Written by: Howard Tillerman
Howard Tillerman is the Chief Marketing Officer for Making That Sale and an award-winning marketing professional.
Updated on February 6, 2024
In the world of sales, knowledge is power. Aside from the nuts and bolts of your products, the most important element to know is your customer.
Who is your target audience? What are they looking for? How do you make their life better and easier? Answering these questions will ensure you reach out to the right people, and avoid wasting time and energy on the wrong target market.
If you’re always on the lookout for ways to communicate better with members of your target audience, then you’ve come to the right place. In this guide, you’ll find all insights you need to create an ideal customer profile likely to boost your sales.
A customer profile, also known as an ideal buyer persona or ideal customer profile (ICP), is a detailed description of your primary prospective customer that includes info on demographics, psychographics, behavior patterns, interests, and preferences.
A detailed ICP helps you better understand your customers, which results in more effective marketing campaigns. The better you know your customers, the easier it is to sell them the products they need.
Creating a customer profile means understanding the characteristics, preferences, and behaviors of your ideal customer. From there, you can tailor your marketing and sales strategies accordingly.
Trying to build a product that solves 100% of the problems for 100% of the market is sometimes called “boiling the ocean.” Attempting to sell to everyone on Earth is a bit like trying to bring the ocean to a boil: it’s not gonna happen.
The irony is that by targeting too broad of an audience, you risk spreading yourself thin and diluting the value of your marketing efforts. That means you may end up solving nobody’s problem.
ICPs serve as guard rails to keep entrepreneurs focused and on track. Identifying the one type of buyer who’ll actually purchase goods from you is a much wiser and more efficient approach than targeting everyone, everywhere, all the time.
To put it simply, without a strong buyer persona, it’s difficult to know which leads are most likely to bear fruit. You’re casting your net for fish with no idea where they are or what they eat. You should instead be like a spear fisherman – targeted, on point, and accurate.
Marketing costs money, and if you want to maximize your return on investment, it’s essential to zero in on your target market. This requires research, analysis, and reflection to create a strong ICP. Start with demographics, psychographics, and behavior patterns.
How old is your target market? Where do they live? How much money do they make? Are they religious? Do they value family or seek fun? How often do they buy luxury goods, use social media, or send emails?
Next, use this information to create a fictional customer persona. Is she a suburban soccer mom? A bride-to-be? A college student? A single professional? Or maybe an aging parent?
If you’re selling high-end furniture, your ICP might be an upper-class middle-aged man without children who has an annual income of at least $100,000. If you’re providing logistics consulting, your ICP could be a Rust Belt shipping company with at least 100 employees and more than $5 million in annual revenue.
Of course, the actual description used as your ICP can vary widely, depending on the product or service. However, marketing that is targeted at specific companies or identities should help jumpstart your sales.
The next step is listening to what your customers have to say.
By listening to your customers, you can better understand how to meet their needs. By showing that you value their opinions and feedback, you build a relationship and foster customer loyalty, ultimately driving business growth.
A good way to actively listen to your customers is to conduct buyer research using online survey tools like SurveyMonkey and Google Forms. Focus groups, customer feedback, and social media analytics can also be useful. You could also gather data from customer interactions, sales data, and website analytics, and store and analyze all this in a central CRM like Salesforce or Hubspot.
Each and every contact you have with your customer provides valuable information about who they are and what they want. Consistent, open-ended interaction with them will help you gather the data you need to inform the next stage of the process.
Data’s impact on advertising made a giant leap forward with the emergence of digital analytics. We live in a world of data where our every touch, like, click, and purchase is recorded, weighed, sold, and examined. Lucky for you, this data enables businesses to target their markets with increasing accuracy.
Customer profiles based on guesswork are often inaccurate. As you take a sober look at the data you’ve gathered, you might find successful leads have surprising characteristics, or lack the qualities you expected to find.
Use your CRM to identify customer patterns and glean new insights. Remember that even a good ICP is not a finished product. Use the data your business is constantly gaining to continue to develop and refine your customer profile, bringing it to life with clarity and detail.
Modern software gives you the power to follow the entire customer journey, a trail of experiences from brand awareness to purchase. Studying this path may help you find the most efficient method to reach a sale. Analyze the trends, take notes, and adjust accordingly.
Creating a strong customer profile is crucial to sales success because the best prospect is the one most likely to make a purchase. Finding and connecting with these people is the surest way to turbocharge your business and broaden your customer base.
As with any relationship, the more you know someone, the more likely you are to anticipate their needs. So take the time to get to know your customers, who they are, and what they want. Then, develop a detailed, insightful ICP and leverage it to your advantage.
There are several ways to gather information about your target audience. One way is to conduct surveys and focus groups to learn about their buying habits, interests, and pain points. You can also use social media analytics tools to track their behavior and preferences online.
Another effective method is to analyze your sales data and customer feedback to gain insights into their preferences and behavior. By gathering customer information up front, you will be able to store and analyze this data at any point in time.
A customer profile should include the following key elements: demographic information (age, gender, location, income level, etc.), psychographic information (values, interests, lifestyle, etc.), buying habits (what, when, where, and how they buy), pain points (problems or challenges they face), and communication preferences (how they prefer to be contacted).
It’s also helpful to include a customer persona, which is a fictional representation of your ideal customer that brings your customer profile to life and makes it easier to understand and communicate.
Once you have created a customer profile, you can use it to tailor your marketing efforts to your target audience’s needs and preferences. By creating messaging that resonates with your customers, you can build stronger connections with them and increase engagement and sales.
Your ideal customer is the same targeted audience that you want to reach with your marketing. By delving deeper into the persona of your ideal customer, you will understand what motivates and interests them. Then, build your marketing strategy around that for maximum impact.
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