Today’s business marketing professionals are being overstretched to grow their businesses—while working on a tight budget. To succeed, they need to improve the Return on Investment (ROI) in their sales and marketing programs. Customer profiling, coupled with marketing analytics, provides key customer insight that can help sales and marketing professionals better allocate sales and marketing dollars to increase ROI. Furthermore, it describes various categories of consumers so that they can be grouped for advertising and marketing purposes.
By objective advertising to a specific market segment, companies can find more success in selling a particular product and increase profits. As a short-hand way of talking about consumers, market segments are often represented by consumer profiles.
Why Should You Profile Your Customers?
Customer profiling helps you to understand your customers, highlighting who they’re, their interests and what they look like. This insight will help you to recognize your customer’s characteristics, behavior, and traits. Having a better understanding of your customers, you’ll understand what they are interested in and will be able to communicate with them more effectively.
CREATING THE IDEAL CONSUMER PROFILE
It’s important to take the time to carve out the ideal consumer profile for your products before you start to market a product to potential customers. You can begin to notice different patterns that may prove useful in target advertising, once your ideal customer has been defined. Customers can be identified by many different categories, such as:
- Preference
- Lifestyle
- Stage of life
- Attribute
- Trait
Thinking about customers regarding the way categorical tiers represent them can be useful. The first tier includes the most common categories for describing consumers, such as product usage, socioeconomic status, and demographics. The second tier extends the principles of the first tier, and it comprises of generation, psychographics, geography, and benefits sought.
Putting Profiles to Use!
There are numerous practical ways to put your customer profiles to good use.
Get the most from your marketing lists
Customer profiles can be used to segment marketing lists, and this is still valid today. Once you recognize the demographic characteristics of your paramount customers, these criteria can be used to target your search for telemarketing and mailing lists. Look for compiled and response lists that allow you to select using demographic criteria.
Prioritize your leads
Majority of marketers use integrated programs to create leads from multiple sources for their sales representatives. Leads from your Web site, advertising responses, e-mail responses, trade show leads, direct mail responses can still be beneficial when using customer profile.
Make your Web site a more operative sales channel
Generating online Web leads is an essential part of your marketing strategy. If you’re doing Web education, banner advertising, affiliate links, or e-mail marketing, you can use your best customer profile to determine which of these activities is producing the highest quality leads.
The Bottom Line
Collecting and storing customer information is not as complicated as it once was. Rather than let your customer information waste away in a database, it advisable to put it to work by using it to execute one-to-one marketing programs that yield results effectively.
When you turn your customer profiles into action, they can help you increase profitability through improved customer retention and acquisition.
Once you’ve this understanding, you can put it to work—possess the key to successful lead generation. As a result, marketers can arm their sales force with qualified leads—many of which will turn into sales—and increase their marketing ROI.
