business plan customer profile examples

Customer Profile Template And Examples

Updated: May 28, 2024, 5:49pm

Table of Contents

What is a customer profile, why customer profiles are important, how to create a customer profile in 4 steps, b2b customer profile examples, b2c customer profile example, frequently asked questions (faqs).

Compiling a customer profile can help you understand your target market more accurately, and should be updated on a regular basis. By gathering information on your ideal customers, you can tailor your marketing efforts and deliver more personalized experiences. We’ll give you a comprehensive guide to customer profiles, including templates and examples for both B2B and B2C businesses. Learn why customer profiles are important, how to create them, and find inspiration for your own profiles.

Download template here

A customer profile is a detailed description of your ideal customer. It provides demographic information, such as age, gender, income, education and location, as well as customer behaviors and interests. By creating a customer profile, businesses can better understand their target audience and tailor their marketing efforts to meet their needs.

Demographic Information

Demographic information includes details about a customer’s age, gender, income, education and location. This information can help businesses understand who their target audience is and what their needs may be.

Customer Behaviors and Interests

In addition to demographic information, a customer profile should also include details about customer behaviors and interests. This can include information about their shopping habits, social media use, hobbies and other interests. Understanding these behaviors and interests can help businesses better target their marketing efforts and create more effective campaigns.

Knowing your customers is key to any business’s success. Customer profiles allow you to gain insights into the needs, preferences and behaviors of your target audience. Here are some reasons why customer profiles are important:

Better Targeting

Customer profiles enable you to target your marketing and sales efforts more effectively. By understanding your customers’ needs, you can tailor your messages and offers to resonate with them and increase the chances of conversion. When you know what a customer likes, you can create products best aligned with their needs and desires.

Improved Customer Service

Customer profiles help you understand your customers’ pain points, allowing you to provide better customer service. You can address their concerns and issues proactively and enhance their overall experience with your brand.

Higher Retention

When you understand your customers’ needs, you can create products and services that meet those needs, increasing the likelihood of customer retention. You can also use customer profiles to identify customers who are at risk of churn and take steps to retain them.

Data-Driven Decisions

Customer profiles provide you with data that can inform your business decisions. By analyzing customer behavior and preferences, you can identify trends and make data-driven decisions about product development, marketing strategy and customer service.

Competitive Advantage

Customer profiles give you a competitive advantage by enabling you to provide a more personalized and relevant customer experience. This can help you stand out from your competitors and build customer loyalty.

Crafting a customer profile is vital for a successful marketing approach. Knowing exactly what a customer wants and needs can help you tailor your products, marketing and services. You can have multiple customer profiles—many businesses choose to have one for each sector—and you should update these regularly, especially as market conditions and customer life cycles change. These steps will help you set up a customer profile.

Collect Customer Data

Analyze customer data, identify customer segments, share customer data.

Having customer profiles is crucial for both B2B and B2C. Learn about your ideal customer, so you can create marketing and sales campaigns that work for them. Use this B2B customer profile template to craft your own, and consider adding information you gather below.

Company Information

Include details such as company size, industry, location and annual revenue.

Company: Madison Corporation

Company Size: Large corporation with 500-1,000 employees

Industry: Technology and software

Location: Madison, WI

Annual Revenue: $1 billion

Madison Corporation is a large technology and software company based in Madison, WI. The company is committed to supporting local businesses and the Wisconsin economy by sourcing materials and services from local vendors. They are interested in purchasing Wisconsin-made products for employee gifts and corporate events.

Decision-Makers and Influencers

Identify the individuals who will be involved in the purchasing process, including decision-makers and influencers.

Decision-Makers

Mary Johnson, Owner of Johnson’s Gifts – Mary is responsible for making purchasing decisions for her gift shop. She is interested in carrying Wisconsin-made products that are unique and of high-quality, and that resonate with her customer base.

John Peterson, CEO of Madison Corporation – John has the final say on all purchasing decisions for Madison Corporation. He is interested in purchasing Wisconsin-made products for employee gifts and corporate events, and is looking for products that align with the company’s values and brand.

Influencers

Sarah Smith, Marketing Manager of Wisconsin Tourism Board – Sarah is responsible for promoting Wisconsin tourism and is always on the lookout for new and exciting Wisconsin-made products to feature in her marketing campaigns. She has a strong influence over tourists and visitors to the state.

Tom Jackson, Local Business Advocate – Tom is a local business advocate who works to promote local businesses and the Wisconsin economy. He has a strong influence over purchasing decisions made by local businesses and corporations, and is interested in promoting Wisconsin-made products to his network.

Pain Points and Challenges

Understand the pain points and challenges your target customers face, and how your product or service can address these issues.

Difficulty finding authentic and high-quality Wisconsin-made products that are not mass-produced or sold at big-box stores.

Navigating the crowded marketplace of Wisconsin-themed souvenirs and gifts, and finding products that are unique and showcase the state’s culture and heritage.

The desire to support local businesses and the Wisconsin economy, but not knowing where to find or how to identify Wisconsin-made products.

How Stapleton Badger Co.’s products can address these issues:

By focusing on producing handcrafted and unique Wisconsin-made products, Stapleton Badger Co. can provide customers with authentic and high-quality products that cannot be found at big-box stores.

Stapleton Badger Co. can differentiate itself from the crowded marketplace of Wisconsin-themed souvenirs and gifts by offering products that are both unique and of high-quality, and that showcase the state’s culture and heritage in a way that resonates with customers.

By marketing itself as a Wisconsin-based business that supports the local economy, Stapleton Badger Co. can appeal to customers who want to support local businesses and the Wisconsin economy. This messaging can be reinforced through the use of Wisconsin-sourced materials and a transparent supply chain that emphasizes the company’s commitment to local sourcing and manufacturing.

Goals and Objectives

Analyze what your customers anticipate from your product or service and how it can bring them closer to their goals.

Supporting the local economy: Madison Corporation is committed to supporting local businesses and the Wisconsin economy. By purchasing Wisconsin-made products from Stapleton Badger Co., the company can help support local artisans and manufacturers, and create jobs in Wisconsin.

Gifting high-quality and unique products: Madison Corporation is interested in purchasing Wisconsin-made products for employee gifts and corporate events. By purchasing products from Stapleton Badger Co., the company can provide employees and clients with high-quality and unique gifts that showcase Wisconsin’s culture and heritage.

Building a positive reputation: Madison Corporation values its reputation as a responsible and sustainable business. By purchasing Wisconsin-made products from Stapleton Badger Co., the company can demonstrate its commitment to supporting local businesses and the Wisconsin economy, and build a positive reputation with customers and stakeholders.

Purchasing Habits and Criteria

Find out how your target customers make purchasing decisions and what criteria they use to evaluate potential vendors.

Researching products and vendors online: Customers are increasingly using the internet to research products and vendors before making a purchase. They may look for reviews, ratings and social media presence to assess the credibility and quality of a vendor.

Shopping locally: Customers who prioritize supporting local businesses may prefer to shop at local stores or markets to find Wisconsin-made products. They may also look for locally sourced materials and transparent supply chains when evaluating vendors.

Attending local events and festivals: Customers may attend local events and festivals to discover new vendors and products. These events may also provide an opportunity for customers to meet the makers and learn more about the production process.

Quality and authenticity of products: Customers value high-quality and authentic Wisconsin-made products that are unique and well-crafted. They may evaluate vendors based on the quality of their products, materials used and the production process.

Reputation and credibility of vendor: Customers may evaluate vendors based on their reputation and credibility within the community. They may look for vendors who have positive reviews, strong social media presence, and a transparent supply chain.

Price and value for money: Customers may compare prices and value for money when evaluating vendors. They may be willing to pay a premium for high-quality and unique Wisconsin-made products, but also expect fair and transparent pricing.

Marketing and Sales Strategy

Outline a strategy to advertise and distribute your product or service to your intended customers, based on the information you have gathered about their characteristics and preferences.

Research and identify Madison Corporation’s needs and preferences: Before reaching out to Madison Corporation, Stapleton Badger Co. should research and identify the company’s needs and preferences for Wisconsin-made products. This can involve analyzing the company’s brand and values, and understanding the types of products that are typically used for employee gifts and corporate events.

Develop a customized product offering: Based on Madison Corporation’s needs and preferences, Stapleton Badger Co. should develop a customized product offering that aligns with the company’s brand and values. This can involve creating unique and high-quality products that showcase Wisconsin’s culture and heritage, such as custom-made home decor, accessories, and gifts.

Establish a sales pitch: Stapleton Badger Co. should establish a sales pitch that emphasizes the quality, authenticity, and uniqueness of its products, and how they can benefit Madison Corporation’s goals and objectives. This can include providing transparent information about the sourcing and production process, highlighting the positive impact on the local economy, and showcasing the products’ durability and craftsmanship.

Reach out to decision-makers and influencers: Stapleton Badger Co. should reach out to decision-makers and influencers at Madison Corporation, such as John Peterson, the CEO, and Tom Jackson, the local business advocate. This can involve sending customized emails or direct mail that showcase the products and explain their benefits, or arranging face-to-face meetings or calls to discuss the product offering and establish a long-term partnership.

Provide excellent customer service: Stapleton Badger Co. should prioritize providing excellent customer service to Madison Corporation, including timely and reliable deliveries, transparent communication, and flexible payment options. This can help establish trust and reliability and build a strong relationship between the two companies.

Knowing your target audience is key to making marketing campaigns that connect with people who might buy from you. In this section, we’ll provide an example of a B2C customer profile to help you get started, as well as information to consider when customizing your template.

When creating a B2C customer profile, start with demographic information, such as age, gender, income and location. This’ll help you work out who your customers are and what they want.

Demographics

Gender: Male and Female

Income: $50,000-$150,000 per year

Location: Primarily located in the Midwest region of the United States, with a focus on Wisconsin residents and visitors.

Stapleton Badger Co.’s target B2C customers are typically middle-aged and middle-class individuals who are interested in supporting local businesses and the Wisconsin economy. They may be homeowners, parents, or working professionals, and may have a strong interest in Wisconsin culture, heritage, and history.

Their income level suggests that they have disposable income to spend on high-quality and unique products. They may be willing to pay a premium for Wisconsin-made products that are handcrafted and authentic.

In addition to demographic information, consider your customers’ behaviors and interests. What motivates them to make purchases? What are their pain points and challenges? What types of media do they consume? Understanding these factors can help you tailor your marketing efforts to better reach and engage your target audience.

Interest in supporting local businesses: Stapleton Badger Co.’s B2C customers may be motivated by a desire to support local businesses and the Wisconsin economy. They may be more likely to purchase products that are locally-sourced and handcrafted, and that support local artisans and manufacturers.

Appreciation for Wisconsin culture and heritage: Many of Stapleton Badger Co.’s B2C customers may have a strong appreciation for Wisconsin’s culture and heritage, and may be interested in purchasing products that showcase the state’s unique history, traditions, and natural beauty.

Desire for high-quality and unique products: Stapleton Badger Co.’s B2C customers may value high-quality and unique products that stand out from mass-produced and generic items. They may be willing to pay a premium for products that are well-crafted, authentic, and distinctive.

Active on social media: Many of Stapleton Badger Co.’s B2C customers may be active on social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and Pinterest. They may use these platforms to discover new products and brands, and to share their experiences and recommendations with friends and family.

Psychographic Information

Consider psychographic information when creating a B2C customer profile. This includes personality traits, values and attitudes. Know what your audience wants and needs, then create messages that they’ll respond to and build loyalty to your brand.

Environmental and social consciousness: Many of Stapleton Badger Co.’s B2C customers may value environmental sustainability and social responsibility. They may be more likely to purchase products that are eco-friendly, locally sourced, and support local communities and artisans.

Appreciation for craftsmanship and authenticity: Stapleton Badger Co.’s B2C customers may appreciate the time, skill, and attention to detail that goes into handcrafted products. They may be more likely to purchase products that showcase the unique skills and techniques of local artisans, and that offer a sense of authenticity and heritage.

Nostalgia and sentimentality: Many of Stapleton Badger Co.’s B2C customers may have a sense of nostalgia and sentimentality for Wisconsin’s culture and heritage. They may be interested in purchasing products that evoke memories of childhood, family traditions, or experiences, and that help them feel connected to their roots.

Appreciation for quality and durability: Stapleton Badger Co.’s B2C customers may value high-quality and durable products that can withstand the test of time. They may be more likely to purchase products that are well made, with attention to detail and quality materials, and that offer good value for the price.

Bottom Line

Building a customer profile is a helpful resource for any company seeking to engage with its target customer. Acknowledging the demographic, behavioral and interest-based details of your customer base can result in the development of more productive marketing and sales efforts. Begin developing your own customer profiles by using the provided templates and examples.

How do I gather customer data for my profile?

You can gather customer data through surveys, customer feedback and analyzing customer behavior on your website and social media.

Can I have multiple customer profiles for different customer segments?

Yes, it’s common for businesses to have multiple customer profiles for different customer segments.

What are some common mistakes to avoid when creating a customer profile?

One common mistake is relying too heavily on assumptions instead of collecting and analyzing data. Another mistake is not regularly updating your customer profile as your target audience evolves.

How do I use a customer profile to improve marketing efforts?

When you’re sure of who your ideal customer is, you can tailor your messaging, content and offers to fit their desires and interests. This can lead to higher conversion rates and improved ROI on your marketing efforts.

What tools or resources are available to help create a customer profile?

There are many customer profiling tools available, ranging from free templates and worksheets to paid software solutions that help collect and analyze customer data. Some popular options include HubSpot , UpLead and ZoomInfo .

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Katherine Haan is a small business owner with nearly two decades of experience helping other business owners increase their incomes.

Customer Profiling in 10 Easy Steps [+ Templates]

Updated: April 15, 2024

Published: April 07, 2023

Customer profiling is an essential aspect of serving customers. But what is customer profiling?

As a small business owner, I’ve found that understanding customers' specific demographics, tendencies, and pain points is indispensable in meeting their needs. To market and sell to customers effectively, I believe you must put yourself in the customer’s shoes, and customer profiling helps you do that.

What exactly is the definition of customer profiling, you ask? I’ve got you. Read on for a full breakdown of customer profiling, what it is, why it’s essential, and a 10-step guide to creating your customer profiles.

Continue reading or jump ahead:

• What is a customer profile?

Why is customer profiling important?

Customer profiling benefits, customer profile data.

• How to Create a Customer Profile (10 Easy Steps)

Customer Profile Templates

Customer profile examples, customer profile.

A customer profile is a data-driven document that describes your current customers. Profiles are based on surveys that gather purchasing behaviors, pain points, psychographic data, and demographics. A customer profile can help you find segments of customers with commonality so you can target them in your sales and marketing campaigns.

If you don't create customer profiles, you risk marketing to a nondescript audience, wasting time, and losing deals. Take it from me, someone who learned that lesson the hard way.

Defining your ideal customer entails gathering and analyzing data about your customers' characteristics, behaviors, attributes, and needs. This information is used to create profiles representing your customer segments.

Sounds great, right? But what is customer profiling exactly? Let's take a look at a sample below.

Customer Profile Sample

Download the Free Customer Profile Templates

Creating a customer profile can be simple. You can create a customer profile just like this one using our free customer profile templates.

With our templates, you don't have to start from scratch. Just fill in the blanks and use the data from your service software or surveys to create a complete consumer profile.

I’ve found these customer profile templates to be a valuable, time-saving tool when creating customer profiles for my business. In my experience, it’s always been beneficial to take advantage of time-saving resources like this that allow me to focus more energy on delighting customers.

Before creating a customer profile, consider your target audience .

If your company is in the B2B space, you'll need to include more detailed information about your customers, such as industry size, regional location, etc.

If you‘re in the B2C space, you’ll want to create a customer profile focused on the individual.

Let's take a quick look at each element of the above template.

Products/Services Used

This section of the customer profile template describes which of your services your customers rely on and how they use them. You can also include other products or services customers use with your service.

If your product can be integrated with another service and customers are successfully meshing your service with another, add that to this section. This will help you better market to other companies or individuals later.

Demographics

Your customers‘ demographics are an essential piece of your customer profile. When writing this section, include your customer’s career, industry, location, and gender identity.

Sure, only some customers will fit your demographic mold, but having a general idea of basic customer information is extremely helpful for your company's bottom line.

I run a music backline rental company, and my customers range from High Schools to Weddings to Touring Bands. These different types of customers have various attributes, and I’ve found that outlining the demographics of each customer segment helps me better anticipate their needs.

Customer Benefits

Your customer profile should also include a list of benefits customers receive by using your product or service. How does your product or service provide value to your customers?

Think about how your product or service adds value for your customers and describe it in this section. The best way to answer this question is to ask your customer base. Compile and compare their answers and add a summary here.

Getting customer feedback requires convincing. I’ve personally discovered that offering an incentive such as a small discount or upgrade is a great way to encourage customers to deliver the feedback that is so valuable to your customer profiles.

Customer Pain Points

While surveying customers, I like to ask about their pain points, which, ideally, I can solve.

Be sure to list pain points that you can actually solve for your customers. You'll want to focus on these pain points in your customer profile.

8 Free Customer Profile Templates

Use these free templates to build out your customer profiles for your marketing, sales, and customer service teams.

• Long Customer Profile Templates
• Short Customer Profile Templates
• Designed Customer Profile Templates
• Simple Customer Profile Templates

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Finding the Ideal Customer Profile For Your Business

When I realized I could use my already existing customers as a model for my customer profiles, it was like a lightbulb going off over my head.

Rather than coming up with ideal, imaginary attributes for buyer personas, I found it much more straightforward and more realistic to analyze the characteristics of the customers I already work with and segment that data to uncover the customer profiles that were there all along.

While a buyer persona provides a fictionalized individual who represents your customers, a customer profile is rooted in the data and factual information of your customer base.

Everything you need to know about a group of customers is captured within this one description. For this reason, a customer profile comes first, and then you build a buyer persona from it.

Once you've defined these qualities of your target audience, you can segment your customer base into different customer profiles.

Customer Profiling

Customer profiling is the act of describing a customer or set of customers using demographics, psychographics, buying patterns, and other factors. In other words, it's identifying the characteristics of the people most likely to purchase your product or service and derive a lot of value from it.

When building a business, developing a go-to-market strategy, or giving your sales team direction, clearly describing your current customers is essential.

I’ve found that the customers most likely to purchase from me in the future are often quite similar to customers who I’ve worked with in the past. Coincidence? I think not.

Customer profiling helps you identify buyers likely to purchase from you, which is more valuable than targeting everyone everywhere. My experience has taught me that taking an informed, targeted approach to customer acquisition is far more effective than casting a wide net.

Trying to build something that solves 100% of the problems for 100% of the market is called “boiling the ocean.” You're “boiling the ocean” when your customer profile is too broad.

The irony is that targeting a broad audience solves only a few problems for only a few people. You end up spreading your product offering too thin and diluting your value across too many customers.

Customer profiles act like guard rails for product managers as they develop a new product, marketers as they craft positioning strategies, and salespeople as they search for potential customers.

Customer profiling is incredibly beneficial for all teams and your business members — let's look at the benefits in more detail below.

Creating customer profiles is crucial for taking your business to the next level. 66% of customers expect companies to understand their needs; customer profiling helps you do that.

A properly executed customer profiling strategy has far-reaching benefits across your entire organization. Read on to discover the many benefits of customer profiling.

It helps all departments become more efficient.

The benefits of customer profiling are impactful across your entire company. Each department in your company will use your customer profiles differently, but they will improve the bottom line.

• Marketing: Understanding the client is vital to creating engaging advertisements or emails for potential prospects and current clients. Marketers use customer profiles to customize messaging to most effectively speak to customer needs.
• Sales : With a customer profile in hand, your sales team will be able to highlight customer pain points and help better sell your product or service as the solution to their problems. Your sales team may even use the customer profile to find ways to create connections with current and future clients.
• Support: The customer profile contains all the necessary information your customer service team will need to assist clients in need. It can act as a record of queries, complaints, and previously tried solutions. This will help save time for your customer service team and keep everyone involved from becoming frustrated.

It allows you to identify better-fit prospects.

By knowing who benefits from your products the most, your organization can find better prospects and increase close rates.

If you're part of the service team, this might not mean much to you. But remember: A better-fit prospect is a happier customer down the line.

It lowers customer acquisition cost.

Customer acquisition cost (CAC) is the money you spend on marketing and sales campaigns to attract a single customer. Implementing customer profiling allows you to focus your efforts on people who are more likely to become customers, which brings customer acquisition costs down in the long run.

I’ve personally discovered this to be true when running social media ads for my business. A well-defined customer profile meant I could target the right people online and lower my ad spend.

It empowers you to serve customers better.

Knowing your customers is critical to serving them better. I found this accurate, having worked on the Support Team at HubSpot at the beginning of my career. We always kept detailed notes on each customer, including the issues they had in the past and their needs/goals. Armed with this information, I was much better equipped to meet customers where they were and guide them to success.

By documenting customer pain points, attributes, and characteristics, you can deliver a superior customer service experience before they ever request help.

You can predict issues before they arise, provide practical self-help resources, and better align with their needs if they reach out to your service team.

It reduces customer churn.

Customer churn refers to losing customers. We can all agree we want to keep that number as low as possible!

By creating strong customer profiles from the start, you can attract and serve customers who actually want to use your product or service — reducing customer churn in both the short and long term.

Now that you know the benefits of customer profiling, which data should you gather for your customer profiles?

Let's take a look.

A refined customer profile can help you find and attract more people likely to buy your product, develop a stronger relationship with your customers, build more impactful features, and put you on a better trajectory for market dominance.

It’s clear that customer profiling is valuable and effective, but how do you start? It’s easy to feel overwhelmed with so much customer data at your fingertips, but fret not; I’ve got you covered.

Below are the four different types of customer profile data you should be gathering:

Demographic

Demographic data are the concrete characteristics of a customer and can be used to understand consumer behavior, albeit broadly.

Demographics include the following traits (and more):

• Education level.
• Family status.

If you're in the B2B space, consider attributes such as company size, industry, and other organizational characteristics.

For example, my music backline rental business is technically B2B, and my customer demographics are segmented by Events such as Weddings/Bar Mitzvahs/Graduations, Music Festivals, and Touring Artists who can’t travel or fly with all their gear. Each type of customer has different needs, and understanding customer segments helps me anticipate and meet them.

Psychographic

Demographics alone aren‘t enough to understand how, when, and why people make purchasing decisions, and that’s where psychographics come in.

These factors relate to the attitudes and psychological makeup of a customer and may include:

Psychographics help you understand the buying journey and even the customer journey after they've already purchased from you. Psychographic segmentation in email marketing can raise open rates by up to 30% and increase conversion rates by an average of 25%

While psychographics relate to psychological attributes, behavioral segments look at how that's manifested in action.

You may consider segmenting by:

• Engagement.
• Readiness to buy.
• Purchasing history.
• Product usage.
• Satisfaction.
• Loyalty or account age.
• Attention required.

Segments based on behavioral traits are some of the most valuable in customer support. It can help service teams find insights about customer interaction and how these trends manifest into recurring revenue and satisfaction rates.

And once those things are measured, they can be improved.

Geographical factors are relevant when location affects how customers interact with a brand or receive their products.

Here are popular ways to segment based on geography:

Gaining insights based on geography can help your organization think through logistics, support implementation, and marketing.

The relevance of Geographical data varies depending on the type of business you run. In my experience running a music backline rental company, geographic data is hugely relevant because I can only serve customers within a certain radius of where my gear is located.

However, if you run a software business or sell products online, geographical data has a different level of relevance. Regardless, knowing where your customers are is helpful in understanding more about them and their needs.

Once you have this data, you can profile customers based on specific types or “segments.”

Segments help you unearth trends in satisfaction, churn, and lifetime value that help you understand more about your ideal customer profiles.

How to Create a Customer Profile

• Use customer profile templates.
• Choose your customer profiling software.
• Dig into demographics.
• Collect customer feedback.
• Review your customer journey map.
• Focus on the problem that your business is trying to solve.
• Examine contextual details.
• Understand your industry.
• Build personas.
• Analyze and iterate on customer personas.

1. Use customer profile templates.

You can shorten the customer profiling process by downloading and using pre-made templates .

You won‘t have to develop different sections for your customer profiles. Instead, you’ll have them pre-written for you. The only thing you have to do is fill in the blanks.

We go into more detail about what you‘ll find in these templates later in the post. But if you can’t wait (we don't blame you), download them now and follow along as we cover the rest of the steps.

Featured Resource: Customer Profile Templates

Download Your Free Templates Here

2. Choose your customer profiling software.

Once you start creating customer profiles, you'll need several types of software.

Remember, you must collect data from your current customer base to create effective and accurate profiles.

Let‘s go over the tools you’ll need.

If you don't have one already, you should start using a CRM to keep track of contact data. Your CRM is going to be the foundation of your customer profiling operation. Companies that use a CRM see an average ROI of $8.71 from money spent on the software.

A CRM allows you to collect all the essential information you need about your customers, such as their name, business name, location, business type, and more.

Are you looking for a great, easy-to-use, free CRM trusted by thousands and thousands of businesses? We’ve got you covered:

Get started with the HubSpot CRM platform for free and track contact data now.

Customer Feedback Software

The next most important piece of software you need is a survey tool that will help you collect additional data about your customers — data you won't necessarily have stored in your CRM.

After choosing a survey tool, you should get familiar with running questionnaires and designing questions that get you the answers you need.

I’ve found that customer feedback is indispensable in discovering what customers are happy with and where they see room for improvement.

“Customers often know more about your products than you do. Use them as a source of inspiration and ideas for product development.”― David J. Greer.

I like this quote from author David J. Greer because it highlights that the customer is king. Customers are the ones who use and benefit from your products, so who better to turn to for inspiration on how to satisfy their needs better?

Hot tip : HubSpot's customer feedback software can help you set up effective surveys, and the results will be stored right within the CRM.

Analytics Software

While analytics software may seem like something only a marketing team needs, it's critical for your customer profiling efforts.

It will help you understand the content your prospects most respond to, and it will unearth the types of customers who are visiting certain product pages on your website.

“A good place to start is with listening projects, where customer data and analytics are used to find the voice of the customer and identify where they are satisfied and dissatisfied.” - Jenny Sussin .

I’m a big fan of this quote from Jenny Sussin because it describes how the customer profile already exists, and you can sift through the data to uncover it.

Pro tip: HubSpot‘s analytics software keeps all of your customer interaction and engagement data in one convenient interface. And it’s connected to your CRM, too.

3. Dig into demographics.

You've got the customer profile templates and the software you need to start account profiling.

To define your customer profile, start by examining external demographics. Then, dive deeper into needs and look at your company's offering.

Here are some external attributes you can use to define your customer profile:

• What market does your product best serve?
• What specific vertical do they operate in?
• What is their annual revenue?
• How many employees do they have?
• Where are these companies located?

4. Collect customer feedback.

After detailing the demographic landscape, it‘s time to dive deeper into gathering customer feedback. It’s easy to want to rely solely on the demographic data you get from your CRM for customer profiling. However, truly knowing your customers goes beyond the data in your CRM and necessitates engaging with them directly.

You need to meet your customers to understand what they‘re like. Accordingly, customer surveys and interviews are the best resources to build your customer profiles. Through customer interviews, you can speak with customers face-to-face, which enriches real human connections and allows you to interpret non-verbal cues in real time. This type of direct interaction helps uncover valuable information that raw data simply can’t show.

If you can‘t reach a specific group of customers face-to-face, consider setting up a phone or video call. While it’s less engaging than an in-person interaction, it's still an effective way of reaching your target audience.

If your customers are willing to schedule a call with you, you know they‘re loyal users and are worth the time investment. The more attention you pay to these customers, the more you’ll have in the future.

85% of people say they’ll likely provide feedback when they’ve had a good experience ( SurveyMonkey ), so if you treat your customers right, they will likely help you out in return.

In my experience, nothing beats building relationships with customers and getting to know them in real life. In my line of work, I spend a lot of face-to-face time with customers, which is invaluable in understanding their needs and the products/services they expect from me.

5. Review your customer journey map.

As you begin examining your customer profile data, you should contextualize it using your customer journey map.

A customer journey map is a document that outlines every touchpoint a customer must pass through to achieve a goal with your company.

While these take time to complete, they paint a detailed picture of who's buying your products and interacting with your brand.

However, you don‘t need to complete a customer journey map to create a customer profile. Simply considering the customer’s journey will help you understand who you're trying to reach.

Interacting with prospects through live chat is also a clever tactic to grasp how they progress through the customer journey. This way, you encourage consumers who are interested in your company to engage with you directly.  At the same time, you get concrete evidence regarding their pain points and what makes them see your business as a potential solution.   

By understanding their needs, challenges, and goals, you'll develop a stronger sense of what your customers want from your business. You can even take this one step further by interviewing customers about each stop on your map.

When creating HubSpot's customer journey map, we asked users how they felt about specific points in the customer experience. Then, we charted these stories on the map to see how customer perceptions changed.

This gave us a good idea of what our customers liked and didn't like about our products.

6. Focus on the problem that your business is trying to solve.

It’s easy to get lost with such a wealth of data. If you find yourself overwhelmed, return the focus to the problem your business is trying to solve.

Identify the type of people who face this challenge. Take a close look at your current users and their behavior.

The common denominator between these approaches is people. It doesn't matter if you only have a few customers or are well on your way to 10,000. You need to understand who your customers are and the problems they are having to solve for them best.

7. Examine contextual details.

Once you've defined the external factors that describe your customer profile, it’s time to dig deeper into contextual details.

For example, if I‘m running a SaaS company, I’d want to understand the following things about my customer:

• How big is their team?
• What are the biggest challenges they face?
• What technology are they using?
• What are their goals for the next three months?
• What are their goals for the year?
• How do they assess problems?
• What does a perfect world look like for them?
• What impact does the specific problem have on their team?
• How are they trying to solve the problem today?

I could find the answers with concrete data from customer service software. I would look into my knowledge base and customer portals to identify common questions and issues. 

You should fully grasp your potential customers' general makeup and goals based on these external factors and contextual details.

The final step is to look internally to see how you can help them based on all this information.

Below are some key questions to answer when completing your customer profile:

• What value can you provide these customers? (Save them money or time, grow revenue, etc.)
• Can you solve their key pain points?
• What are the features that differentiate you from competitors or a homegrown process?
• How does your solution fit into their short- and long-term goals?

8. Understand your industry.

One significant contextual detail you should consider is where your brand falls compared to others in the industry.

You should know how your customers perceive your brand and which companies you're competing with for their attention. This should give you a good idea of the type of customer you want to attract and retain.

Understanding your industry also helps you define your brand identity. If you're going to stand out, you need to find a way to differentiate your product and services.

If you know which marketing strategies your customers already respond to, you can mirror your competitor's successful techniques for introducing and educating customers about a new product or feature.

My experience has taught me that understanding my niche is vital. There are plenty of music backline rental providers on the market, many of which are larger and more established than I am. However, I differentiated myself as an individual who provides white-glove, personalized service, compared to larger providers who can’t offer a personal touch.

9. Build personas.

Remember that you're serving people with actual personalities, feelings, and needs.

Once you've identified the attributes for your customer profile, the next step is to identify the individuals within the company that you want to reach .

This will be helpful when trying to establish a relationship with the account and understand who the decision-makers and influencers are.

Here are some key things to uncover about the people in your customer profile:

• Education level
• Income level
• How will they use your product/service?
• What marketing channels can you use to reach them?
• What are the key responsibilities of their role?
• What role do they play in the decision-making process?

If you need a tool to help you build, visualize, and share your personas, try HubSpot's Make My Persona tool.

“Personas are often met with opposition because they're a lot of work to assemble, and once assembled, they are living, evolving things that must be maintained. Like people, buyer personas change over time with the market, the times, the ebbs and flows of products and services.” - Justin Gray .

10. Analyze and iterate on customer personas.

A clearly defined customer persona is a cornerstone of business growth. The definition of your customer persona will act as a guide when informing what products or features to build, what channels to use in a marketing campaign, and much more.

Without it, you risk offering a product or service that doesn‘t meet any potential customers’ specific needs. Or you end up marketing to prospects in a way that doesn't resonate with their understanding of the problem.

Your goal should be to sync up your business strategy with your customer personas to incorporate everything from your features to your go-to-market approach, ensuring it aligns with your customer's needs.

As you build your customer profile, gather the external factors, qualify the contextual details, and develop a deep understanding of how your business adds value to each customer type.

But remember: You don't have to start from scratch. You can use templates to compile your consumer profiles.

B2B vs. B2C Customer Profiles

B2B and B2C companies both benefit from the use of customer profiles. However, they differ in their focus and approach to the matter.

B2C companies cater to a much more comprehensive demographic range than B2B and will focus on demographic data such as age, marital status, location, income, etc.

Meanwhile, B2B businesses need to think about two categories. Firstly, they must consider firmographic data such as company size, budget, and industry.

B2B businesses must consider individuals as well. B2B teams should make customer profiles for both users and decision-makers at their target organizations.

Take me, for example. When renting out backline gear for a concert, the person who coordinates and purchases the rental (perhaps a tour manager) and the musician who uses the gear are typically two different people. Still, I must understand both individuals to ensure a successful job overall.

We've created customer profile templates you can use to walk you through these steps. You can download them here .

Download your free templates now.

Inside this kit, you'll find:

• A short customer profile template. This one-page template helps you lay out all the basic information about your customer. It gives you space to list your customer's demographics, pain points, retention tactics, and preferred products and services.
• A long customer profile template. This two-page template gives you more space to define your customer profile. It‘s ideal for B2B account profiles. You can list external attributes, such as the customer’s industry and internal attributes.
• A colorful customer profile template. This template is ideal for B2C industries where customers interact face-to-face with your staff members. You have space to list user behaviors, frustrating interactions, and customer communication notes.
• A corporate customer profile template. This template allows you to list a professional overview of your ideal customer, as well as challenges, benefits, and restraints. We recommend this template for more corporate environments due to its color palette.
• A simple customer profile template. This template lets you list your ideal customer's background, decision-making process, product preferences, wants, goals, and behaviors in easy-to-scan boxes.
• A modern customer profile template. In this template, you have space to list your target customer‘s company goals, team challenges, and retention tips. We recommend this template for B2B companies because you’ll be profiling an entire organization.
• A buyer's journey customer profile template. This template is unique because it gives you space to outline your ideal customer's discovery story — that is, how they found you and what their research process was like. You can also list their goals and pain points.
• A segmented customer profile template. If you'd like to create different segments as you profile your customers, this is the template for you. It lets you list critical information such as goals, benefits, and product constraints in a chart.

Do you need help with what your customer profile can look like?

Below, we list alternative consumer profile examples with methods that you can use to list your ideal consumer's attributes.

If you need help figuring out where to start, look at these top customer profile examples for a granular and overarching overview of your customers.

1. Scorecard

Customer profiles can vary depending on your company's needs and preferences. Some companies format customer profiles as a scoring system to determine whether a prospect fits the business.

The above example uses the BANT framework. The BANT framework helps salespeople assess prospects and gives them a score for each criterion ranging from zero to two.

If the total score meets a preset benchmark, that’s a green light for sales to reach out.

2. Segmentation

A segmented customer profile recognizes not every prospect is the same. What one customer needs from your business may differ from the next, and your customer profile definition is mutable. Each customer type is broken down by demographics, core values, and preferred communication channels in a segmented customer profile.

It includes a summary describing how the marketing team should advertise to these individuals.

With this information readily available, your marketing team can work alongside customer service to create effective campaigns that resonate with each segment of your customer base.

3. Basic Information

Download this Template

A basic information customer profile is just that — basic. This customer profile, available in our free customer profile templates , cuts right to the point.

It lists the fundamental information we need about each customer type, including background data, demographics, and pain points. I’ve found that the basic customer profile format is the easiest to get up and running, and you can always expand to a more involved customer profile type as you grow.

Download a free, editable copy of this customer profile example .

4. Buyer Persona

To construct a buyer persona customer profile, you must survey your current clients to understand their general buying personality.

It's important to note that the buyer persona usually comes after you know your customer profile.

Nonetheless, many buyer persona builders can get you thinking critically about your ideal customer by asking valuable qualitative questions.

Buyer personas can greatly enhance marketing efforts. Brands that utilize buyer personas have seen a 100% increase in web page visits , a 900% increase in visit duration, a 111% increase in email open rates, and a 171% increase in marketing-generated revenue.

Use HubSpot's Make My Persona tool as a starting point for mapping and profiling your customers.

5. Demographics, Psychographics, and Behaviors

A customer profile can be as detailed as you need it to be.

Many marketers find that the more they know about their audience, the better their chance of engaging with a prospect and making a sale.

Gathering demographics, psychographics, and behaviors in one document gives you an overview of your most profitable customers.

Write your answers in bullet points or paragraph format, and you‘ll be able to understand your customers’ purchasing behaviors better.

Customer Profiling Will Improve Your Service Experience

By creating thorough customer profiles, you can target better customers in your sales and marketing campaigns, reducing customer churn and resulting in happier customers later down the line.

The more detailed your profile, the more value you can extract from it, making your marketing, sales, and service experiences more effective and valuable for your customers.

Editor's note: This post was originally published in December 2018 and has been updated for comprehensiveness.

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What are customer profiles a complete guide, examples, and free templates.

Leverage data to build rich customer profiles so you can provide more relevant, personalized experiences.

By David Galic, Contributing Writer

Last updated June 11, 2024

A personalized experience based on a customer profile: A music app that understands your listening habits and recommends similar artists or playlists you might like.

An exceptional personalized experience based on a customer profile: A music app that uses your data from the past year to create a (fictional) music festival lineup based on the artists you listen to the most, names the event after you, and sends you a shareable festival poster.

The Zendesk Customer Experience Trends Report 2023 shows that 59 percent of consumers want businesses to use the data they collect about them to personalize their experience. How can you use data to give your customers that extra push of customization that takes their experience from good to great? By creating a data-rich customer profile of your target audience.

Follow our guide on how to develop customer profiles so you can start providing hyper-personalized experiences for your customers and boost loyalty and retention

• Customer profile definition
• Customer profiling definition

Benefits of customer profiling

Types of customer profiling.

• Methods of customer profiling
• How to create a customer profile

Customer profile templates

• Target customer profile examples

9 tools you can use to collect customer profile data

What data is necessary to create an ideal customer profile, what is a customer profile.

A customer profile is a document that contains key information about your ideal customer. You can use it as a strategy guide to creating personalized experiences.

Each profile should contain customer pain points, interests, buying patterns, demographic data, motivations, interaction history, and more. These details can help your business understand how consumers engage with your brand and products, so you can customize marketing campaigns, tailor messaging and conversations, and provide personalized support.

Remember to be transparent with customers about what data you gather and how you plan to use and store it. Always allow your customers to decide whether or not they want to share their information.

B2B vs. B2C customer profiles

There are two business types of customer profiles: Business-to-business (B2B) and Business-to-customer (B2C). The data you collect for client profiles will vary depending on whether you’re a B2B or B2C company.

• B2B customer profiles map the typical business that buys your goods or services, including the company’s size, industry, location, revenue, and target audience. The profile may also cover the decision-makers at the client company.
• B2C customer profiles focus on individual customers and feature demographic data like age, gender, and lifestyle preferences.

What is customer profiling?

Customer profiling is the process companies use to create customer profiles. The goal is to identify, describe, and segment customers based on numerous characteristics and variables, based on their personalities, buying habits, and behaviors. Customer profiling mainly focuses on your ideal customer’s pain points and brand interactions.

With customer profiling, you’ll have the data you need to create the tailored experiences consumers want. The data allows you to see the customer’s motivations and deterrents behind their purchases and provides insights into what customers value most when interacting with brands. Here are some benefits your business can expect from customer profiling.

Improve efficiency by reducing silos

The road to accomplishing deeper personalization often gets blocked by siloed data . Having a system that unifies data from across departments allows teams to find the customer data they need quickly and efficiently. With a single customer view, agents can get the context required to create a personalized experience without switching between systems.

Drive loyalty through personalized and proactive experiences

Offering proactive and personalized experiences is essential to building trust and fostering customer loyalty. According to our CX Trends Report, 60 percent of customers say they can tell when they receive personalized recommendations from a brand, and they find them valuable. When customers feel like a brand understands them, they’re more likely to stick around. Leverage the data to engage with your customers and form a deeper connection with them.

Increase cross-team collaboration

Every team within your business has valuable insights that can enhance your customer profiles. Increasing cross-team collaboration enables you to create targeted marketing campaigns and deliver personalized support for great customer experiences. A system like the Zendesk Agent Workspace helps improve collaboration across teams by consolidating real-time information into a single view that each department can see.

Boost sales

Customer profiling shows you which groups to target. This helps your sales team identify high-quality leads and customize their approach. As a result, they may close more deals.

Say a customer profile reveals there’s interest in a product feature that your company now offers. You can customize your messaging when reaching out to the customer and start the process of closing a sale.

Gather insights to make data-informed decisions

Collecting relevant data that may be scattered across systems and consolidating it—with help from a customer data platform (CDP) —can provide valuable insights to help you make informed decisions. Marketing teams may have crucial information that could help close a sale, while customer support may have key data for a more personalized marketing campaign.

The customer profile you want to create helps determine the types of data you need to collect. Here are common ways to segment your customers to create the best customer profile possible.

Demographic

Demographic profiling defines your customers by who they are. This type of segmentation groups customers by personal characteristics like:

Marital status

Marketing and support teams often use this information to create personalized messaging and to identify communication channel preferences.

Psychographic

Psychographic profiling defines why customers buy your products or services. This type of customer profiling segments customers by:

Personality traits

Values and beliefs

Political affiliation

Though this type of data is subjective and typically the most difficult to identify, it can be the most valuable information in the customer profile. It helps your business understand the thoughts and motivations behind purchases and how customers feel about your brand (also known as customer perception ).

Behavioral profiling defines how your customers interact with your brand. This type of segmentation groups customers by behavioral tendencies like:

Buying patterns

Spending habits

Brand interactions

How they use your products or services

Types of feedback

Businesses can use behavioral data to identify upsell and cross-sell opportunities, improve the overall customer experience , and make personalized recommendations.

Geographic profiling defines your customers by their physical location and where they shop. This type of profiling separates customers by personal characteristics, such as:

Physical location

The factors of geographic data—like climate, cultural influences, delivery options, and rural vs. urban environmental needs and preferences—impact customer influences and shopping habits.

3 methods of customer profiling

Customer profiling will group customers with similar traits, characteristics, behaviors, motivations, or decision-making styles. You can approach customer profiling in three ways: psychographic, typology, and characteristic.

Psychographic method

The psychographic method uses the consumer’s qualities, traits, and lifestyles to define market segments. It covers:

• Demographics: age, location, gender, marital status, ethnicity, income, internet access, job title, homeownership, and education level
• Lifestyle: hobbies, activities, interests, values, attitudes, opinions, and talking points (politics, religion, human rights, etc.)

Typology method

The typology method focuses on what drives the consumer to interact with you. It defines the customer by their motivation type:

• Need-based: customers who only buy what they need
• Deal-based: customers who look for discounts and care most about price points
• Impulse-based: emotionally driven customers who spend based on feelings and impulses
• Loyalty-based: customers who consistently buy from you and promote you to people in their network

Brand characteristics method

The characteristics method focuses on the traits that influence purchases. Some common traits for this approach consist of:

• Convenience: You make it fast and easy for buyers to do business with you.
• Personalization: You’re able to appeal to consumers on a personal level. They recognize that you tailor experiences to their specific wants and needs.
• Belonging: Customers feel like they’re part of a community. They connect with other customers, pay close attention to reviews, and regularly interact with you.

How to create a customer profile in 5 steps

The most successful profiles contain more than just basic details—they should include a wide range of data that showcases how your target audience interacts with your brand. To build a data-rich customer profile, you need customer database tools to track customer information. Here’s how to create a customer profile in five steps.

1. Use customer profile templates

Creating a customer profile on your own can be a time-consuming process. Rather than starting from scratch, use pre-built customer profile templates to plug in your customer data and build a profile quickly and easily.

2. Identify customer pain points and solutions

The next step is to identify the most common customer pain points and how your product or service solves them. Many customers may share similar pain points, and customer profiles can help you find the connective tissue.

3. Determine common demographics and behaviors

That leads to the third step: determining shared demographics and behaviors. Customer profiling data can help you find similarities between certain customer groups, like characteristics, locations, or motivations. This enables you to better target customers and personalize outreach , marketing, and customer service communications.

4. Gather and analyze customer feedback

Gathering and analyzing feedback can help you paint a picture of what your ideal customer looks like across different customer groups. You can collect feedback via:

• Customer satisfaction surveys (CSAT, Net Promoter Score®, etc.)

Customer interactions and interviews

Focus groups

Social listening

Online reviews

Community forums

Once you capture this quantitative and qualitative customer profile data, you can track and analyze it with a customer relationship management (CRM) system .

5. Find the right software to integrate data across tools and systems

Use your CRM to continuously refine your customer groups and integrate the data across tools and systems. The right CRM software will help you collect data from your current customers—like name, location, history, and information from the entire customer journey —to create the most accurate profiles.

Our customer profile templates make it easy to get started. With your free download, you’ll get five fill-in-the-blank PDFs:

• Basic customer profile template: This easily scannable template provides—you guessed it—the basic information you need at a glance.
• Comprehensive customer profile template: This template lets you deep-dive into the customer details, with plenty of blank space to add relevant customer data.
• B2B customer profile template: This customer profile template gives you space to add the important details for your ideal B2B customers, including business size, revenue, structure, strengths, weaknesses, location, budget, pain points, and solutions.
• B2C customer profile template: This template has everything you need to create a profile for B2C customers, including their professional overview, the products they use, the benefits and challenges of product use, pain points, and a customer summary.
• Ideal customer profile (ICP) scorecard template: The ICP scorecard template allows you to use a scoring system to assess the potential fit of a customer. It includes categories for need, timeline, budget, and decision-making power.

Free customer profile templates

Get to know your ideal customer base better with our free customer profile templates.

Customer profile examples

Here’s a sneak peek at a few of our ideal customer profile template examples. Download now to get started.

Basic customer profile

The basic customer profile includes demographics, the products or services used, pain points, and solutions.

Download free customer profile templates

Ideal customer profile (ICP) scorecard

As mentioned earlier, an ICP scorecard method helps you evaluate your potential customers using a simple scoring system. Scores range from zero to two based on how well they fit the assigned criteria. If a customer’s score exceeds your threshold, odds are they’re an ideal customer.

Zendesk Agent Workspace customer profile

The Zendesk Agent Workspace customer profile shows you how a customer profile looks when pulling customer data into a single unified view. This marketing profile example lets you see contact information, activity history, ticket information, additional customer details, and a full conversation history.

Consumers give companies their data in dozens of ways every day. Potential customers can browse your website, engage with your brand over social media, call customer service, and so on. Each interaction allows you to capture customer details, but that information is only useful if you have access to it, and you will ideally have access to all of it in one place.

Here are a few tools to help you collect customer data to help you understand buyers better.

Lead capture forms and surveys collect the data that make up the building blocks of your ideal customer profile. They can also give insights into customer loyalty and engagement.

1. Lead capture forms

Embed a sign-up form into your website and ask site visitors to fill it out with their contact information. In exchange, they’ll get access to something, like a special discount code or a white paper. You’ll learn which products or subjects each visitor is interested in while gathering basic information about them.

Send surveys to customers who used your product or service (and/or interacted with your support team) to understand what they like and dislike about your offerings. You can use that valuable customer feedback to make improvements and build stronger customer relationships .

Communication platforms

Information collected from communication platforms can show you how consumers interact with your brand.

3. Email marketing platforms

Capture data from your customer email interactions to inform your targeted marketing profiling. For example, if a client clicks on an email about a specific product they haven’t purchased yet, it might be a sign that it’s time for an upsell. Email marketing platforms can also integrate with your CRM software to give you an overall picture of a customer’s engagement level with your brand.

4. Social media

Are your customers following your social media channels? If not, think about how to attract their attention. Have they liked a lot of your Facebook posts or shared them with their friends? Do they regularly respond to your business’s tweets ? If so, you know they’re loyal customers. All this information can be merged into a CRM for your marketing team to use.

5. Customer support channels

Meet customers where they are and deliver streamlined support with an omnichannel experience . You can start a conversation on one channel and resume it at a later time—on a different channel—without losing context. This provides a flexible, customer-centric communication method that records data and conversation history.

Web analytics

Web analytics illustrate how your customers engage with your business online.

6. Google Analytics

This tool provides deep insights into customer interactions on your website, so you can identify what’s working and what’s not. You can see the most popular pages, learn about your audience’s interests, and sense how visitors engage with your site.

7. Customer accounts

A customer’s registered account on your website or company platform offers basic information (such as name, email, or preferred method of communication). If a customer is logged in to their account while browsing your website, you’ll be able to see how they interact with each of your products.

Core business tools

Use these tools to facilitate customer interactions, learn about their purchases, and gather and house consumer details.

8. Ecommerce and billing platforms

Tools like Shopify collect information about how a customer makes purchase decisions. They also obtain key data like what your customer purchased, how much money they spent, and how frequently they place orders.

9. Customer service software

Open, flexible customer service software allows you to integrate all your data from different sources into your CRM, giving you a complete picture of the customer. When you have the information you need in one place, you’ll better understand how you can build great customer experiences .

Even if you use these types of tools, you don’t necessarily need to integrate every data point into a CRM at once. You can choose what to include based on your company’s objectives. Regardless of what information you obtain, the centralization of data will help your team provide a consistent customer experience.

Here are three types of data needed to create an ideal customer profile.

Customer marketing data

Marketing teams can use a consumer profile to create an effective marketing campaign with tailored messaging, predict customer behaviors , and identify buying patterns and trends.

For example, if your marketing team knows which products your customer previously returned, they probably won’t send more information about those specific items. Similarly, a target market profile may tell your marketing team if a customer opens an email about a particular product dozens of times. If they clicked on links and never made a purchase, it’s probably a sign the customer wants more information about the item.

Customer sales data

Sales teams can use the data from customer profiles to determine how to approach a customer. The information in the consumer profile may help a sales rep get a clear picture of whether a client might be open to an upgrade or whether they’re an unlikely candidate for an upsell. Customer profiles can also enable sales reps to find better prospects and close more deals.

With Zendesk, you can customize integrations to capture customer activity (like when they place an order) and customer qualities (like clothing size) that give sales reps more context, so they can better understand the customer.

Customer support data

Support teams can use customer profiles to provide personalized customer service . Whenever a consumer reaches out for help, the details of their interaction get recorded. This gives agents valuable information about the customer so they can personalize each experience. For instance, if your agents can see which solutions a customer has already tried, it will improve the quality of support they provide.

Everyone at the company is responsible for creating a positive brand experience, so a data-rich customer profile can make life easier for every department.

Use your customer profile data to personalize experiences

Building data-rich profiles will help you improve your marketing, sales, and support by anticipating what customers need. When you have all that data, you can start strategizing how to approach things next.

A comprehensive profile helps you know who your customers are and what they want before they’ve even asked a question. Your customers will likely be more loyal to your brand because they know you can solve their problems. These positive experiences should lead to reduced customer churn .

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What is an ideal customer profile (ICP)? Template and examples

You probably know already that you can’t build a product to satisfy everyone. That’s why you need to zoom in and aim to serve the unique needs of a specific group of potential users.

However, that’s easier said than done. Discovering the right type of user to target is challenging, and the common wisdom of focusing on a niche first often does more harm than good.

In this guide, we’ll show you how to identify your ideal customer profile.

What is an ideal customer profile?

An ideal customer profile describes a hypothetical user that is most likely to benefit from your product. Identifying your ideal customer profile helps you focus your team’s efforts on features and initiatives that will serve those users who are most likely to spend money on and return to your product.

Put simply, an ideal customer is a perfect match for your product and business. It’s the type of user that:

• Gets the most value out of your offering
• Is highly engaged with your product
• Is easy to sell to
• Refers your product to their colleagues without prompting

For these reasons, identifying and doubling down on your ideal customer profile should be one of your primary and foremost goals when launching an early-stage product.

How to identify your ideal customers

That sounds great, but how do you identify your ideal customers? Start with these three steps:

• Develop a hypothesis
• Analyze user behavior
• Understand those users

1. Develop a hypothesis

It’s almost impossible to identify ideal customers upfront; they are usually discovered over time (and it takes months, if not more) and they often turn out to be a completely different type of user than you initially expected.

But you have to start with somewhere, right?

Start with creating a hypothesis about who your ideal customer might be and why. After all, you are building a product to solve someone’s pain points.

Keep your hypothesis loose. Narrowing down your target persona too much will only constrain your thinking and observation in the long run.

Although the common tip is to focus on a niche, I don’t believe this is a good early tactic because you don’t have enough information to make a sound decision.

Over 200k developers and product managers use LogRocket to create better digital experiences

Instead of hypothesizing something overly specific — for example, “an overworked employee working 80 hours a week in the consulting industry,” — try something more broad — for example, “a corporate professional.”

Again, it might be counterintuitive, but your goal in the early stage is to explore the market and discover your ideal customer profile. If you fixate too much on a specific niche, you might miss out on a bigger fish in the pond.

2. Analyze user behavior

So you hypothesized a target persona, built a product with specific use cases in mind, and launched it on the market.

Now you wait.

Discovering product-market fit and your ideal customer profile is like fishing. You prepare to catch a specific type of fish, throw the hook, and wait to see what bites. Often, the fish that bites the most isn’t the one you expected to catch in the first place.

Focus on pushing as many people through the product as possible (quantity over quality) and look for the top 1 percent of engaged users.

But, don’t jump the gun too early. You want to attract as many people as possible to use the product to get the most significant insights. Your top 1 percent out of 100 users might be a pure coincidence. Your top 1 percent out of 10,000 is probably something meaningful.

Don’t look at your top 20 percent percent, 10 percent, or 5 percent. Look for the most engaged 1 percent of the users. Your bait (product) attracts these people the most.

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3. Understand those users

The next step is to reach out to your 1 percent of users.

You want to understand as much as you can about them. Get rid of all your initial assumptions about your target persona. You’ll learn it in a bit.

During interviews, aim to discover the following insights:

• Why did they come to your product?
• How do they perceive the product? Do they think your app is an e-mail client, a to-do list, a communicator, a project management task, etc.?
• What pain point does it solve for them?
• If your product didn’t exist, what would they use instead? Why?

This will help you better understand your customers and provide insights into your product as a whole. For example, let’s say you tried to build a new async communicator and your ideal customers perceive it as an alternative to Gmail. There’s a big difference between making a chat app and a mail app.

Doubling down on your ideal customers

An increased understanding of your ideal customers will help you adjust your product roadmap to attract more customers. That should be your focus. If you can’t dominate the niche that already loves you, then you have no chance of winning the broader market.

There are two main things you should take care of:

Narrow down the focus

Nail your marketing and positioning.

In the beginning, you built a broad product to attract a wide number of users. Now it’s time to niche down.

Focus on what’s delivering the most value for your ideal customers. If your product has 10 features, but your top 1 percent of users only use three, then focus on these three.

Make these features more prominent, improve their functionality, and regularly talk to your top 1 percent of users to understand what they lack.

I’d even go as far as completely stripping the remaining features. Reducing the noise and complexity will help you in the long run.

While, initially, your goal was to attract as many users as possible, now you want to narrow down the focus to your ideal customer profile.

Ultimately, it’s better to get a hundred new customers who will love and refer to your product than a thousand random customers who’ll churn within a week.

Three tactics here include:

Positioning properly

Going where your ideal customers are, referring to the alternatives.

It doesn’t matter what you think your product is. What matters is what your customers think.

If you built a product management app, but your customers believe it’s more of a “personal task list,” hate to break it to you, but you unintentionally built a personal task list. Don’t go against the wind.

Learn how your ideal customers discovered your product and double down.

For example, you may spend 80 percent of your growth budget on paid ads, while your ideal customers come to your product mostly from your free YouTube video. Remember, you are no longer trying to attract the masses but, rather, a particular type of customer.

During interviews, you should ask your users what they would do if your product didn’t exist. Use that in your communication.

For example, if your product is a better alternative to Salesforce for some specific use case, then communicate it as such. Tailor the communication to address the pain points of your ideal customers.

Ideal customer profile template

To use this ideal customer profile template, begin by researching your existing customer base, analyzing user behavior, and conducting interviews with your most engaged users. Next, collect information about the demographics or firmographics, psychographics, behavioral traits, pain points and challenges, and goals and aspirations that define your ideal customers.

Use these insights to refine your ideal customer profile. Remember, your ICP is not static and should be updated periodically to reflect changes in your target market or business objectives.

To create your ideal customer profile (ICP), use the following template:

• Age, gender, location, education, income level (for B2C)
• Industry, company size, revenue (for B2B)
• Values, preferences, attitudes, interests, lifestyle
• Purchasing habits, preferred communication channels, product usage patterns
• The problems or issues your ideal customer faces that your product or service can address
• The objectives your ideal customer wants to achieve with your product or service

When it comes to building products, the advice to focus on a niche first often backfires.

While focusing on a niche is a good strategy, you must first discover that niche. And to discover that niche, you must first expose the product to a vast number of people. It’s close to impossible to “define” a proper niche upfront.

The better approach is to:

• Start with a loose hypothesis and target a broad group of users
• Identify the most engaged users you get
• Understand them better
• Make an informed and validated decision to niche down
• Win the niche

Once you win your first ideal customer group, then and only then should you expand further and target additional segments of users.

First, go broad, then niche down, and then expand.

Featured image source: IconScout

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