How to Define the Ideal Customer Profile with Examples and Strategy

In order to put together a good marketing strategy, you need to study some customer profile examples, create your own ideal buyer profiles and aim your campaigns towards the audiences that are most likely to buy from you.

Obviously enough, the purpose of any business is to sell their products or services. For this purpose, they need a good marketing strategy. The foundation of a good strategy is not to advertise a good product, but to advertise a product that brings value to the customers. By getting to know your customers you will be able to develop marketing strategies that will help you sell more to your existing customers while also attract more new customers. In the following lines, we will explain why these profiles matter and we will provide you with some customer profiles examples. We will also teach you the best ways to create these profiles and how to use them to grow your business.

1. Why go through the trouble of getting to know your customers?

Due to emerging new technologies, the average customer has become empowered with information. Modern customers are less likely to buy on impulse, just because of a good ad or a good sales pitch. They will prefer to wait, research and compare, and eventually make an informed purchase.  But what if you already knew everything about your customers before addressing them? What if instead of offering them a good product, you would offer each customer a solution to their individual problem? This concept has the potential to change the game and shift back the power from the customers to the businesses.

2. What is a customer profile?

Customer profiles are the holy grail of modern marketing. Also known as a buyer persona, a customer profile is a general description of your ideal customer. The purpose of this description is to help you understand what drives customers to buy your products. You can later use this insight in order to convince them to buy more, but also to find new customers that fit your ideal buyer profile.

3. Key elements of a customer persona

There are two factors to take into consideration when learning how to do a customer profile: demographics and psychographics. Both are equally important for your profile. The demographics will tell you what drives customers to your industry and psychographics will show you why your ideal customers choose you instead of the competition.

Demographics

This category includes all physical characteristics from age, gender, location, education, occupation and so on. For B2B clients, demographic data can also include industry, volume of sales, number of employees and other relevant physical data.

Psychographics

This category includes everything that has to do with behavior or beliefs. It can include hobbies, personality, style or humor. For B2B clients, psychographics can include the decision making factor, resistance to change, awareness of the competition, technology sophistication, professionalism or technology preferences.

Psychographics data is usually harder to collect as it requires actual interaction with your customers. However, customer psychographics data is essential because it introduces the emotion factor into marketing strategies. Emotions are a big part of our lives and they dictate everything we do, including our buying options. Even in the B2B world, emotions still play an important part in the buying journey. For example, imagine that you are offering a software solution, as an alternative to another popular software that exists on the market. Did you ever consider that some of your customers are choosing your product, simply because they hate the competition? Perhaps it’s the competition’s high prices, bad customer services or simply their overrated popularity. Regardless of that, customers might be coming to you just because they hate the alternative, and realizing this can help you address a new audience with a properly tailored campaign.

As we said, you need both demographics and psychographics to build an accurate persona. Take a look at the company profiles examples presented above. If you were to take into account just one of the two tiers, the profile would be incomplete and irrelevant. But if you put both types of data together, you will obtain a comprehensive and useful profile of your ideal customer.

The right way to create customer profile examples

It is important to understand that you are not dealing with a single ideal customer. Most likely, you will be dealing with at least two or three types of customers, so you should start with at least a couple of ideal buyer personas. As you collect more data, you will gain a better understanding of your customers. This will help you segment your customers based on several types of profiles. There are many ways to create your profile and finding the best way depends on your specific business, but also on the data that you have at your disposal at the moment. For accurate profiles, follow these 3 golden rules:

1. Be as accurate as possible – Don’t settle for general characteristics, but try to create a detailed background of your ideal customer.
2. Identify your persona’s goals and needs
3. Identify their preferred communication channels
4. Store every single piece of data in your CRM for further analysis

You can find many examples of customer profiles online, since many companies have chosen to share their findings on this topic. If you take a look at the customer profile examples presented below, you will see that these personas can be as simple or as complicated as you want them to be. Ideally, you should start with a basic persona and continue to develop it as you gather more data on your customers.

How to collect the data for your profiles?

For many marketers, surveys seem like the best and easiest option to collect customer data. However, surveys have many shortcomings, from the fact that they are often anonymous, to the fact that customers consider them tedious and time consuming. Moreover, various studies performed in different industries have found surveys to be completely unreliable. In fact, according to one recent study in the banking industry, over 60% of the lost customers were declaring themselves satisfied before switching to another bank. So, which is the right way to gather data? Well the right way is to use your CRM consistently and record each interaction that you have with your customers. This includes everything from direct insights from your sales agents to exporting data from your social media channels, your email campaigns, your website but also your offline channels.

As a general rule, the more data you have on your potential customers, the closer you will be to closing the deal with them. This is why the lead lists provided by SalesRipe come with comprehensive details. You can use these details to build your first sample customer profile. If you already have defined your ideal customer personas, you can use the program’s segmentation feature to target solely the leads that are most likely to buy from you.

How to use the customer profiles to grow your business?

Once you have a clear understanding of your ideal customers, it is time to use this info to grow your business. To do this, you need to develop a marketing strategy that answers the following questions:

1. What is the best way to reach each type of customer? (e-mail, social media, cold calls, TV or radio ads)
2. To what type of promotions will this customer answer? (new products, add-ons, giveaways, discounts)
3. What can you do to increase their confidence in your brand? (warranties, trials, good customer service)
4. What type of products will appeal to this customer?

Once you answer these simple questions, you can develop tailored marketing campaigns for each type of customer persona.