Who are your customers - the importance of profiling
Building a profile of your ideal customer is a sure fire way to improve your marketing.
Why?
Because the more targeted your marketing becomes, from the message to the way you market, the more likely you are to succeed. The message resonates with the intended reader, and because you are in the right place, your prospective customer finds you.
But first you need to profile your ideal customer.
So, how do you do that?
In reality, there are some very impressive and expensive systems available that profile right down to the tiniest detail, but we believe that for most small businesses, the personal touch is the best approach.
If you are in a service based business, you are likely to know your customers pretty well.
So start with the easy stuff – how old are they, are they male or female, do they have families. You don’t have to ask them intrusive questions, most of this kind of information is likely to come out in conversation, and you would be surprised not only how much you learn, but also how powerful it can be.
Don’t worry if you have a product based or eCommerce business, because you still have a stack of very useful information to mine. Again, you can determine how many customers are male versus female, and may even have their age bracket.
You can look for buying patterns – if they buy product A do they often buy product B too, or maybe they are more tempted by product C or D. Here you are looking for common buying habits.
Remember, you will always get exceptions to the rule, but you are building up a profile based on the majority of your customers.
You may discover you have more than one type of customer, but that is OK.
Start by focusing on the kind of customer you prefer working with – now that might be the most profitable, or it might be the most rewarding in terms of results, or it might even be the ones who fire you up (if you have any of those you know exactly what we mean).
We will be coming back to this topic, because it is so important, but we would love it if you made a start right now…
