Brian Honigman is a marketing consultant, professional speaker and freelance writer. This post originally appeared on the blog SumAll.
One of the most important parts of your business is to understand who your customers are. This helps to define what makes your company unique compared to other companies in your industry. The concept of a brand is created around these differentiators help define what makes a company different from the other.
Customers choose to shop in a store shirt on another or eat at a taco place on the other because you have built a company that meets a specific demographic, offering products or quality services at fair prices based on your market.
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Therefore, it is very important, especially from a marketing point of view, how to create an accurate customer profile that helps define who the customer you are trying to achieve.
1. Understand your own products and services, their intended use, and how they are actually used
To begin crafting a specific customer profile, understand your own products, services and your mission as an organization. This is an ongoing process, but from the beginning, it is essential to understand that you want your customer is and how it relates to how your products and services are developed and packaged.
The use of your offers this type affects people decide to use them and, therefore, should be monitored accordingly to ensure that your products and services are of the highest value to that audience. For example, if your business is a clothing store, how jeans or t-shirts that you sell adapt to a customer can greatly affect this type of customer your business attracts.
Noting these differences in the details of your products and services and how they are used is important to make sure that you are still crafting the right experience for your customer base.
By paying attention to the use of your products and services, you will be able to see how the use of your customer your offerings change overtime and how your organization must respond to these changes . This could mean your business trips around your offerings to better meet the needs of your customers, your team decides to build a product or additional service to respond to this change, etc.
Finally, the mission of an organization can also define how a brand is presented and what type of customers do business with your company.
For example, if your company believes in providing environmentally friendly practices or give a percentage of profits to charity, these activities may affect the type of customer your business attracts. Keep this in mind when building a profile of the client you are trying to achieve, to change your mission to meet their needs and interests.
2. Getting the continuous customer feedback, along with the industry research
As accurate a profile that you and your client as much as your company actively adapts its offers to their needs, the customer is in control - today more than ever. In order to understand what they want from your business and industry as a whole, have them.
For the profile of the most accurate client, search your public regularly for feedback about your offerings as well as their perception of your company. Tools such as Survey Monkey or Checkbox Survata are useful and affordable for companies of all sizes looking to explore their public.
Use your existing email list or social media accounts, ask your customers about your business, about themselves, their preferences, the market in general and in a few easy answer issues that will better help your business understand what your customer base really is. 
Sometimes it can be difficult to get your customers to take part, which explains why incentivizing participation with a coupon or coupon code for a discount is a great way to encourage participation. Make sure that whatever you ask you your public comments that you make the process enjoyable.
Finally, an overview of your customer base by reviewing reports on the landscape of your industry from sources like eMarketer, Forrester or L2, among others. Organizations like these are responsible for customer behavior analysis of trends in different verticals that among many things can help your business keep an accurate profile of your client, despite the constant changes in their additional behaviors.
3. Map of the interests of the customer based on demographic, psychographic, behavioral and environmental, including age, interests, the role of employment, gender, location and more
from your two predictions of who your customer is and the actual data on your existing customer base, create a map of their interests on the basis of different demographics that make up the different ideals buyers. Every business has a few different types of customers and this card will clarify the differences between the profiles of each ideal buyer.
Find out what is unique about their individual preferences and write all to discuss what makes the list and what is removed. Map of age, interests, the role of employment, favorite music, sex, location, socio-economic, religious status, education level, race, ethnic origin, level and more revenue.
This is an example of a very simple customer profile to help direct your strategy.
Ask questions such as :?
- What other businesses do they attend
- What websites they tend to visit the more
- Which blogs do they read regularly?
- What are their personal interests?
- What kind of jobs do they have?
- How will your product improve their lives?
- How to entertain your customers?
by asking the questions above and you will be able to tap into how your team collectively consider your client and once these aspects of your profile are mapped, you'll be ready to develop a strategy to systematically reach these customers.
4. Maintain consistency across the enterprise in terms of your customer profile
Once you have established your customer that is among your team in writing, require the buy-in all actors of society. Everyone must agree on the goals of your organization and the client profile is an essential tool to help your company achieve these goals.
By requiring the customer profile be documented, easily accessible and agreed by all members of your team, ensure consistency across the enterprise. Consistency is important for long-term success of growing your customer because every member of your team needs to work towards the same goals to achieve, otherwise your efforts could be structured teams and against-productive.
For consistency, follow a model when creating and updating customer profiles throughout the enterprise. For example of what this model might look like, you can use our model below.
5. Revisit profile to reflect changes in your business, industry and the consumer landscape
it is important to note that the client profile will always changed since your business is constantly changing due to shifting habits, interests and preferences of your customers.
Therefore, your business must continually update your customer profile when fourth to make sure it is still accurate based out of both your insights as an expert in your industry and data collected from reports and customer feedback.
Constantly review industry reports on your customer base and survey these clients quarterly gain new knowledge about changing habits, interests or preferences and update your profile customer accordingly. This will help your company stay on track with your goals to drive more revenue and grow your customer base to the next level by specifically targeting people on the basis of a specific customer profile.
What prevents your company create an accurate customer profile? How your company compiles detailed information about your ideal customers? Let us know in the comments below.