Before you build your brand, it is important to know who your brand is targeting. Who is your ideal customer?

Creating a customer profile is a great way to figure out who your ideal customer is and how to brand your business to gain their attention, trust, and brand loyalty.

What is a customer profile?

According to HubSpot, “a customer profile, or a consumer profile, is a detailed description of your current customers. In a customer profile, you’d identify purchasing behaviours, pain points, psychographic data, and demographic data with the intent of targeting similar customers in your sales and marketing campaigns.”

You can determine a customer profile not only for your current customers but also for the customers you want to target. You can do this by learning the purchasing behaviours, pain points, psychographic data, and demographic data of your targeted customers.

Building this target profile will help your business make strategic decisions based on the information.

How to build a customer profile

To build a customer profile, gather the following information for your targeted customer:

• Geographic location
• Buying patterns
• Psychographic characteristics – customer’s beliefs and behaviours
• Demographics
• Purchase history

You can gather this information from your current customers by using data tools that analyze your website such as Google Analytics. See here for adding Google Analytics to your website.

If you currently have no customers, research your ideal customers through social media and check out what kind of customers are following brands/organizations that are in the same industry as your business.

To build a customer profile, you need to also understand what you sell and how your customers use it. Your business mission statement should help you determine this and if you don’t have a mission statement yet then it is best to create one first. A mission statement is a summary of the aims and values of your company or organization.

Once you have understood why you sell and what you sell, work out how your customers would use it. What is their pain point that your business helps them with? And why do they buy it from you?

Finding Answers

A good way to figure out how your customers would use what you sell and why they would buy it is to ask them. If you currently do not have any customers, ask family and friends what they would think if they were your customer and ask for honest answers. If you currently have customers, ask them for feedback.

 Ask your returning customers a questions such as:

• Why they buy from you?
• What makes your business different from other businesses in the industry?
• What they like the most about your products/services?
• What they like the least about your products/services?

You could ask your customers directly or send them an e-mail. It may help to also offer a discount or some kind of reward for answering your questions.

Break down the details

Once you know more details about your customers, it is time to break down the information into categories. By doing this, you can create an ideal customer profile which makes it easier to identify the better suited branding strategies to use.

There are a variety of categories that you can break down your customer details into, such as:

• Gender
• Jobs
• Age
• Interests
• Geographical location
• Income level
• Education level

The following categories may also help identify your targeted consumers further:

• Which branding strategies or marketing channels will help you reach them?
• What role do they play in decision-making?

Data maintenance

Once you have gathered and organized this data about your targeted customer, it is important to keep it up-to-date. Keeping your customer’s profiles up to date will ensure that you have access to information that prevents you from making costly branding errors.

One way to keep your data up-to-date is to continue to send out surveys to your current customers as your business grows. This will help you keep track of their changing habits, geographical locations, and buying patterns. Surveying your customer base as your business grows will also give you insight into their different pain points and therefore new products or services that you could introduce.

Choose Who to Continue to Focus On and Why

Perhaps you prefer to focus on the customers that make you the most money or customers that show you the most brand loyalty? Focus on the customer base that works best for your business goals. By focusing on these customers it is a win-win as you ensure that you put your selected customer’s needs at the centre of your business and in-turn reach your business goals.

Conclusion

Building a customer profile will help accelerate your business growth by guaranteeing that you reach your ideal customers and your business goals.

If you need assistance with your brand, from creating your visual identity to building your credibility contact us for a free consultation. We’d love to help elevate the way you run your business through engaging brand identities and innovative digital experiences!

Written by Alice Bowyer | July 14th, 2022 

Sources:

https://blog.hubspot.com/service/customer-profiling