do With Your Products
A pitfall that snags many businesses is trying to solve all of the problems you see with one service or product. If you hope that your business will appeal to every single person on the market, and you attempt to target such a broad audience, chances are you won’t see much success.
However, when you find out exactly what problem you are trying to solve, and then figure out the type of people who struggle with said problem, you can customize your products and services to fit that specific customer’s needs.
A good tip for this process is to look at how customers already use your products and services. Once you know how your business offerings are used by customers, you can adjust your services to better fill their wants and needs.
Identify Your Customers Based on Different Traits
Customer groups are affected by many different traits, and you can use this information to better define your own customer profile. Some of these traits include:
- Demographic: Where do your customers live? Are you targeting a specific gender? Do you hope to draw in a certain ethnicity or household composition? Are you marketing to consumers or businesses?
- Psychographics: Dig into your customers’ lifestyles, attitudes and opinions, and even political tendencies.
- Socioeconomics: What income bracket do you aim to attract? Are your customers living in large, well-off neighborhoods or in apartments? Learn about their educational achievements and occupations.
Retired couples living with plenty of money will have different needs than immigrant families looking for jobs in an unfamiliar area. When you fully understand the situations, lifestyles, choices, and preferences of your customers, you can more fully target your services and products to fit their needs.
Get Helpful Feedback From Existing Customers
Feedback from your existing customers is vital to understanding how your products and services come across to your chosen audience. And you shouldn’t rely solely on cold, analytical details that come to you through Google or some other data tool. You also need to talk with your customers in person.
Customer interviews are a great way to get to know the people you are trying to reach. As you create relationships with actual people, you will learn more about them than what raw data can show you. If in-person interviews are impossible for your business, don’t worry: online surveys and questionnaires are also a great way to get customer feedback.
You may even incentivize your customers to help. Explain that your business wants to better serve your customers, which is why you’re sending out the survey. Then offer a discount or promotion of some kind for those who willingly fill it out or agree to an interview. Your customers will appreciate your honesty and effort.
Continue to Adapt Your Customer Profile As Needed
Once you’ve done the necessary research to produce a customer profile that fits the type of people you’re trying to reach, you may assume that your business is good to go. However, times change and people change, so if your business doesn’t change with them, you’ll quickly become irrelevant.
Another thing to keep in mind is as your target audience ages, their needs will change. The new generation of target customers may be completely different from the old generation. This makes the need for customer profiling constant.
A great way to do this is to send out new surveys every quarter or so to keep your information as up-to-date as possible. You can also incorporate any new information that your sales team learns as time passes and customer behaviors change.
Make sure you document your findings in an easy-to-read way so that you can quickly go in and adjust them as needed. If you keep this information organized, you’ll find that keeping track of existing and new profiles will be a breeze.
If you want your business to succeed, you need to create products and offer services that meet the needs of your customers. In order to do so, you must fully understand your customers, not as numbers on a spreadsheet, but as living, breathing people with hopes and needs.
Consult with Grow Team to learn more about creating and managing customer profiles. We’re ready to help you and your business succeed.