Customer profiling is about knowing who your customers are – I mean really knowing them.
It’s not just what they bought and how they found you (although that’s super important too). You need to dive deeper to really understand who they are and what makes them tick, so you learn what drives your customers in their purchasing behaviour. This can be broken down into four categories:
- Demographic – identify where possible their age range, gender, income, religion, education, family size, and occupation
- Geographic – don’t just think about where your customers physically live, but also consider where they commute to and which places they regularly visit
- Psychographic – depending on what your business offers, this may be trickier to define but think about their values, personalities, interests, attitudes, lifestyle choices, what their opinions are, and what motivates them
- Behavioural – look at their attitude towards brands and explore their decision-making and buying processes. Did the person who made the enquiry have the final decision to proceed? How often do they purchase from you, and how brand loyal are they?
So, what data sources are available to you, and how do you use them to find out who your customer is in any detail? Here are the top 3 that you should be regularly interrogating…
1. Customer database
If you’ve been in business for a while you should have some form of customer database, whether it’s a simple Excel spreadsheet or a more sophisticated CRM system. It doesn’t need to be anything fancy or expensive, but ideally you should be recording every single enquiry and converted sale.
As a minimum I suggest you want to record:
- Date of enquiry
- Name
- How they initially made contact (e.g. contact us form on your website, Facebook Messenger)
- How you followed up (call, email, Messenger etc)
- Was the follow up successful? (yes/no)
- Lead source (where did they come from – Google, social media, referral?)
- Lead type (more specific – if it was a referral, who made it – a friend, an existing customer? If it was social media, which channel?)
- Demographic (age range, profession, family etc – create a dropdown menu in your spreadsheet to ensure you don’t have different variants for the same answer)
- Meeting (did you have a face-to-face meeting with them – could be via Zoom – yes/no)
- Did you win the business? (yes/no)
- What did they buy?
- Notes (a place to record any other relevant information)
TOP TIP: In the yes/no columns, use 1 for yes and 0 for no. This makes it easier to quickly tally up your results.
Once you have set up your master spreadsheet with all historic information from all your previous enquiries and sales, you need to regularly analyse the data. This will show any patterns and you’ll start to paint a picture of who your customers are.
I strongly recommend you go a step further and add another column to show the value of each customer’s order. Then you can monitor the revenue you receive by channel and by audience demographic. If your business gets a high volume of repeat orders, you could go a step further and work out the lifetime value of each customer, so you can discover who your VIP customers are. Other metrics to consider calculating are: average spend per customer by channel, cost of acquisition, conversion rate.
TOP TIP: You may want to have a new sheet for each month or quarter, so you can compare results against previous periods.
2. Google Analytics
Google Analytics is one of the most widely used digital analytics software platforms available. Not only is it free (and who doesn’t love free stuff?) it allows you to analyse the behaviour of people that visit your website.
It’s like having a shop and asking your customers how they found you, watching which aisles they go down, and noting how long they spend looking at a particular product.
Google collects all sorts of useful information about your virtual visitors, so it’s a gold mine for businesses to tap into. It’s also really neatly organised into sections that cover audience, acquisition, and behaviour.
Some of the key information you should pay attention to includes:
- How they found your website – was it a direct hit from someone who typed in your website address, or did they follow a link on Facebook or a search engine, for example?
- What kind of device they used (mobile, tablet, desktop)
- What browser they used (such as Chrome, Safari, Firefox)
- Where they are located in the world
- How many pages they viewed and how long they spent on your site
- Their age and gender
- What actions they took on your site (links clicked, videos played etc)
- You can also set up ‘goals’ and ‘events’ so that Google Analytics will measure the conversions you want to track, e.g. the number of brochure downloads
You can use this information to see if there are different characteristics and behaviours between your website users and your customers.
However, not all businesses have access to this data. If you’re a franchisee, for example, you may not have your own website. In instances like this you will have to rely on other data sources to gather customer insights, such as your internal records and social media.
Social media audience insights
There is a plethora of information about your audience on social media platforms such as Facebook and Instagram. You can get insights on age range, location, gender, relationship status, employment and so on, as well as discovering their interests through the other types of pages they follow and the content they consume.
Using tools like Facebook Business Manager or Creator, you can really hone in on your audience and you can use the data to run paid advertising campaigns that are delivered specifically to the types of customer you’re looking to engage.
You should also cross-reference the social media analytics with the audience data from Google – does it match up?
Why is this data important?
Once you’ve collated all this data, it is crucial that you work out which channels are driving the most enquiries and sales, and which types of customers you’re attracting and converting.
Piece it all together by paying close attention to patterns and similarities in the data you’ve pulled from all these sources. Take it one step further and create customer personas that will categorise your key customers by type, and create a visual aid to help you focus on who your customers are. Read my blog on Why customer profiling is important for more detail about how to do this effectively.
Don’t forget to look back at how much you’ve spent on creating your marketing collateral and then calculate the return on investment so you can make more informed decisions about your future marketing activity.
What data do you have available to you? Do you understand it? Ask me how I can help you with customer acquisition by implementing my Customer co-ordinates strategy.
