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How to Build Customer Profiles to Improve Engagement and Sales

Last updated: October 7, 2024

Customer profiles are key to understanding your audience, delivering on their expectations and creating lifetime value that builds on itself over time. 

But the complexity and scale of new marketing technology has made this process harder over time. To stay on top of their customers’ needs, they need to collect, unify and standardize their customer data quickly enough to create actionable and predictive profiles. And then they need to activate quickly enough to actually connect with the people they’re trying to reach. 

It’s no small task — but the right strategy and technology can help you build and action customer profiles quickly enough to see results. In this post, we’ll present the benefits and challenges of creating customer profiles, tell you how to create customer profiles of your own, and add real-life examples to help you effectively identify, segment, and engage your target audience. 

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What is a customer profile?

A customer profile is a detailed description of a typical customer or target audience for a product, service, or brand. 

Customer profiles combine demographic information — like age, gender, job title, location, industry, company and company size, etc. — with psychographic aspects — like their interests, values, lifestyle choices, attitudes, motivations, and purchasing habits. If your profiles are complete, this information will come from a variety of sources — from your social media, email, events and marketing data as well as any events and surveys you’re running. 

Benefits of customer profiling 

Customer profiles give you a more complete view of everyone in your audience. And if you look closely enough, each person’s profile tells you how you can connect and ultimately convert them, too.

That alone is more than enough to justify the effort. But some other benefits of customer profiling include: 

Target your marketing and communications

Many times, making a sale is just about telling someone the right thing at the right time. The more complete your customer profiles, the less guesswork you need to figure out what your audience — or specific audience segments — need to hear at different times. That becomes exponentially more valuable as you start to manage more brands, products and/or publications, each with their own audiences.

Personalize customer experiences

Every company out there, from Netflix and Starbucks to your neighborhood nail salon, is leaning hard on personalization. But if you don’t know what each individual in your audience wants, you’re in no position to give it to them.

Allocate resources more efficiently

Nobody wants to chase unrealistic markets or fall short on a splashy new campaign. But if you don’t have a clear view of your audience, it’s easy to chase the wrong ventures and spend money in unpromising places. Accurate customer profiles will give you that clearer view — and ensure you’re putting your dollars in the right place. That leads to optimized resource allocation, higher efficiency and better outcomes — all with less stress for you.

Improve customer retention

In the rush to get new customers, it’s easy to lose sight of the ones you already have. Customer profiling makes it easier to stay on top of your current audience’s needs, interests, and experiences. 

From there, you can personalize your offerings and communications specifically to that group, improve customer satisfaction and loyalty, reduce churn rates and increase their customer lifetime value. And the lower your churn, the less you have to rely on new business to keep yourself going.

Gain a competitive advantage

The most successful businesses are the ones that know who they are. Just as importantly, who they’re not. 

Customer profiles give you the information you need to answer those questions. With a better view of your audience, you can identify their needs, your value proposition for them and, in turn, the key differences that’ll separate you from the crowd. 

Customer profile examples 

Now let’s put it all together. Here’s an example of what an ideal customer profile might look like for a data management company targeting audience development managers in consumer media.

• Title: Audience development managers
• Industry: Consumer media
• Location: United States
• Budget: $7000/month
• How do they find you?: Industry referrals, events and LinkedIn/other digital communities
• How do they engage with you?: Email newsletters, events and social media
• Pain points: Their data is spread across multiple systems so they can’t get a single view of their audience. They spend too much time managing data silos to focus on audience growth activities.
• Technology: They have complicated tech stacks that create more work than they solve.
• Now that you know what problems your audience is facing, how can you meet them?

How to use customer profiles to improve engagement and conversions 

Data is only as powerful as the strategy behind it. If you’re letting your customer profiles sit in your database, or you’re not using them to personalize and optimize your marketing, you’re leaving potential sales on the table. Once you’ve built your profiles, activate them with these best practices: 

Segment your marketing and prospects based on their similarity with your ICP

Then target your messaging, communications and offers specifically to that audience’s observed needs and interests.

Score your leads 

Track each person’s level of engagement and readiness for sustained marketing outreach. (With Omeda’s CDP, you can build a lead scoring model that automatically pulls in customer data from every source.)  

Use information from your customer profiles to pursue better-fit sponsorship opportunities 

Or if you’re selling ads, use your rich customer data to prove your worth to advertisers and attract more revenue. Or if you’re considering a partnership, ask the potential partner to profile their audience so both parties can identify overlap and best promotional opportunities.

Use content recommendations and dynamic content to further personalize 

So far, we’ve portrayed your ICP as a monolith —  anonymous people with the same broad interests, needs and wants. But there’s a lot of individual differences even within your ICP. So how can you individualize your messaging to everyone in your ICP without losing your mind?

Use content recommendations. When it’s active, every email recipient is served with content that’s tailored specifically to their past browsing, engagement and purchase history. This allows you to give everyone the one message that’s most likely to resonate with them — and helps you capture nuances within your ICP.  

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