Customer Profiling and Personalized Segmentation

The first and the most crucial step in any business cycle is to identify customer profiles – who is this business selling to? 

In my experience, if you have got your ideal customer profile right, you will have a high success rate in attracting the right audience and selling to that audience. Even better, those customers will be happy to pay for your solutions and services because you solve a critical challenge for them, which in turn will reduce the customer churn.

Keep reading to discover all about customer profiles and segmentation, including what they are, how to construct one for your business, and how they can help your business to grow. 

Customer Profiles – How to Get it Right?

A customer profile, sometimes also known as a consumer profile, is a detailed document describing the characteristics of your current customers. This document includes psychographic data, demographic data, purchasing patterns, and the key challenges that you solve for your customers and key accounts. This study is important to make data-driven decisions whether to personalize the marketing message for your target audience or to sell your products and services. The goal is to reach out to the potential prospects that match your customer profile closely, through marketing and sales campaigns, to increase the probability of successfully selling to them.

Creating a customer profile can assist you in ensuring that your products and services are of the highest value to your consumers. It would further help you better understand how the customers' preferences change over time and how you should adapt these changes to suit your customer's needs.

5 Steps Process to Create a Customer Profile for your Business

The five simple and easy steps to create a customer profile include:

Identify your Key Accounts

Identify the customers that benefit the most from your offerings. Address the following questions to identify the best customers.

1. Which accounts are your highest paying accounts?
2. What critical business challenge are you solving for them?
3. How satisfied are they with your solution or service?
4. Have they left good reviews for you or are they willing to provide references?

Customer profiling creates a roadmap for your business – from branding, and personalization, to selling – it provides useful insights for optimizing every business process. And if done right, it can pave the way for your success and position you as an industry leader.

If your highest paying accounts are satisfied with the solution or service that you provide them, chances are that you can easily sell to any business that is facing the same challenges as your current customer. And because the profile matches closely, they will have a budget to pay for your solution/service.

List Important Attributes

The next step is to record all the notable features of your best customers. These features mainly are:

1. ROI from them (the fee they’re paying you)
2. Their industry vertical
3. Their location
4. The decision-makers in their company
5. Their annual revenue
6. The team size etc.

You will choose the metrics that are important to you and make sense for your business. And these attributes will be your prospect qualification and segmentation criteria. Based on this data you can create market segments that you’re trying to sell to, and create targeted marketing campaigns for these segments.

Enrich your Customer Profile Database

Once you have decided on the metrics and attributes, the next step is to collect information about your customers to fill the gaps. There are many ways to collect this information. There are various tools available in the market that can help you with the account study (revenue, team size, executive team etc.).

In addition to that, for larger accounts, I recommend having your customer success manager meet with the users and identify the pain points that you are solving for them. This will shape your USP and go-to-market message for similar businesses.

Choose your customer Profile Template.

After you have surveyed your best customers, noted all their important attributes, and obtained a comprehensive understanding of their purchasing behavior, the last step is to combine all the information into one single document – Customer Profile.

The main things your customer profile should include are:

1. Name
2. Demographic information
3. All important attributes
4. Pain points
5. Motivators
6. Goals
7. Preferable communication channels
8. Comments from customers

There are lots of online tools and templates available for customer profiles. You can go through them and pick the one that's best suited for your business.

Use Digital Platforms to Segment

After you have created your ideal customer profile (ICP), leverage digital platforms such as social media, emails, online discussion forums, Q/A groups to connect with more of your potential customers.

It is critical to segment and differentiates between your customer profiles. For example, you are a SaaS company, and you have customers in the healthcare and education industry. You will create separate customer profiles for both the customer accounts and develop a message that will resonate with their respective industry.

Why is Customer Profiling so Important?

Customer profiling is the go-to-market strategy to build a business and have a set direction for the team to work on. It helps identify the customers that will buy from your business and save you time and effort on your targets.

A customer profile acts as a safety net for marketers as they construct positioning strategies, product managers as they create new products, and salespeople as they seek out new consumers. Moreover, it also saves your business from diluting its value across the huge pool of customers by specifying the target market. 

Let’s Talk Benefits

Account-Based Marketing

If your organization employs an account-based marketing (AMB) strategy, you'll need to figure out how to make each client's communication more personalized.

This necessitates learning about each customer, which can be challenging for smaller businesses. Fortunately, you can use ABM approaches to offer highly tailored advertising based on your target accounts' characteristics by creating a client profile.

Lower Customer Acquisition Cost

Knowing your target market and your goal is clear makes it easier to run ads at a cheaper rate. You will have the necessary insights and information to target specific customer segments actively. In other words, the more information you have about your client, the more effective your campaigns will be with spending the lesser amount of your bucks!

Reduces Customer Churn

Solid customer profiles attract and serve consumers who truly wish to purchase from your business. This significantly reduces the customer churn in the short and long term both.

Market/Product Fit

Your business might drive a lot of sales through discounts and promotions, but you will have to adjust your business to meet your customer's demands by customer segmentation. You will have the necessary information available in each customer's profile to help you tailor products to different market segments.

Brand Loyalty

Client profiles may help you provide exceptional customer service even before your consumer asks for assistance. If they contact your support staff, you can anticipate challenges, provide effective self-help options, and better match their requirements.

You may tailor their experiences and provide excellent service to make them loyal to your company as you learn about their pain points and preferences.

Customer profiling creates a roadmap for your business – from branding, and personalization, to selling – it provides useful insights for optimizing every business process. And if done right, it can pave the way for your success and position you as an industry leader.