According to last year’s systematic bibliometric literature review, for many customers, personalization increases satisfaction with the brand. But what is the most efficient way to create smart personalized offers and provide customers with services tailored to their needs?
In our experience, the better agents understand their target audience, the more effectively support teams can interact with them. Customer profiles can reveal a great deal about service or product buyers and their preferences and interests.
This article will help you dive into enhanced targeting and personalized messaging. We will review ideal customer profile examples for both B2B and B2C use cases and highlight the integral parts necessary for proper information collection. Here you can learn how to build profiles correctly. With a few examples of common mistakes related to profile creation, you will learn how to make it right and useful for an agent’s work.
A customer profile is a document that contains the company’s view of an ideal customer. It is a detailed description that includes information on the brand’s areas of interest. For instance, for some companies, age range and gender are key factors, while for others, education and income are priorities. An ideal customer and client profile example serves to reach a deeper understanding of the target audience and gives clearer direction for marketing efforts.
Business-to-business (B2B) customer profiles describe the businesses (companies) that use the brand’s services or goods. Business-to-customer (B2C) profiles, meanwhile, are focused on individual customers.
Usually, a customer profile includes demographic information such as age, gender, marital status, location, education, and income level.
Besides, brands often add more details about customer behavior and preferences. They may include shopping habits or social media usage. Hobbies and interests are a valuable source of touchpoints where a customer may notice the brand. Psychographic data also includes lifestyle descriptions and personality traits, especially those that influence buying decisions.
Pain points are a vital part of a strong profile template because brands need to understand the kinds of challenges their customers may face and how their products and services can help address them.
Here are a few examples of client profiles for B2B organizations.
| Demographic data: | Gender: 60% male, 40% female; Age: 35-55 y.o. |
| Job roles: | Account manager, financial analyst |
| Psychographics: | Focused on data accuracy and reliability Requires a solution for a large data amount processing |
| Pain points: | Difficulties with changing data Lack of real-time access to information |
| Preferred touchpoints and content: | Case studies, blog posts, webinars |
| Company’s attributes: | Over 15 employees Annual turnover from $1M to $6M Online activity, including social media platforms Investments in software for financial management |
| Demographic data: | Gender: 60% male, 40% female; Age: 25-55 y.o. |
| Job roles: | Company owner, customer support manager, service manager |
| Psychographics: | Strong bond with suppliers Requires reliable solutions |
| Pain points: | Low-quality tools Needs cost-effective software Focus on scalability potential |
| Preferred touchpoints and content: | Webinars, video demonstrations, social media |
| Company’s attributes: | Over 10 employees Annual turnover from $100K to $3M Online activity, including social media platforms |
| Demographic data: | Gender: 70% male, 30% female; Age: 30-55 y.o. Decision-makers |
| Job roles: | Operations director, logistics coordinator, supply chain manager |
| Psychographics: | Seeks efficiency and cost-saving options Prefers reliable and scalable solutions Values vendor transparency |
| Pain points: | High costs for transportation and warehousing Delays in shipment tracking and delivery confirmation |
| Preferred touchpoints and content: | Webinars, LinkedIn posts, social media pages, software demonstrations at trade shows |
| Company’s attributes: | 100-500 employees Annual turnover from $10K to $30M Regional distribution network |
Here you can find several examples of B2C customer profiles.
| Demographic data: | Age: 25-55 y.o. Married, have children Budget-limited |
| Psychographics: | Needs fast meal solutions Health-focused |
| Pain points: | Too little time for cooking between activities |
| Preferred touchpoints and content: | Blogs for parents, forums for busy moms, social media pages with quick recipes, subscriptions for meal planning |
| Demographic data: | Age: 18-29 y.o. Male and female |
| Psychographics: | Sense of style beyond the trends Strongly focused on friendship and community bonds Loyalty to 1 or 2 athletics brands |
| Pain points: | Difficulty in finding both comfortable and stylish clothes Limited budget |
| Preferred touchpoints and content: | Sports influencers, sports events on streaming platforms |
| Demographic data: | Age: 21-60 y.o. Pet owners Brooklyn, New York Focus on residents |
| Psychographics: | Needs high-quality food and treats for pets Interested in meal delivery services for animals |
| Pain points: | Low-quality food Unsafe food options Picky pets |
| Preferred touchpoints and content: | Often visit pet stores Follow the social media pages of pet influencers Pet care blogs Pet lovers' channels |
Really successful customer profiles go far beyond basic details. A wide range of data may give a better understanding of interactions between the brand and the target audience. But where to start? Simply Contact has prepared a short guide on making a customer profile in 5 steps.
Creation of a customer profile from scratch is quite a time-consuming process. You can avoid it, saving time and effort, by using pre-built templates. For instance, you can find a suitable example of a customer profile and adjust it according to your business's specifics. Templates can also help you understand if you consider everything you may need for an effective profile.
Demanded products and services are the key to the brand's success, and this step will help evaluate current demand for your niche. For example, by identifying the main pain points of your target audience, you may find how exactly products and services can solve their issues and make life easier.
You can target your desired audience more effectively if you understand the commonalities they share. For example, are your goods suitable for specific groups related to age, locations, or motivations? Diving into audience specifics, a company can create more customer-oriented marketing campaigns.
By checking how customers feel about products and services provided by your brand, you can better visualize how your ideal customers are across various groups. Here, CSAT and NPS surveys can help with information collection, similar to reviews on community forums or social media.
Once you have collected all the required data for ideal customer profiles, you need an effective solution to track and analyze it. For instance, CRM (Customer Relationship Management) systems can help track all information and keep all teams informed within the company.
Need a support team that sees the person behind every request? Simply Contact provides high-quality customer support services with a focus on each individual customer.
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For some, creating a profile of ideal customers seems like an easy task, as you review your best customers and try to identify a common set of features from all the ideal pieces. But there are five common mistakes for inexperienced profile creation, so let’s take a closer look at them and see how to avoid them.
A realistic view of the current company’s customers is a must-have. When creating an ideal customer profile, you need to refer to current best buyers, the real, existing ones. For example, of course, you may want your ideal customer to spend millions per year on your products, but unless it really happens across current purchases, it will not work.
Consider attracting customers that match the current specialty, style of work, services, and the company’s culture. If none of the current customers match this description, you may want to check your processes and marketing campaigns. Existing customers are the base for a new search and direction for target audience attraction.
It is too easy to limit the ideal customer by imagining an actual person. Keep in mind that the ideal customer is a broad description, not a specific human being to refer to. When the profile reflects the interests, motivators, and behavior of the collective image created from several individuals, you can get a better understanding of the target audience than by imagining a certain buyer. Don’t make it a figure of the perfect person you want to work with.
Customers within one target audience are quite alike. They have similar problems and ways to make decisions about purchases. Before starting to create new profiles, think about what differences they have. Is this another type of person? Or can you still use the previous template? If you can’t highlight a few details that make them different from one another, it may be a sign that you have too many personas for profiles in mind and should reduce the quantity.
Sometimes companies claim that their products can help with more things than they actually can. The best you can do is to identify which pain points your brand can really solve and what customers can gain using the company’s products and services. Targeted solutions will bring more value to the brand and demonstrate it as a reliable one.
Sales and account managers, consultants, and strategists know your customers better than anyone, as they interact with the target audience daily. Team interviews can be very helpful during profile creation, but we recommend not relying on them as a single source of information. For instance, contacting current and previous customers may help understand what they are searching for in products and what the purchasing process looks like for them. Pay attention to customer feedback on forums and social media pages to collect as much as possible.
A customer profile is the key to your target audience. It enables a deeper understanding of buyers’ needs and pain points and helps to create influential touchpoints for attention attraction. It sets the direction for effective and target-oriented marketing campaigns. Using a pre-built customer profile example, you can adjust it according to the company’s needs and culture, saving time and effort for more accurate audience analysis. Find your perfect template and take a step closer to building a stronger connection with customers, providing them with products and services that ease their everyday professional and personal challenges.
At Simply Contact, we specialize in creating personalized customer support solutions that drive business growth and customer satisfaction. Let us help you elevate your customer experience and stand out from the competition.
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