A customer profile is also known as customer persona or avatars. It includes a description of a customer or a set of customers based on geographic, demographic, and psychographic segments. It may also involve buying patterns, purchase history, or creditworthiness.
An ideal customer profile considers all the primary and secondary aspects involved in a business. It helps the business make critical decisions by tracking customer information, which is based on the same trends and patterns, business use to build a customer profile.
Remember, a good customer profile is as specific as possible where you, as a seller, shall be able to think and act like a customer.
Define the Demographics
There is a need to dissect every aspect of an ideal customer profile if we start with demographic factors. You need to look at age or age range, gender, level of education, type of training, occupation, general income level, and family structure. You may also include race, ethnicity, household, and other demographic factors.
These demographics help the business identify the key audience for their product or service. It helps them narrow down their market strategies to target and attract the people who are more likely to buy the product based on the demographic data.
Include Psychographics
Psychographics are the mental characteristics of your customers. They may include their goals, beliefs, motivations, and anxieties. As we get close to building an ideal customer profile, it is perhaps essential to know your customers, mentally.
Psychographic factors are hard to be gauged compared to demographic factors because they are least likely to be accurate. It’s because often there exists a disparity between the consumer’s purchasing power and their willingness to buy the product.
To fix this issue, you can investigate their hobbies, interests, favorite TV shows, etc. The second part of the psychographic factors is to put yourself in the customer`s shoes. What problem they can solve through your business, how often they use your products or services, how much are they willing to spend, and will they refer your business to someone else?
These questions help us to gauge the thought process of the customer, which in turn helps us to build an ideal customer profile.
Take Actionable Insight
Now when you have the relevant demographic and psychographic data, an ideal customer profile is to combine it for an action plan.
An ideal customer profile will enhance your business decision making such as which new products to introduce, whether promotions are necessary, if yes, then what type of developments and the best way to reach out to your customers.
What Are the Key Characteristics of an Ideal Customer Profile?
An excellent customer profile has the following characteristics:
Personal Information
An ideal customer profile has relevant personal information. You must take everything into account, from their financial status to age, gender, and even their hobbies. However, make sure that you don’t add fictional details or write it based on assumptions. Build a customer persona out of their data.
Customer’s Interest
Combine and analyze the collected data into identifying customer’s interests and behavior patterns. An ideal customer profile lays out all possible customer’s attention. Once you are privy to customer`s importance, you can identify their problems and work out a solution. Remember, if you present a solution to the problems faced by your ideal customer, they are more likely to purchase your product or service.
Profile with Abilities
While assessing customers, you need to adopt strict criteria because you can’t just target every possible customer out there. Assess your customers using a framework and categorize them according to need, time, success, budget, and winners. With this framework, you can rate prospective customers. An ideal customer profile entails customers as either no fit, workable fit, or complete fit.
Profile with Artistry Aspect
You can be creative about your ideal customer profile and work around with information. For instance, a simple customer profile inquiry about marital status, but what about children and how many children? What do they like? What’s their preferable mode of communication? These carved out details in an ideal customer profile can help you understand your customer in a much better manner.
Buyer Persona
A buyer persona is perhaps the essential factor of an ideal customer profile. This type of customer profile has all the vital details. It creates a sample customer for your business.
For example, Andrew who is 43 years old is married with two children. He is a risk analyst at a security firm with an average salary of $120,000 and lives in the suburbs. Now, this is an ideal yet effective customer profile where brands can determine whether Andrew is an ideal customer or not. You can further know about Andrew`s demeanor which would include his behavior in relationships, his motivations, and his moral standing.
These qualities of Andrew may seem vague. However, they help you effectively decide whether Andrew falls under your ideal customer profile or not.
How Do You Create the Perfect Customer?
There is no such thing as a perfect customer, but you can always have an ideal customer profile, which acts as a benchmark. The closer your customers are to the said profile, the higher your business can benefit from them. An ideal customer profile enables you to work around with different types of customers, depending on their proximity with a perfect customer profile.
Is Building an Ideal Customer Profile Helpful?
Many people assume that building an ideal customer profile promotes stereotypes and is a breach of privacy. To avoid such a situation, ensure that you don’t extract any customer information without their consent. If they are willing to give personal information, it’s legitimate and ethical.
Moreover, an ideal customer profile prevents you from wasted marketing efforts on irrelevant messaging. It helps you to reach out to the right people, those who are interested in your brand.
Create Your Ideal Customer Profile!
Customer profiles can be elaborate, in-depth, and structured depending on your methodology. However, ideal customer profiles are essential to promote your business to the right audience. After all, if you’re not targeting your ideal target market, it’s not beneficial to your business.
