How Can Customer Profiles Help You Build Your Online Business?

I have recently embarked on my Masters in Creative Writing, studying online part-time with Teesside University. So far our weekly activities have included colouring-in, eavesdropping on conversations, and stalking people (sort of). It’s just as fun as it sounds, and last week we were filling in ‘character profile sheets’ to help us develop characters in our stories. 

Our character profile sheets require us to fill in some basic information about our characters, such as their name, age and relationships with other characters. The sheet also includes space for us to write down what our character wants, their biggest fantasy and what other characters have said about them. Other sections include lists of personality traits which we have to highlight if they apply to the character, and diagrams showing the balance of power between the character and others in the story. The exercise is designed to help us find out more about our characters so we can make them more relatable and real, with rich backgrounds and personalities. Ultimately this should help us to write better stories.

These character profile sheets aren’t so different from the customer profiles businesses often create to build a picture of their ideal target market. As much as I’m not particularly keen on filling in worksheets about my characters and would much rather just get on with the whole business of writing a story, I can see the benefit of planning how to write about these people, and the same goes for customer profiles. Instead of simply launching into a novel or a marketing campaign, authors and marketers alike can benefit from taking a step back and creating a picture of the person they are writing about or marketing to. With this person in mind – or people, if you offer several products that appeal to different markets – you can develop a more personalised, tailored approach to eCommerce.

So let’s take a look at how customer profiles can help you to build your online business and develop more targeted marketing campaigns.

Who Are Your Customers?

If you haven’t created customer profiles before, they can help you to figure out who your customers are, where they are and how you can find them. To create your customer profile, you could think about who you intend to target, analyse information you already have about your existing customers, or work with a combination of both. If you don’t have the information you need, you could talk to your customers or carry out a survey.

The information you need to build a profile will depend on who you are marketing to. For example, if you are marketing to consumers, you may want to think about their age, gender, location, spending habits and income. If you are marketing to businesses you’ll more likely be thinking about the sector they operate in, the size of the company and how much they spend. Depending on your company and your product, you may be able to think of many more factors that make up your typical customer.

Where Are Your Customers?

Now that we’ve covered who your customers are, we need to find them. For example, which social media platforms do your customers use? If you are a business-to-business organisation the answer may be LinkedIn, but you can take this a step further by thinking in more detail about your customer. You can join specific groups on LinkedIn that are frequented by your ‘ideal customers’, and share relevant information and updates there. Similarly, you can use Facebook advertising and promoted Tweets to target potential customers depending on their age range, their interests, who they are following, and so on.

What Is Their Purchasing Process?

What are your customers’ buying habits? Are they impulsive or do they take a little time to weigh their options? The type of product or service you offer will also factor into this. If your customers tend to leave your site and come back to make a purchase at a later date, you may benefit from running a remarketing campaign, or from sending out emails to people who have registered or put an item in their basket without making a purchase, so you can entice them back.

Tailored Targeting

Once you have more information about your customers, you can also send them email marketing that is tailored to them. You can create email lists or segments and send emails to certain people depending on their demographics. For example, a women’s accessories shop could send one email campaign just to women, giving them ideas for dressing up on a night out. Meanwhile, they could send another campaign to both men and women offering Christmas gift ideas. In this way, customers would only be receiving emails that are relevant to them.

You could further extend this idea to your website, providing landing pages for different types of customers and linking to them in the appropriate emails or social media groups.

Creating a profile of your customers can not only help you keep your existing customers, but it can also help you to find new ones. By always keeping an image of your ideal customer in mind, you can focus on your target market and use every weapon in your online arsenal to find and win over more potential buyers.