What is a customer profile?

Part of having a great product is knowing who you’re selling it to. Even if you have an amazing idea, it isn’t easy to market it and finalise the design unless you know what your customers want from a product. This is where a customer profile comes in.

The article will guide you through the process of building a customer profile, as well as explaining the advantages of using them. We’ll cover topics including:

• What is a customer profile?
• Why are customer profiles important?
• How can I create a customer profile?
• Managing increased sales revenue with Countingup

A customer profile is a way of identifying your audience so that you can segment them into different categories. This makes marketing easier as you can refine your adverts to appeal to specific categories. Profiling also makes product development easier, as the information it provides allows you to adapt upcoming products to better fulfil particular individuals’ needs.

You can lay out a customer profile in a number of ways, but the most common is simply a list of relevant information. A thorough customer profile might include:

• The age range of this category
• Gender
• Typical job titles
• Educational level — this refers to their most advanced level of education, whether that’s a degree, doctorate, or high school education
• Family status — this refers to if they are married or not, if they have children and if so, how many
• Average salary
• Hobbies and interests
• Purchasing habits — this refers to what brands they shop with, how much they spend, and how often they shop
• Geographic information — this section shows if they are local, if they live in a city or outside of one, and may include their nationality

There are other options for data you can include in your customer profile, but the information above should provide a good starting point.

Some of the most valuable information in a customer profile is the parts that relate directly to how an individual spends their money and how much they have to spend. This means it’s a smart idea to prioritise any research on average salary, purchasing habits, and hobbies.

A customer profile is an essential part of identifying your target market. A target market is the section of the population that you’re trying to sell your products to. To identify your target market, you need to create a customer profile containing all of their information.

Although they seem like very similar concepts, key differences exist between customer profiles and a target market. The customer profile does not display the info of a real person; it simply lists characteristics that the people who buy your products have. A target market, on the other hand, is real. Your target market consists of people whose characteristics match the ones in your customer profile.

So, a customer profile is important because it allows you to identify your target market, and once you identify your target market, you can start adapting your marketing and products to suit their needs.

When taken together, the information in a customer profile will provide a decent picture of those customers’ lifestyles. Once you know how they live their life, you’ll learn how your products fit into that life. In this way, customer profiles can help you better understand what people want from your product.

Using customer profiles, you might even identify other areas where your product would be useful and can update your marketing accordingly. Or you may get an idea for an entirely new product that would be useful for your target market.

When researching competitors for your business plan, make sure you look into the customers they target with their products and marketing. If there is considerable overlap between their targets and yours, you may want to start building a customer profile. 

The profiles will allow you to advertise better, hopefully winning you back a few sales from the competition. They also might help you to identify new markets that you don’t share with your competitors.

With software tools like Google Analytics, you can start learning about the people who visit your website. Most analytics tools will provide basic information like a visitor’s age, location, and the device they use, but they might not offer detailed insights about their lifestyle. 

The big benefit of analytics is that they can tell you precisely what the customer did on your website. For example, knowing what products they bought, looked at, and how much they spent is all data you can put into a customer profile.

Simply asking people for their information can also be helpful, especially if you need specific answers to your questions. For instance, a survey might be a good idea if you have a lot of demographic information — age, gender, location — but very little lifestyle information. Consider adding questions such as:

• Where do you shop?
• What is your job title?
• What social media platforms do you use, and what kind of accounts do you follow?
• What’s your favourite purchase you’ve made, and why?
• How do you use our products?

Take care not to ask questions that are too personal, such as family status and salary. This might make people uncomfortable, which means they may avoid answering your survey.

Once you’ve successfully identified your customers, your sales will likely increase. With increased sales will come increased income, and managing all this money might become somewhat complex. You will need to spend time managing your finances, and the best way to make that task quick and easy is to use a financial management app. 

Countingup is the business current account with built-in accounting software that allows you to manage all your financial data in one place. With features like automatic expense categorisation, invoicing on the go, receipt capture tools, tax estimates, and cash flow insights, you can confidently keep on top of your business finances wherever you are. 

You can also share your bookkeeping with your accountant instantly without worrying about duplication errors, data lags or inaccuracies. Seamless, simple, and straightforward! 

Find out more here.