10 Steps to Develop Your Ideal Customer Profile

A personalized marketing strategy creates more conversions.

But if you don’t know who you are targeting, you cannot personalize your message. Developing a customer profile or avatar is vital to your marketing campaign’s success.

How do you create your ideal customer profile? And, why is this so important? Let’s find out.

What is a customer profile?

Your customer/consumer profile, also called client avatar, is a description of the type of people you want to sell to. This profile identifies your customer’s traits, location, behaviors, needs, pain points, and more.

Without this customer persona, you are likely marketing to an unknown audience. This decreases your marking efficiency and increases costs. You may find you spend more money to achieve less. No business wants to be in this boat. To avoid this, create a detailed customer persona, which will lower your customer acquisition cost (CAD).

Benefits of a customer profile

A customer profile points you in the right direction when developing a marketing strategy. You know your ideal customer intimately and can create messages that connect with them.

Using a customer profile allows you to:

• Create relevant content that resonates with your customers.
• Enhance keyword usage.
• Create more efficient marketing campaigns that reduce CAD.
• Improve your lead generation and reduce low-quality leads.
• Improve your sales process.
• Optimize all marketing communications and campaigns.
• Target the right marketing channels to improve ROI.
• Identify segmentation opportunities.

How do you develop a customer profile?

Your business probably already has most of the information needed to create this avatar. Your customer persona can be created based on your existing customers.

Collect the following information to build your customer persona:

1. General Demographics include age, sex, job title, education, family status and income. If your customers are other businesses (B2B), collect information such as industry, business size and other organizational attributes.
2. Physical Location. Collecting customer locations is especially helpful for local businesses. If you know what city/country your customers live in, you can build a local ad campaign.
3. Buying Power. How much money or capital does the customer have to work with? Look into their income, investments, Willingness To Pay (WTP), readiness to buy, purchase history and product usage. Spend a lot of time here to identify their purchasing behaviors and preferences.
4. Professional Background (may not matter as much for B2C). We already mentioned education in the demographics step, but here we take it a step further. What achievements does your ideal customer have? What projects do they take on? Where have they worked?
5. Background and Home Life. Detail your ideal client’s upbringing, family life and/or daily routine. What do they do when they get home from a long day?
6. Interests. What hobbies and passions does your ideal customer have? What do they spend their free time on? What fascinates them?
7. Motivators, Values and Goals. Remember, a personalized marketing message is more effective than a generic advertisement. Get up close and personal — What do your customers care about? And why? Do they want more freedom and time in their life? Do they want to be respected? What are their ethics and boundaries?
8. Digital location. Where do they spend their time online? Do your customers browse Facebook, Instagram or Tiktok? Or do they spend their time on LinkedIn?
9. Pain Points. Identify why they need your service or product. What are they struggling with that your product or services will solve?
10. Common Objections. This last step is one of the most important. What are common objections you or your sales team hear? List them out. Then write your response to resolve the objection.

Once you have collected the necessary data and information, compile everything into one document. Many businesses use a consumer profile template. This document can now be shared with your marketing and sales team. This will optimize your marketing and sales strategy, allowing your business to take a cohesive and organized approach.

If you are looking for a strategic marketing partner who improves your lead generation and ROI, Dream Local Digital can help. Our marketing services optimize our clients’ marketing campaigns across multiple channels. This reduces Client Acquisition Costs (CAC) and makes your business more profitable. We can work with your existing customer profile or develop a detailed one based on your consumer data. Contact us today.