Creating customer profiles is a great way of organising the different types of people or companies who are interested in your offering.

In the process of creating customer profiles, you may also discover there is a particular type of customer who spends a lot of money for minimal effort on your part. On the flip side, you may also have some customers who do not give the same return on investment than others.

Why do you need Customer Profiles to ensure marketing campaign success?

To be competitive and successful in business, it’s important to know about your market. One can assume or even search the internet for information about the customers in your industry. However, the best way of knowing who your target market is to look at your current customer base. By examining the people or companies you already do business with, you can create the profiles of all the kinds of customers you have. From there, you’ll easily recognise who your target market is, who your high value customers are, and can therefore start to concentrate your marketing efforts on them.

GETTING STARTED

You may already have some demographic information about your current customers. These are details like gender and date of birth. Take a look at your current customer base and start grouping them into the different demographical information you have. Other things to look for can include location, occupation, salary, and education. By organising this information, you will start to see trends and as such, begin to create customer profiles.Collecting this type of information when your customer purchases your offering makes this process a lot easier. If you missed this opportunity, now might be a good time to touch base with your customers through a simple survey or phone call to find out more about them.

LOOK AT THEIR PURCHASE HISTORY

Once you have listed all the demographical information, now is the time to take a look at your current clients’ purchasing history. In particular, investigate the customers who have spent the most money with your company. See if you can correlate any demographical information that is linked to those customers. For example, you might notive that women who are between the ages of 25 and 30 seem to make the most purchases and spend a lot for each purchase. These customers are your high value customers in that, they spend a lot without much effort on your behalf. Listing the similarities in their demographical information will create a template of who your target market is.The next thing to do is to look closely at their purchase history. Pay attention to things like what they have bought, the amount of money spent per purchase and how often they buy. If your offering is something people only purchase every so often, take a note of what your customers added on or any extras they included. Add this information to your customer profile.

CONFIRM YOUR FINDINGS

You now have a base of information, from which you can see some trends occurring. Now is the time to discover and confirm the reasons behind the trend. While it’s easy to assume why your high value customers spend money how they do, the best way to find out is to ask them directly.Customers generally don’t mind taking surveys especially if you give them something in return. If there is too much to put in a survey, you could give them a quick call courtesy customer service call. Not only does will this provide you with the information you seek – it’s also great customer service. Take this opportunity to ask them what they like about your offering and your company, and also if they have had any bad experiences. Find out what they would keep, what they would change, and what they would like to see more of in the futureIf this is done properly, your customers will not realise you initial intention and will be happy to hear you care about their experience.

 COMPLETE YOUR CUSTOMER PROFILE

By now, you have all the information you need to put together a customer profile of your high value customers – demographic information, buying history, and insight into their needs, wants and problems that you can solve.From here you can be confident in connecting the dots between your offering and your customers. You may have even discovered things about your business that your customers really enjoy but you were unaware of. You may also now know how your can expand your offering or change it slightly so that it is more in line with your high value clients.

From here you can set up your next marketing campaign based around your high value customer profile. You’ll be able to put together an intelligent and thoughtful marketing campaign that will speak to your target market. This means you will spend less time and energy trying to please everyone and instead, you will attract more of the right customer – the customers who are loyal to your company and spend more for less effort.