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What Is Customer Profiling [Elements, Process & Tips]

Targeting the right customer based on the products or services is crucial to helping a business scale. By performing customer profiling efficiently, you can predict what your customers want, improve products to better meet their needs, and make your brand stand out. 

In other words, before forming a business or marketing plan, you must know who you are designing the plan for. And this is where customer profiling comes in! 

It is the first step in creating a marketing strategy for your business. 

So, in this blog, we will discuss what is customer profiling and how you can go about creating a detailed customer profile. 

What Is Customer Profiling?

Understanding the customer’s expectations, needs and preferences is crucial to improving the customer experience. And customer profiling allows us to do just that. 

It is basically the process of organizing customers into specific groups possessing similar goals or characteristics. 

Besides, with the help of customer profiling, businesses are able to better target and engage with customers. Therefore, this leads to enhanced customer experience, enhanced loyalty, and a boost in marketing efforts.

Now, let’s have a look at some of the most important elements of customer profiling. 

Elements of Customer Profiling 

A customer profile has the following elements-

  • Demographics- Age, city of residence, education level, gender, race, or household composition.
  • Socio-economic- Income, educational attainment, occupation, neighborhood, or association memberships.
  • Psychographics-  Lifestyles, goals, values, personality, attitudes, or opinions.
  • Behavioral- Satisfaction, habits, engagement level, purchasing history, level of brand loyalty, or satisfaction.
  • Geography- Geographical area or region in which customers reside and work.
  • Benefits- What benefits consumers are looking for when they shop for products and services?

How to Create a Customer Profile?

Now that you know what customer profiling means, let’s talk about how you can create a customer profile. 

1. Define Why You are Doing Customer Profiling

Ask yourself- why exactly are you doing it? 

Customer data and profiling can be used in numerous ways, hence, it’s important to make sure you know what you want to achieve. This will surely help you focus your efforts as per the scope of your requirements.

2. Collect Information About Demographics and Other Elements

By combining demographics with behavioral and psychographic questions, you can surely get a much better understanding of your customer profile. Some important questions that you can ask include- 

  • Where do your customers presently live?
  • What’s their annual income?
  • What is their occupation?
  • What kind of lifestyle do they generally prefer?

PRO TIP-: You can collect all of this information by creating a survey using Outgrow’s free survey maker. Sign up for their 7-days free trial or the free survey plan right away!

Also, learn how to create a survey in just a few minutes. 

how to create survey

3. Encourage Customers to Share Their Opinions

You can encourage the customers to share what they think of your products or services by conducting polls and giveaways. This will significantly help increase customer engagement. Moreover, the information collected will help you decide what to sell in order to ensure optimal customer satisfaction. You can do so by:

  • Conducting surveys
  • Conducting quizzes
  • Requesting testimonials
  • Focus group testing

NOTE- Data helps digital marketers gain a deeper understanding of their customers. As customers basically demand personalized services, they look for content they can interact with directly. This is where interactive content comes in. So check out Outgrow’s interactive content platform to learn more about interactive content!

4. Learn More About Customer Habits

You can learn more about your customers by understanding their usual buying habits and what motivates them to make a purchase after that. Behavioral analysis will help you answer the question, “What do they do?”.

This could include personal or professional activities, as well as typical buyer journeys. In order to identify the habits, responsibilities, buying motivations, and purchasing decisions of customers, it is vital to understand their behavior.

5. Research About the Competitors

Conducting some research on your competitors can help you determine what the target customers want. This can help you create an offering to meet those needs. Moreover, you can also conduct market research and seek customer feedback in order to identify your competitors. 

6. Keep Your Customer Profile Updated

As your company expands and you create new offerings, it is important to regularly update your customer’s overall profile. You can ask different questions to your customers regarding this like-

  • How do they generally like their new product or service? 
  • How do they use the new product?
  • Does the target customer use this service occasionally?

Tips for Creating an Accurate and Effective Customer Profile

Well, we’ve put together a few tips to help you create an accurate and effective customer profile simultaneously. Let’s have a look-

  • Use both qualitative and quantitative methods of research.
  • Use different types of interactive content like surveys, polls, quizzes, and e-commerce recommendations to profile your customers.
  • Segment your target market based on demographics, psychographics, and behaviors using a market segmentation survey.
  • Furthermore, use as many elements of customer profiling as possible for better research and experience.
  • Take a look at your web analytics to see how your customers are finding out about you. Analyze what they are doing on your site and generally which pages they are spending the most time on.
  • Use social media analytics to find out which social media channels they generally use and how they interact with your brand online. 

Bonus Point: Learn more about interactive content through this blog by Outgrow!

interactive content

Conclusion

There you go! We’ve already established how customer profiling plays an important role in planning brand activities. It helps you group together various customer types so you can gain a comprehensive understanding of the habits and preferences of your target consumers.

Furthermore, using interactive content will help you gather important data about your customers. This will ultimately smoothen the process of customer profiling for you!

So, what are you waiting for? Sign up for Outgrow’s 7-days free trial today and start creating interactive content pieces.

FAQs

An ideal customer profile describes the ideal customer who would later benefit from your solution. Hence it provides you with significant value. Thus, through a customer profile, you can improve customer service and personalization which will result in more successful transactions.

By determining a clear set of messages and imagery that target specific segments of their customer base, customer profiling eventually enables businesses to engage and target customers better. As a result, customer experiences are enhanced, retention and loyalty are optimized, and marketing strategies are more effective.

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