Getting The Most Out Of Customer Profiles

It is very unlikely that you’re completely new to customer profiles while reading this. You know that a buyer persona is a user or customer-centric approach to understanding and designing products for end users, but do you know how to get the maximum out of buyer personas? From understanding the fundamentals of your customers to guiding product development to setting marketing goals. We’ll go through on how to construct, use and continuously improve your buyer persona — your handy partner in marketing. Firstly…

How To Build A Customer Profile?

The start is always the hardest because you just don't know where and how to start. Don't overwhelm and intimidate yourself, it's not that challenging if you’re starting in the right direction. Start by first brainstorming your rationale behind building a new product or service, digging into the “why” part. This would be helpful for helping you understand your unique selling points further and the details of what you offer. Your offerings and selling point will guide the direction of which customer segments to look at and further develop.

Once you have the general direction of which segment you’re heading towards, you can start considering their distinctive needs and motivations — the core of your customer profile. There are a few ways to go about this, you can opt for the most convenient and traditional way; conducting surveys, focus groups, or in-depth interviews to identify the needs and motivations of your target audience. You can also analyze how your past customers or leads have responded to your products and services and look for behavioral patterns. This part is where you can get creative, and don't feel restricted to the above methods, you’re free to approach this however you want to, as long as you find validation and prove their needs and motivations. Also, be sure to use some handy tools to help you build customer profiles, e.g. Entelo, Quarto and Crazy Egg, they’d be helpful!

Things to Remember When Building Customer Profiles

One key thing to keep in mind throughout building your customer profile is to always think and be in the mindset of a potential customer, lead or target segment. Don’t make assumptions, regardless broad or specific, test out and prove your theories if needed, and always feed in quality and accurate data for your customer profiles. Your inputs directly determine how useful your customer profile will be for you, rubbish in rubbish out.

When you’re in the mindset and perspective of your buyers, remember to include all stages of the buyer decision journey: research, evaluation, decision, and adoption. They’re all equally important and flow in with each other.

Using Your Customer Profile in Product Development

No matter what stage your product is in, you should always keep your buyer persona in mind, it’s essential to utilize it in all stages of your product. Customer profiles help your product team to learn the most important question of who the product is catering to.

These profiles accumulate needs, wants, user behaviors, and details that help the product team to design from a user-centric perspective. It helps them emphasize better with buyers, thus guiding better decision-making in developing products and bring the product closer to the “ideal” state of what real buyers would want to see. Additionally, a well constructed customer profile can also help settle dilemmas and arguments without the need to waste time to test and validate, as these profiles can be used for references and guides..

Identifying And Setting Marketing Goals With Customer Profile

Market goals are why anyone buys anything, and knowing what they are will help you create your marketing strategy. A buyer persona is a fictional representation of a potential customer. It lets you think about your target audience and what motivates them to buy. You can create a buyer persona by asking yourself: Why are they interested in this product? What are their needs? What problems do they face? You can tailor your marketing strategy to address their needs by understanding who your customers are.

By identifying market goals, you can create a marketing strategy tailored to meet those needs. For example, if you want to encourage people to eat healthy food, it makes sense to market healthy food products. Knowing your customers will also help you choose the correct channels to reach them. Understanding your target audience's needs and motivations can help you identify your marketing goals and create a more effective marketing strategy. Once you have your marketing goals, you can create buyer personas representing your target audience's various segments and product interests.

Discovering Pain Points and Motivations With a well-constructed customer profile, you’d be more likely to discover accurate and insightful pain points. With your evidence-backed customer traits and a completed, developed profile, you could see their thought processes, and understand their unique perspectives, which are prerequisites to discovering their main pain points. Now you’ve figured out the pain points of your buyer personas, you can start identifying key areas of improvement for your product. This would get you a roadmap with clear directions on how to improve your product, increasing efficiency and reducing failures. Additionally, you don't have to be stuck on pain points, you could dig a little deeper and seek for your user’s motivations, this goes hand in hand with pain points and could provide a more insightful bigger picture. What are their high-level goals? What are their dreams at a more granular level? These are critical details that will help you create more relevant solutions and develop a more holistic product roadmap that's more aligned with your customer's needs and desires.

Create A User Journey Framework For Optimal Product Design

Now that you better understand your customers and how they use your products, it's time to apply this to product design. You can start by creating an overall user journey for the development and breaking it down into various steps, like research, evaluation, decision, and adoption. You can also create different personas for customers at multiple stages of the journey and use their different needs and motivations to inspire design decisions. In addition, you can represent your users' journey visually using a technique such as personas-in-motion. It can help you visualize your user journey and each step in your customers' journey.

Conclusion

Now that we’ve reached the end of this article, you should know more details on how to build a customer profile, and how to use it in different areas — product development and setting marketing goals, etc. Hopefully, you understand the critical role and potential a well-constructed customer profile holds. The trajectory of your product development and marketing strategies can be influenced by customer profiles, so spend more time building them!