Understanding your customers is probably the most important aspect of providing outstanding customer service. Not only that, knowing what characteristics, interests and needs will help you be able to market to them more effectively. Are you defining your customer profiles or are your customers profiling you?
The intent of customer profiles is to help guide your marketing, sales and fulfillment to better understand your customers. They’re not hard and concrete like it might feel when you fill them out.
Customer profiles (or personas – less evil sounding) are the guide for where most ideal customers fall into. A misnomer of customer profiles is to use them as lead qualification; rather, the purpose is to help guide the path of marketing collateral or the sales pipeline. Customer profiles are defined usually by several core characteristics of ideal prospects or customers.
For some small businesses, they could be talking about several profiles or just a few. There are subtle ways of defining these profiles. It shouldn’t hurt if you let your prospects know, and should be communicated consistently throughout your Website and marketing pieces.
Here are a number of characteristics to build into a customer profile:
- Industry
- Expertise
- Interests
- Demographics
- Thought Leaders
- Competitors
- Stereotypical
- Decision Factors
- Financial Situation
- Emotional Influences
- Logical Influences
These are only suggestions on where to start; they will be unique to each and every business. The idea here is if you could reproduce the ideal customer or prospect numerous times, who would fit into that profile? In reality, no one will necessarily fit all the criteria, but it’s a start to help scope out the kind of copywriting or design considerations down the road.
As for us – we have a few personas of customers who would be ideal for our software. For starters, people who established their small business and are beginning to hit the roof in productivity of labor. Small business owners who are comfortable with their situation, yet have the motivation to scale their efforts to a larger audience. Web-enabled entrepreneurs that want to grow. It’s also a consideration that our users may not be very tech-savvy, but are aware of technology solutions that can bring results to their business.
Again, customer profiles are meant to be the guiding factor in effective marketing for prospects and customers. We’re not baking cupcakes, we’re building relationships and working with people and arming them the right information to make the right decisions. Now, there’s nothing that precludes you from scaling personas into more black-and-white lead qualification, but it’s important to hold a persona into context. There are plenty of happy customers who might not fit into any persona, but remain awesome customers.
Do you currently (or have plans to) profile your ideal customers? Do you have any advice; share it in the comments below.
[Photo by chadmiller on Flickr, modified]
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