Beginners Guide To Creating A Customer Profile

When you begin your online e-commerce journey, you will quickly realise just how much there is to do. One of the most important things to do, which gets overlooked by so many new starters, is to learn and understand who your target customer actually is. In the beginning it is so easy to be focused on WHAT products you want to sell and forget about WHO you are going to sell your products to. You could have the greatest product on the planet, but if you are marketing it to the wrong person, you are never going to have the type of success you are putting all this effort in to achieve. Even before you design your website, source your products, and start a marketing campaign, every online business should begin by understanding WHO their customer is.

As a business, when you come to the realisation you want to make a profit connecting with people and helping them solve their problems or addressing their reasons for coming to your business, rather than just making a sale, you will have entered an exciting phase of your business growth. As such, your entire business and marketing strategy will need updating to reflect this, so best get this sorted right at the beginning and start your journey on the right foot, focused on the right things to achieve success.

In this article, I intend to discuss why you need to do this and show you the steps you should take to build a Client Profile.

What Exactly Is A Customer Profile?

Single-person profiles or representations of your market's customers are examples of customer profiles. Buyer personas, marketing personas, and customer profiles are all terms used to describe customer profiles. Your fine tuned marketing strategy will be impossible to execute without customer profiles, and without it your marketing strategy will be very hit and miss. If you don't know and understand who your customer is, how do you plan to design and execute marketing initiatives, and know where you should run these initiatives? A customer profile is a fictitious character created to represent your ideal marketing target audience. In many cases, they will offer loyalty to your brand, provide excellent referrals, and make frequent purchases in return for you providing them with high-quality products and/or services.

Rather than simply a broad demographic snapshot, like those provided on social media platforms, the aim of a customer profile is for you to conduct research and understand the real characteristics of your client. You'll be able to identify precisely what your ideal client wants from your business, as well as who they are. You might have more than one customer profile if your business spans more than one niche and is segmented into various goods or services. For example, you might want to develop a male and female consumer profile for each niche if you have an internet store that sells both men's and women's clothes and accessories. Don't just limit yourself to just two either, as some businesses may identify they have a few.

Why Is A Customer Profile An Important Thing To Have?

Creating a customer profile may appear to be a lot of wasted time and effort to define a fictional person. After all, your marketing platform probably has plenty of demographic data already that you can use to narrow down your advertising campaigns, right? Wrong. This data is not definitive enough for you to truly understand where you are going to find your customers.

Even though you know who might want to buy your product, it still doesn't tell you who your ideal customer is, or where you are going to find them. That's where spending the time to create a customer profile comes in.

You can concentrate your marketing strategy, target better, and personalize your effort by creating a single customer profile. It is critical to success to know where to find your target consumers, what they want, and how to connect with them on their own terms. Also, by removing people from your marketing strategy, you'll increase your conversion rates and save yourself a fortune in wasted advertising. You can also improve your conversion rates by knowing who you DON'T expect to buy from your business.

Four Steps to Create a Customer Profile

Customer profile creation isn't a quick and easy process. You are going to have to do plenty of research to identify your ideal customer in comparison to who you think you want as a customer. The more detailed you can make your customer profile, the better you will understand who it is you want to be walking in your business's front door, or coming to your homepage.

The process doesn't have to be a painful one. In fact, there are only a few simple steps you need to get started on your first customer profile.

1. Research customer demographics

Before you can build your ideal customer profile, you first have to find out everything you can about your ideal customer.

First, you should research your ideal customer's general demographic information. This will vary based on what products or services you offer, as well as the geographic scope of your business (local, regional, national, international) and your type of business. Data you collect should include:

• Age and gender

• Family dynamics, such as whether they are single, or in a relationship, and whether they have children or not

• Are they a personal consumer or a commercial/business consumer

• What is their highest level of education attained

• What is their occupation and income, and that of their partner/spouse

The difficulties and pains that your ideal customer has, are one of the most important pieces of data you'll want to gather. When it comes to e-commerce, solving a problem for someone is a key success factor, as is identifying those who have this problem and want it fixed. Your concept of the ideal customer can be narrowed or expanded by understanding and appreciating the concerns your ideal client might have.

Second, you will need to create a customer profile to represent your ideal customer using the information you have already collected. This includes giving the profile a name, age, gender, occupation, and income (for themselves or their business).

You should also define your customer's history. This can be done by simply giving them a brief backstory, like where they grew up, their aspirations, or what drives them in their daily life.

Furthermore, you may want to consider assigning them a sort of behavioural saying, such as something that they might say, believe or think, that is an indication of their type of persona. This saying doesn't have to be an original statement either. For example, if you're marketing to the finance , your customer profile may be a fan of Warren Buffet's famous quote: "Price is what you pay. Value is what you get."

2. Identify your customer's drivers

Everyone who comes to your business has arrived there because of some sort of driver, or reason to be there. Whether it be a particular like or dislike for your or your competitor's products and/or services, a need to solve a problem, a desire to achieve an outcome, or something else, everyone has a reason.

Ultimately, your customers want products and/or services that provide solutions to their problems at an excellent price.

To help get started, ask yourself a few questions like:

• What does your ideal customer want?

• What does your ideal customer need?

• Is your ideal customer working within a specific budget or timeframe?

In addition to this, you want to ensure you identify and model the values your ideal customer may hold. For example, if you're going to sell to religious consumers, trying to sell clothes and accessories with devils imprinted on them won't be a good look for your brand.

To help identify customer drivers, you'll need to review the demographic research you've already done. From this, you can ask yourself important questions like:

• What problems are your ideal customers trying to solve, or what are they trying to achieve?

• What are your ideal customers' personal or professional values and commitments?

• Are there any values or drivers that your customers consider to be dealbreakers?

• Remember what a customer doesn't value can be just as important and meaningful as what they do!

Once you have this combination of drivers and values, you can include this in the customer profile you've already started to create.

3. Understand the decision-making process

Once you have your ideal customer defined, you'll want to spend some time considering their decision making process. It's important to understand that no business will ever have a 100% perfect product or service, not even yours. That is, no business can truly offer a "one-size-fits-all" solution to every customer past, present or future.

As such, we come to the decision-making process. When a potential customer is considering a transaction with your business, and more specifically considering your product or service offerings, they will have several factors "built-in" that influence their decision. For example, one customer may have a maximum limit on how much money they're willing to spend on your type of service, while other customers may be prepared to overlook the price if the product's quality or value is considered worth the cost.

Likewise, time to get the solution (product or service) is often a significant contributing factor in a customer's decision-making process. Are they in the early stages of shopping around looking to make a purchasing decision later, or are they ready to acquire the product/service immediately?

Anticipating how these questions play into the decision making process will help you address their concerns by having answers ready to go when making your offer to them.

4. Find and use an existing template

If you don't feel comfortable creating all this stuff from scratch, you may want to consider using a template. Customer profile templates can range from simple to very detailed. They frequently include many of the factors we discussed here, such as a customer's:

• Drivers and values

• Likes, dislikes, and fears

• Pain points and challenges

• Their role in the decision-making process

• Demographics such as background, current situation, education level, and their income

Best Uses Of Customer Profiles

One of the best uses of a customer profile is creating a marketing strategy to meet your target audience. Rather than shooting blindly into a big black hole and hoping your ideal customers will bite, you can target the most profitable segments.

This also means you can eliminate unnecessary costs right from the start. Rather than spending money on emails, social media ads, google ads, etc that are targeted at the wrong audience, you can focus your attention on the strategies and media types most likely to be worth your ad spend.

You can also create a customer profile for a specific purpose. For example, if you want to start marketing on social media, you can make a profile of your ideal online customer. In doing this, you should consider other factors like how much time a person spends on social media and their preferred platforms. You may very well find that your target audience isn't predominantly on Facebook and that Instagram or Pinterest are better platforms to focus on. Consider also that as time goes on, these will change. For example, Facebook was once a new platform and as such, attracted the younger tech-savvy audience, whereas today its audience is an older generation compared to users of Instagram, TickTok, and Snapchat.

But there are other ways that creating a customer profile can be profitable and beneficial for your business. For example, knowing what your audience needs can help you make important changes when it comes to product selection or development. It also allows you to understand the difference between helpful customer criticism and unhelpful customer complaints.

Customer profile creation will also improve the user experience. If you're developing for, and marketing to your ideal customer, then you're more likely to build a longer lasting relationship with your ideal customers as they will warm to your approach, and this will be a great stimulus for growth in your business.

The Awakening

Many people do not prioritize the creation of a customer profile as they mistakenly think they know who their customer is and what they want. In fact, it's more likely they think they know but don't, and they have no idea how to get in front of an audience they don't realize is their target market. Knowing who your ideal customer is and what they expect from you and your business, is the first step to designing and building a profitable e-commerce business.