Why Customer Profiles (sometimes) Don't Work
“I made a profile of my perfect customer, but it wasn’t much use: it didn’t really make any difference to my business.”
It’s a common scenario: you make a profile, then put it aside and soon forget all about it as you get on with the day-to-day work of running your business.
If that’s you, you’re not alone.
But actually, if you’re running your business without good customer profiles in place, the chances are you’re missing opportunities. How can you capture your customers’ attention or give them what they want, if you don’t know who they are or what they’re looking for?
The job of a good customer profile is to help you to hear your customer’s voice in every conversation. Once you have learned to tune in to that voice, your business and marketing decisions should begin to get a whole lot easier.
What is a Customer Profile
A Customer Profile – some people call it a Customer Persona or an Avatar – is a means of personifying a group of customers, in the form of a single, typical individual. There is no hard-and-fast rule about what your Profile should look like: some of the most effective ones I’ve seen have been sketch drawings; others are photo collages. Mine are usually a mixture of photos and written descriptions.
Whatever the format, the important thing is that your profile brings together all of the salient, defining features of a whole group of customers, in the form of a single, relatable individual. That single individual then acts as a shorthand for you and anyone involved in your business – your team, your partners, your designer or website developer, your social media manager – so that they understand exactly who your target customers are.
The key word here is ‘salient’. You don’t want to drown in the details of what your customers ate for breakfast, nor what car they drive – unless you’re selling breakfast cereal or automotive accessories – you want to know what defines them as customers.
As a small business owner, you’ll usually need to make between three and five Customer Profiles. If you have fewer than three, you will often find your profiles are too broad; if you have more than five, the level of detail can become overwhelming. In either case, your profiles become difficult to work with, and that is exactly the situation you want to avoid.
Three Common Customer Profiling Mistakes
Here are the 3 most common reasons why customer profiles don’t work for business owners, and what you can do to make sure that you don’t make the same mistakes again:
You profiled an imaginary customer
Yes, this happens all the time. You got carried away with profiling a ‘perfect’ customer, when what you should have been doing, is profiling a real customer: current, or potential. Have you ever given up on a film or novel because the characters just didn’t ring true? Same problem. When you create your profile, you’re not trying to invent a new breed of human being from a wish-list of possible human attributes; you’re trying to understand the real people who are out there already.
If you’re a local business trading within a limited geographical area, your customer profile has to be someone who realistically lives or buys within that area.
If you are selling a premium product, your customer needs to have not only the means, but also the inclination, to pay your premium price.
Check your profiles to make sure that they are not only detailed, but realistic: do the customers’ attributes all add up?
Your profile was too broad
The most common error of all: you identify that your customers are ‘women aged 25 – 55’, and stop there. But there are lots of different women aged 25 – 55. And they are probably not all your potential customers. You need to delve deeper to find the point of difference that distinguishes your customer from all the other women who will never buy from you.
It goes without saying that people typically experience different life stages – in terms of relationships, health and wellbeing, career, parenthood/grandparenthood, etc – at 25 and at 55. These factors all play a part in their behaviour; outlook; mental health; financial means; leisure time; priorities … the list goes on. And each of these things, in turn, will have a direct effect on their ability and inclination to become your customer.
If your customer bracket is broad enough to span more than one life stage, it’s time to break it down to create more actionable segments.
Your profile was too narrow
Another easy trap to fall into: you get off to a great start, because you know a real person who you believe represents your ‘ideal’ customer. But soon you become so absorbed in capturing the details of that person’s individual characteristics and circumstances, that you create a profile that applies only to him and her. Having delved into so much detail, it’s difficult to zoom out and recognise the salient details that will help you to find more, similar individuals, and which were unique to that particular person. You risk building a profile per customer, rather than a profile per customer type: the volume of information is overwhelming, and as such, it is unactionable.
If your profile is based around a single individual and feels indistinguishable from that person, then take a step back: your profile should be more caricature than portrait, capturing only the salient features so that you are defining not an individual, but a customer type.
Next steps
So dig out those old customer profiles, and take a fresh look: identifying what went wrong last time, is the first step towards doing it better next time.
If you’d like to read more about customer profiling, look out for two new posts coming soon on how to make a really useful customer profile, and what customer profiling should do for your business. Sign up for our newsletter if you’d like to be notified when those posts are published.
You might also like to take a look at our online training programme, where we run regular Masterclasses including How to Target your Ideal Customers.