Why You Can’t Succeed In Business Without A Customer Profile
Why would someone visiting a strange city drive in circles for over an hour looking for his morning cup of Sumatra when a Starbucks was only a few blocks from his hotel?
That’s like trying to run a successful business without knowing who your customers are. Unless you have a clear profile of your ideal customer, you have little chance of understanding their business challenges or providing them with products and services that solve them.
But how do you create that profile? Let’s see, shall we?
Profiling your target audience includes researching their observable demographics, their largely hidden psychographics, as well their individual characteristics - the personal profile that reflects your research findings will give you tremendous insight in who you’re actually serving and what they need from you.
Why this is important…
About a year ago I spent a week in Austin, Texas working on a project. I woke up early and headed out to find the only coffee here in the U.S. that’s worth leaving a warm bed for.
There was no one on duty at the front desk and so I got in my rental car and just started driving thinking that within a few blocks I’d find my home-away-from-home, a local Starbucks - Texas style.
I drove for an hour, got hopelessly lost in the process, only to phone the hotel and discover that a Starbucks was conveniently located a few blocks from the hotel in the opposite direction I’d taken.
Being in business without a detailed customer profile is like driving in a strange city without a map or a GPS unit. You’re never quite sure of your destination. And if you by chance experience success, the of chances repeating it are slim to none.
Another reason to define your target audience -it determines how you communicate to them. A health care professional thinks and processes information in a way that would be foreign to most poets. An attorney requires an approach that a baker wouldn’t necessarily appreciate.
Not only does target audience determine your language, but also the medium you use to reach your audience.
A colleague recently decided to extend services to photographers and is abandoning his usual online manner of conducting business. Why? Because most photographers don’t do a lot of business online.
In this way, his target audience determines the methods and media he’ll use to reach them.
The components of a target audience profile…
To discover your ideal target market, you need to define two important terms: demographics and psychographics. Like my friend marketing to professional photographers, some would also include geographics. If your audience is mainly offline, geographics might play an equally important role in creating your customer profile.
Demographics are the basic facts about your clients or prospects. These are simple, objective (and usually observable) facts about their location, field, industry type, size of company, etc. Your target market’s demographics reveal their external, measurable, and observable characteristics. These are easily found in business journals and associations that member of your audience subscribe and belong to.
Psychographics are more about the character and philosophy of your prospects. Think about the adjectives you’d use to describe your clients. An example of your client’s psychographic may be action-oriented, self-motivated, honest and ethical. As demographics reflect the external, observable characteristics of your target market, psychographics deal more with their internal, non-observable traits. These would also include their needs, wants, and desires; how they envision success, and what their fears are.
How to get started researching your customer profile…
Demographics
- how old are they?
- what is their job title?
- what’s their income per month, a year?Lifestyle
- what is a day like in their lives?
- where do they live?
- what do they drive?
- what things do they like buying?
- what are their hobbies?Information
- where do they search for information on
- how informed are they about my business?
- how informed to they consider themselves?Media Usage
- what media do they read, listen to, watch, click, consume etc?
- are they members in any professional association of interest?
- is there a good list they’re on?Similar Purchases
- have they bought from a competitor before?
- what similar products have they bought before?
- how were they marketed to, sold to before?Problem
- do they know they have a problem?
- how does this problem manifest in their lives?
- what makes them toss and turn at night?Objections
- what are their main objections, and
- criticisms about my business/my offer/similar offers
- what do they hate about my industry?
- what preconceptions do they have?
I urge you to create your own customer profile using these guidelines. Research it, create it, and share on the forum how it expands your vision for reaching your customers.
I guarantee taking the time to create a customer profile will prevent you from driving in circles for hours when what you want is right around the corner. 
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Comments
Sherri,
Thanks for commenting and raising some good questions.
Ultimately this information should come from, as you point out, your own experience with your target audience and client base.
For those without a significant client base, it’s often useful to interview other business owners who serve the same audience.
However, that’s only a starting point. As you go forward serving clients, experience will reveal the characteristics and data necessary to arrive at the profile.
And of course, using the profile is the topic for another post.
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Hi Barry,
This is a great list, and one of the best, simplest forms of info I’ve seen so far on this subject. Thanks for sharing your insights on this subject.
I see you touched lightly on where to find this info…I’m wondering aobut other places one might look for this…blogs, ezines, websites, census info, chambers of commerce, magazines, … all that pertain to one’s specific subject matter. how about the Library of Congress? List companies?
Ultimately though - don’t you need to survey your own customer list to get an inkling of where to start looking? And what if you don’t have a customer list? I’m guessing one would need to a) look at other companies of a similar nature and see what their customer base is like or b) make your best guess.
Other ideas??
Great subject matter to discuss! Thanks for bringing it up.
Cheers!
Sherri