How to create an ideal customer profile

An ideal customer profile is a depiction of the group of people you would most like to sell to. These profiles detail your preferred customers’ likes, dislikes, behaviours, personality traits, buying habits, and other relevant information. 

This guide will help you create an ideal customer profile by looking at the following areas:

• Why you need an ideal customer profile
• Types of ideal customer profiles
• How to create an ideal customer profile

Marketing your small business can be challenging, especially if you don’t know who you want your campaigns to reach. Creating a customer profile allows you to define your target audience and what attracts them to a business. 

The idea is to find out as much information as you can about these people so you can provide them with the most optimised solution for their needs. Gathering this information in one place gives you great insight into your ideal customer’s mindset that you can use to inform your future marketing and sales strategies.

Depending on your business type and size, you might want to create several ideal customer profiles to encapsulate different segments of your audience.  

There are a few types of profiles you can use depending on what information will help your marketing efforts the most. We’ve listed the main ones below.

This basic type of profiling enables you to build a clear picture of your audience’s characteristics. Demographic profiling is usually based on key information like gender, age, income, job title, and so on. 

As the name suggests, geographic profiling focuses on information regarding peoples’ location, such as a country, town, city, or district. Creating geographical customer profiles can help you offer the most relevant and helpful products or services for that area. 

When creating an ideal customer profile, it helps to know about their habits, interests, life goals, worries, etc. Psychographic profiling is a form of profiling that allows you to define what makes your customers tick. Understanding your customers’ mindset lets you offer a significant and memorable customer experience.

It’s crucial to understand your customers’ behaviour throughout their buying and user journey to help you give them what they really need. Behavioural profiling helps you analyse peoples’ purchasing journey, engagement and usage patterns, and loyalty to your business and solution. This form of profiling is particularly useful if you want to expand your customers’ usage. 

Simply follow the step below to create an ideal customer profile for your business.

When creating your customer profile, focus on the problem your business solves and identify the type of people who face this challenge. Whether you have two customers or 10,000, it’s crucial to understand who they are, how they use your solution, and why they use it. 

The customer journey represents the experiences customers go through when interacting with your company and brand. In other words, it documents the entire experience of being your customer. So by understanding your customers’ needs, challenges, and goals at each step of the customer journey, you’ll get a stronger sense of what they need from you.

The first step to creating your ideal customer profile is defining external demographics before digging deeper into needs and looking at your company’s offering. 

You can begin by asking yourself these questions:

• What market does your solution serve best?
• What specific sector do they operate in?
• What is their annual revenue?
• Where are they located?
• If it’s a company, how many employees does it have?

Once you’ve defined the external demographics, you can add details relevant to your chosen profile type (demographic, geographic, psychographic, behavioural). 

It’s good to speak to customers to have a clear picture of what they’re like. This makes customer interviews one of the best resources to use when building a customer profile.

Customer interviews allow you to speak with users face-to-face, over video chat, or by phone. This way, you can read their reactions to questions in real-time, allowing you to gather valuable insight that data can’t give you. 

If your customers are willing to speak to you, you know they’re loyal users and are worth the time investment. The more attention you pay to these customers, the more information you’ll have in the future.

A crucial part of creating ideal customer profiles is to consider how your business compares to similar brands in your industry. You need to know how customers perceive your brand and what other companies might compete for their attention. By understanding your industry and your place in it, you can build a solid brand identity that helps you stand out to customers. 

Customer profiling is an easily repeatable process, meaning you can apply the same method whenever you need to create a new profile. Repeating your ideal customer research means you’ll always stay on top of emerging trends and changes in buyer attitudes. This way, you can ensure your solution and marketing methods continue to satisfy customers. 

It’s a good idea to repeat your ideal customer profiling process every year or so to ensure the data is up to date. After all, new competitors, solutions, influencers, and customers entering the market will likely alter peoples’ perceptions of brands and shift the status quo over time.

Now that you know how to create an ideal customer profile for your business, you can begin targeting better customers with campaigns they’ll love. The more detail you put into your profile, the more value you’ll get from it. As your customer base grows, a robust and reliable system like Countingup will allow you to manage your financial activities easily.

Financial management can be stressful and time-consuming when you’re self-employed. That’s why thousands of business owners use the Countingup app to make their financial admin easier. 

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.