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5 tips for creating a customer profile

If you’ve found yourself tasked with creating customer profiles for your brand or organization and you don’t know where to start, it’s important to first remember two key things:

  • Customer profiles do help inform product development, messaging, media placements, empathy, customer experience and more
  • Customer profiles do not answer your shoppers usage patterns, provide or include hard data

Once you have your bearings with the do’s and do not’s, you can start to build out your framework.

The depth and breadth of information available when creating a customer profile is endless and can often be overwhelming. We’ve broken it down into an easy 5 step process that will have you off the ground and running in no time. Let’s get started.

  1. Start with a 50,000 foot view. Who is your key audience? To create a tailored customer profile, you first need to know the people this profile is going to represent. A customer profile works best when represents a larger behavioral segment.
  2. Give them a face and a name. Who is this person? Add in some basic demographics. Age, gender, marital status, household income. Give them a name and an occupation. This step creates the framework the rest of your profile will live in.
  3. Describe what makes them tick. How do we understand this person? Look at what makes them unique. Their core values, what drives their decisions, what about their life excites them or makes them feel fulfilled. All of this information will help inform things like your messaging strategy, your marketing segmentation, and even product development later on.
  4. Understand what they need. What does this person need help with? Go back through your research and identify what your customer is thinking about and solving for as they move through their shopper journey, along with any pain points they might be experiencing. This helps build empathy between anyone in your organization using the customer profile and the customer themselves. When we start to understand what they need we can provide a better customer experience.
  5. Finish it with some color. How do we reach this person? Fill in the remainder of your profile with some of the information that might seem a little superfluous at first glance. Hobbies, favorite television or podcast channels and topics, social media use. This last bit of information, when well researched and proven, rounds out your profile into an actual person and will help influence things like media plans and targeting strategies.

There is no limit to the opportunities that using customer profiles as a consistent tool can open up for you (and if you have any questions, you know who to call). Happy crafting!