Businesses have existed for as long as society has. If you go back thousands of years, you’ll see goods and services exchanged. Many years ago, you might have seen an open-air market with shiny rocks exchanged for food or clothing.
As long as commerce has existed, marketing has as well. Primitive marketing was mostly word of mouth. As a business owner hundreds of years in the past, you might hire someone to go around telling his neighbors how much he enjoyed your services or products. Perhaps that drummed up some business for you, and you saw a revenue increase.
Later, radio spots and TV commercials became the norm. Now, you see targeted online marketing and social media ads. The point is that marketing usually brings back revenue for business owners if they do it properly. That’s part of why, if you run a company, you need to come up with ideal customer profiles.
We’ll talk about this concept in detail in the following article.
What is an Ideal Customer Profile?
The latest technology that can help you with a people search might reveal all kinds of things about a person. It might show you whether they have a criminal background or their education level.
However, that’s not quite the same as creating an ideal customer profile. A background check tells you about a specific person’s life. Ideal customer profiles tell you about a fictional person who you feel will buy your products.
You compile an ideal customer profile so you will know how to craft your marketing campaigns. Companies have done this for many years, though the term “ideal customer profile” didn’t exist decades ago.
A company will make a product or product line they feel a specific person will buy. They can’t know for sure whether they’re getting the market penetration they want, though, until they get that product out there to see who’s buying it and how it’s selling.
If you’re a company owner or operator, and you come up with an ideal customer profile, you’ll know who’s most likely to buy a product or service. You’ll know how to create ads that will appeal to this person, and you’ll know where to display them.
How to Create an Ideal Customer Profile
As a business, if you want to create an ideal customer profile, you’ll first need to ask yourself what problem your product solves. For instance, say you manufacture and sell snow tires. You’ll immediately know that your customer base owns vehicles, and they live in snowy climates.
Next, you can research and identify your best customers. If you already have your business up and running, you can observe customers who come in. Can you identify how old they are, the vehicles they drive, what credit cards they use to pay, their gender, ethnicity, and so forth? If you start to see trends, you can begin to know how to market to your base.
Next, you will want to analyze your customer feedback. The negative feedback matters as much as the positive, if not more so. You can find out what your customers like and don’t like based on what they say about your company on social media, calls you get to the store, Google reviews they leave online, and more.
At this point, you can have your marketing team start to compile ideal customer profiles. They will include things like this person’s geographic location, their disposable income level, and anything else you feel has relevancy.
Now, you’ll have a working ideal customer profile model. You can always modify that as you learn more about your customer base or roll out additional products or services.
How to Get More Customer Information
As a business, you need marketing, which is essentially the same as advertising. You probably have limited money to spend on it, though. You need to make sure you’re spending it in a way that gets you the best chance to beat your competitors. You will doubtless have some, regardless of what services you offer or the products you make.
We’ve talked about how you can begin to profile ideal customers by watching what they say about you on social media with brand mentions. You can note when they come in and complain about your products or praise them. You might need to go further, though, if you want to continue updating and refining your ideal customer model.
You might conduct a focus group to do that. We’ll continue with the snow tire example. You might tell your customers who come in that if they want to participate in a focus group that takes a couple of hours, you will pay them for their time, or you might give them a discount on some new tires instead.
You can learn more about your customer base when they answer questions during your focus group. You might also point out a website on the receipts you give your customers. They can go to that website and answer a few questions for a chance to win some free tires during a drawing you conduct each month.
You usually need financial incentives to get someone to interact with your business and tell you about themselves. You can get that for free in certain ways, but it’s also worth it to have focus groups, conduct surveys, or come up with other ways to learn about someone who might buy from you.
What Do You Do with That Information?
You will need to hire a marketing team that knows the latest ways to reach customers. We mentioned TV commercials and radio spots before. You might also rent billboards advertising your products or services that people driving will see on their way to and from their jobs each day.
Those methods might still serve some purpose in the current era, but social media advertising and targeted marketing must play a part as well if you’re going to compete in the modern world. When you learn about your ideal customer and create a profile for them that you constantly refine and update, it tells you where you need to advertise. It also tells you what those ads should resemble.
For instance, maybe you learn that your ideal customer, based on the data you’ve collected, is a Caucasian male, age 30-45. He drives a certain kind of vehicle and makes between $45K and $65K per year. He has a wife and two kids.
That’s just one example, but whatever your ideal customer profile reveals, you need to advertise to that person based on what your marketing team knows about them. If your marketing team tells you that this person uses one social media platform over any others, you know to show your ads there. If you don’t have this profile in mind, you will advertise on the wrong social media platforms and waste your marketing budget.
You Need to Update This Profile Constantly
You should not view your ideal customer as an unchanging entity. You should continue to learn who buys your products and uses your services because that demographic can always change.
Also, even if you have an unchanging ideal customer profile, that doesn’t mean you won’t want to expand into other customer bases as time passes. Maybe you sell particular products or offer services, but you want to increase your market share, so you have your R and D team come up with new ones.
Now, you might have multiple ideal customer profiles. You know you’re consistently selling to one population contingent, like the one we described earlier, but now, you want to reach a different gender, age group, ethnic group, etc.
You can do that if you have the right products, but you also need a vigilant and well-informed research and marketing team. Any time that you want customer base expansion, you’ll need to do the research before you come up with new products and launch new ad campaigns.
If you fail to research your ideal customer base, as well as new ones if you’re going to expand, you’re probably going to waste your ad money. You will not get the sales you want, and potential customers will see you as out of touch.
The ideal customer profile is a weapon you can use. If you have an accurate one, you know that you can use it to tailor your marketing successfully. If you have an outdated notion of who you want to sell to, your business might fold very quickly.
That’s why you must pay attention to who you hire to run your marketing department. If you don’t know the methods to use to come up with an ideal customer profile, you need to bring in people who know how to do that.
When you hire your research and marketing team members, talk to them about what strategies they know how to use to develop ideal customer profiles. If they don’t know how to do it, you’ll probably need to hire other candidates.
