To run a successful business, a perfect marketing plan is a must. And a perfect marketing plan starts with finding out the right audience for your product. When you are trying to figure out how to market your product you need to come up with a customer profile. A customer profile makes you know what type of customer you are expecting, are they your targeted audience or not? Their likes and dislikes, how to approach them and convince them to buy your products?. This whole process does save you a lot of time and money which you are wasting on other marketing strategies. The customer profiling helps you to reach your targeted audience without a great effort.
What is the Customer Profile?
When you are selling your products, it is essential to have a knowledge on which of your product suits to whom. You can’t sell a product to everybody, each product has its own audience and as a marketer, your job is to find out that audience. That’s why it is necessary to create a customer profile that matches to your target audience. So, how to create a structure in which the customers can give a brief on their goals and features they are looking for in your products.
Let us see how to create a customer profile which serves as a guide to reach the ideal customers.
Step 1: KNOWING THE BACKGROUND OF YOUR CUSTOMER TO CREATE A CUSTOMER PROFILE:
The first step to do when starting to make a customer profile, it is needed to categorize your customers according to few categories. Those categories can be given as,
- Demographic
- Psychographic
- Generation
- Socioeconomics
- Product usage
We will see all about the above categories each one by one:
#1 Demographic
The traits that come under the demographics are,
- Age
- Location
- Gender
- Marital status
- Income
- Education level
Concentrate on all the above factors to include in your customer profile to reach the target audiences.
#2 Psychographic
The factors that come under this are,
- Lifestyle
- Personality
- Attitude
- Behavior
- Values
This helps you out to know the lifestyle and all above factors to know their interests and whether they can be suited to your products or not. According to that, you can reach your audience.
#3 Generation
The generation is one of the important factors to put in the customer profile. You do know, the few products are only liked by few generations. For example, let us consider chocolates or any sweet items. It is pretty much obvious that only younger generation are interested in those items, not older people because of health issues or something like that. This is one of the attributes that need to be included in the customer profile.
#4 Socioeconomics
Socioeconomic factors are the social and economic experiences and realities that help mold one’s personality, attitudes and lifestyle.
All these attributes help you get an outline of your idea customer lists that gives a lot of information and can surely increase your audiences.
Step 2: LEARN THEIR EXPECTATION AND REACH THEM:
After getting all the information the next step is identifying your customer’s goals and features they would be expecting from your product. That makes you easy to categorize your customers and concentrate on each section of customers individually.
- Once you have made your customer profile, start your work with reaching out to the audiences whom you targeted according to your product preference.
- If your product is for children opt the advertising strategy which the children are most likely to attract.
- If your targeted audience is the adults then go for social media advertisements.
- If for older generation opt for traditional advertisements like newspapers, pamphlets etc
Step 3 TAKE THE DECISION AND ACT ACCORDINGLY:
The next step, after you have the idea of your customer, reach out to them and let them fill in the customer profile, know their interest, features and choose the product that reaches their expectations. Evaluate your decisions. The decisions would be like,
- What does the product suit them?
- Are they comfortable or will they like it?
- Can they afford? and the products that come under their budget?
- How to talk to them and make them understand to reach the goals?
These all decisions are up to you to decide and work according to it.
MARKETING CAMPAIGNS:
Know who your competitors are and how much ahead they are?
Utilise the other marketing techniques like digital marketing to reach your audiences. Start the ad campaigns in all of the social media platforms to promote. The Facebook ad campaigns, ads on the Youtube. Make use of hashtags to reach out in just a few seconds.
The digital media being one of the powerful media, use all the marketing plans to promote your business. Even while you are organizing the campaigns, don’t forget to make your ad that targets your preferred audience. The ads must display that content that every customer are related to. Because many people can’t afford the costly item and not all people buy cheaper items. The marketer’s mind should think about the position of a customer does.
Even if you take the feedback from your customers, it is not at all sufficient because what would you do after they have completed buying from you, what I mean is if the customer’s experience is bad at fast, obviously there would be a negative feedback, if you might feel like will like correcting your mistake you would lose a customer. Instead make a template, in which the customer write down every requirement he/she is expecting. That will make your job easy, won’t that?