The list of why customer profiling is valuable to your business is almost endless. Customer profiling has been happening as long as people have been involved with selling products. Customer profiling is why the candy is in the checkout isle when you go shopping, and why specific toys are at child’s eye level in department stores. Customer profiling is why those irritating commercials come on TV that seem awfully sexist in regards to who does the laundry in your home.
Companies use customer profiling to innovate, create and improve products and services for their intended audience and to move into new territories.
Helps Identify Your Customer in a Clear Way
When you really study your customers, or the group that you want to be your customers, you will find out the truth about them in a new way. We all start with assumptions, and it’s hard to overcome them without stepping outside of our own ideas and asking the customer directly. You might learn something new and helpful for your business.
Answers Questions about Your Audience
It’s likely you’re not a member of your own target audience, and even if you are, it’s imperative to get outside of yourself and ask your audience questions. Your audience is your best source of information about what they need, what they fear, what their problems are, and even what type of solutions they need.
Helps You Identify Your Current Customers’ Needs
As mentioned previously, asking your audience the right questions can help you figure out what your audience needs. Your job is to fill their needs within your niche and ability, and you can’t do that if you don’t have the right answers. You can’t get the answers in your own bubble. Get out of your bubble and ask them.
Assists with Better, More Targeted and New Product Creation
By finding out what your customers need, you will also find that you are able to create new products that are more targeted and received better. They’ll buy faster now than they did your former products and services because you’re getting the truth from the right people and making more targeted products.
Helps Improve Existing Products and Services
Your job is to service your customer in the way that they need. By using customer profiling you’ll also be able to improve existing products and services so that they are more appealing to your target audience. Aside from that, you may determine your product doesn’t need improving, but your marketing needs to be changed to get your message to your audience in a more clear way.
Helps You Meet Your Audience’s Expectations
Once you create a following, your audience starts having expectations of you. If you stay in your bubble and don’t keep learning from your audience as they grow and change in their own lives, you may end up falling short of expectations. But by practicing ongoing customer profiling, you’ll learn valuable answers that can help you not only meet expectations but also anticipate them.
Creates More Understanding of Why Your Customers Buy from You
Customer profiling is very helpful in helping you understand why your customers buy. If you can understand why one customer bought (by surveying them), it will give you the information you need to improve your systems so that more people choose to buy.
Helps You Segment Your Audience Better
One of the keys to good marketing is audience segmentation. Who bought, who didn’t buy, why did they buy, where did they buy from, and what more might they want to buy? Segmenting your audience into smaller subgroups is always going to help you market in a clearer way that gets better results.
Customer profiling is not only valuable for your business – it is necessary to your business’s survival. You can get started now by sending a survey to your audience using SurveyMonkey.