The importance of customer profiling - how well do you understand your customers?

A lot of start-ups, small businesses and growing organisations make the mistake of kick-starting their marketing with a shiny new website and social media strategy before they’ve given proper consideration as to who their customers are. If you don’t know who you are talking to, then how can you hope to include messages in your marketing that attract their attention and resonate with them? 

Today, it’s even easier to fall into this trap. With website templates, social media schedulers and AI-generated content, businesses can produce a lot of marketing very quickly. But speed without clarity just means you can get the wrong message in front of more people, faster.

I really can’t stress enough, the importance of completing a customer profiling exercise before you invest any time and money in sales and marketing activities.

Most businesses that I come across haven’t got a clear or effective marketing strategy. I can quite understand why – you have an idea or an opportunity to start a new venture and you want to get it up and running as quickly as possible. However, a scattergun marketing approach - launching a new website, churning out social media posts and hoping something sticks, will only ever get you so far.

Even if you can’t yet be persuaded to produce a fully documented marketing strategy, then at least invest some time in profiling your customers. That way, when you come to create your brand and logo, and to brief your web designer and write your website copy, you can be confident that all the tools in your marketing toolkit appeal to your target audience. 

And by the way, if your designer or copywriter doesn’t ask you about your target audience before they set to work, that should set alarm bells ringing.

How do you profile your customers?
It’s very likely that your business will offer various products and services, each targeting a slightly different audience. For example, an osteopath might offer pre and post natal treatments, baby and infant care, sports injury and sports massage, and general osteopathy. 

How you communicate to the different audiences and where you promote your services to them will vary considerably. A one size fits all marketing approach isn’t going to be half as effective as targeted campaigns. And when it comes to targeted marketing, the devil is in the detail – and that detail isn’t just demographic. It’s behavioural: how they research, who they trust, what triggers action and what causes hesitation.

What your customer profiles look like will depend very much on the type of business you are running. By the end of the exercise you need to be as familiar with what makes them tick as you are with your nearest and dearest - their loves and hates. 

For B2B businesses
If you’re a business to business outfit, then you need to know what sort of department your customers work in and what sort of business title they have. You need to know whether their gender, roughly how old they are likely to be, what budgets they might have, what challenges they are likely to be facing that your product or service could address, and what reasons they might have for not purchasing from you.

It’s also useful to understand who else influences the decision, how risk-averse the organisation is, and what internal pressures your contact is under when making a recommendation.

For B2C businesses
If you’re going to be targeting consumer customers, then you need to think about their age, their gender, their salaries and spending habits, the sorts of products and brands that would appeal to them, how they prefer to shop or be approached, what they read or watch and where they spend their time – physically and online. 

A lot of brands go as far as giving names to their customer profiles. For example, a well-known food brand has Caroline - a professional woman and busy working mother. Caroline likes high end brands, drives an Audi or Tesla, shops online and is happy to treat and reward herself. She buys the food company’s luxury brand range. Debbie is the same age and also has a family, but works part time, does one big weekly shop in-store and is likely to be swayed by offers. She buys their mid-range products. And so it goes on.

That food brand creates pricing, packaging, promotions, PR, advertising and social media campaigns to appeal to Caroline and Debbie - testing, refining and evolving its approach as customer behaviour changes. If they come up with a new consumer profile, they expand their range and create a new product and marketing strategy to target them. 

If you’re relying on a generic, one-size-fits-all approach to marketing, you’re leaving opportunities on the table.

Get clear on who your customers really are. Only then can you decide what to say, how to say it – and where it will have the greatest impact.

Find out more about my marketing services for small businesses, start-ups and growing organisations.