An average of 23% of the marketing budget goes to waste due to ineffective targeting”, according to a statistic by the ANA.
Imagine your cat food ads appearing in front of someone with dogs, or your ad of sweet boxes reaching to a person with diabetes.
Ineffective targeting leads to wasted ad spend and efforts, frustrated audiences, and missed opportunities.
So how can you target the right audiences with the right messages and experience real growth through high engagement and conversion?
By building an Ideal Customer Profile that helps you know your target audience inside-out and reach out to them at the right places, with the right messages, at the right time.
In this blog, we will explore the components of an ideal customer profile and how you to build a complete profile to guide your brand marketing efforts.
What is an Ideal Customer Profile?
It is a hypothetical description of the perfect customer for your product or service, a picture of a customer who will benefit most from it and give it the highest value.
It is an outline that highlights various characteristics and behavioral traits of the perfect customer.
An ideal customer profile guides your product, sales, brand marketing, customer support, and supply chain efforts to ensure you can cater to them well and convert them into happy loyal customers.
Components of an Ideal Customer Profile –
There are 4 essential parts of an ideal customer profile –
- Demographics:
The first and most basic level of information about your customers.
It is the “who” of your profile – the outline that broadly defines your target audience.
It includes your target segment’s –
- Age & Gender
- Location
- Education Level
- Profession & Income
- Family Status
- Surface Level Attributes such as Ethnicity, Ailments & Allergies, Body and Blood Types, etc.
In a B2B context, this section of your ideal customer profile will also consist of data about your Industry, Company Size, and Job Title/ Department.
It’s essential to have the above data about your target audience to craft sales & brand marketing strategies and build processes for the same.
- Psychographics:
Knowing your target segment’s age or profession won’t be enough for you to make them resonate with your brand and connect with you on a deeper level.
This section helps you find their psychological traits and understand the “why” behind your consumers’ behavior –
It consists of your consumers’ –
- Values: What are their core values and motivations?
- Interests: What are their personal and professional interests?
- Lifestyle: What’s their lifestyle (Urban/ Rural, Social/Homebody, Fast-paced/Slow-paced)?
- Goals: What are their personal, professional, financial, and family goals?
- Habits: How do they prefer to shop, search, be informed, and spend their leisure time?
These insights from your ideal customer profile shape your marketing strategy, communication and campaigns, customer experience, and engagement activities.
- Behavior Patterns:
Here you will understand the “how” of their profile – to manifest how their preferences turn into actions.
It includes the customer’s-
- Buying Habits: What are the factors that influence their decision?
What’s their typical buying journey, mode, and frequency?
- Channel & Content Preference: What platforms and types of messages do they prefer to spend their time on?
- Brand Loyalty or Lifetime: How long do they stay with a brand?
What are the factors that influence their loyalty?
- Product Usage: How often do they use your product?
What are the features they like and don’t?
What are the use cases of your product?
- Purchase History: What products do they purchase from you?
Do you observe any pattern that will let you predict their future buying decisions?
This section of your ideal customer profile will enable you to make strategic decisions about your product innovation, customer experience, loyalty programs, and sales & brand marketing efforts.
- Needs & Pain Points:
The last piece of your ideal customer profile and the most crucial one.
If you miss this part, all the above data won’t help you garner the results you desire as you won’t be able to strike the emotional chord with them at various touchpoints.
Here, we explore your audience’s –
- Needs: What are their latent and unmet needs?
- Frustrations: What are the roadblocks they face in achieving their goals through a product?
How does the frustration impact them? What are the emotional triggers?
- Pain Points: What problems will your product or service address?
What will be the benefit of doing so?
What will be the consequences if they don’t resolve these pain points?
- Alternatives: What other options do they use or are available in the market?
How do they fall short of fully addressing their needs & pain points?
These insights from your ideal customer profile will empower you to craft compelling value propositions, brand positioning, narratives, hero statements, and brand identity – which is the very foundation of your brand.
Things to Do After You Prepare Your Ideal Customer Profile
- Build a Feedback Loop to Improve the Profile Further
The true purpose of an ideal customer profile is to highlight the needs, pain points, and behavioral traits for better targeting.
Now, your consumers’ needs, pain points, and buying patterns are constantly evolving, so you can never rest easy after building your profile once.
You need to build a way to constantly observe, interact, and engage with your target segment to ensure you are addressing them well and uncover crucial data/cues to drive future decisions.
The most prominent way of gathering customer feedback is to have focus groups, surveys, and in-person face-to-face conversations.
- Revisit Your Value Proposition Statement
It’s natural to feel overwhelmed and distracted after gaining such a wealth of data for your ideal customer profile. At such times, you have to ask questions like,
- What’s the problem my product will solve?
- How will it benefit my target audience?
- What is the unmet need or pain point it will address?
- What will be the consequences if it’s not addressed?”
Your value proposition statement will answer these questions and help you focus on the data useful to the problem you’re trying to solve.
- Dive into Contextual Details
You will have to tweak or add sections to your ideal customer profile depending on the category of your business.
For example, if you’re a B2B brand, you uncover data about your target customer’s team size and roles, their decision-making levels and frameworks, and their methods and technologies.
Note: In most cases, more than one person is involved in a buying decision (in different ways), regardless of a B2B, B2C, or D2C model.
What are the Types of Personas to Target?
We say that there are 3 key stakeholders of a decision (or 3 personas one should focus on while working on an ideal customer profile) –
- User: They are the ones who will benefit most from the problem your product will solve.
If I am in the business of selling toys, then kids are my users. - Influencers: They are the ones who have a word in the buyer’s decision.
Here, the Mother influences my consumer follows or their Mom’s friend can be an influencer.
Even the User, the kid who will play with my toys can be an influencer. - Decision-Maker: They make the final decision after considering all other aspects. Yes, parents are the decision-makers in this example.
That’s all you need to know to start building an ideal customer profile for your product and finish the 2nd section of a Business Model Canvas, Customer Segment.
You can schedule a workshop/ training session with Mili Kataria to build each section of a Business Model Canvas to ensure a robust foundation.
Pandora’s Box is a Business Consulting and Brand Marketing Agency that helps firms build robust, consistent, and differentiating presence online.
