Great marketing campaigns are created for their target audience. Designers choose the layout, images, and graphics to resonate with their audience. Copy writers strategically select what is said and how it is said to speak that particular group of people. Even what channels are used to deliver the message, whether digital or traditional, are determined based on the target audience. Needless to say, it’s critical to know who you are targeting, but do you really know who your audience is or are you guessing?
If you guess who your target audience is and you’re wrong, it can be a very costly mistake. All the time, resources, and money spent to create a beautiful campaign will be wasted because it’s not speaking to the people who are most likely to respond. You can solve this problem by using a customer profile.
What is a customer profile?
A customer profile shows you exactly who your customers are and gives you layers of information about them. Data scientists will analyze all of your customer and transactional data, create a model, and generate a customer profile. The profile reveals your unique customer demographics such as average age, location, income, marital status, number of children, etc. It will also show you hundreds of behavioral and lifestyle data points such as they are interested in hiking, are they new home owners, or are they boat owners.
This information gives you a clear picture of who your customers are, so you know how to design your marketing. With your customers’ behavioral and lifestyle data, you can make informed design decisions. For example, you might learn that 75% of your customers are dog owners, so you should feature images with dogs or products for dogs.
Customer profiles often include spatial information, so you can see where they come from and what your customer footprint looks like. Do they live close by? Are they driving across town? Do they live in single family homes or multi-family units? All of this information can be used to help you design better marketing pieces.
How often should you get a customer profile?
It’s important to get an accurate customer profile, but don’t treat it as written in stone. Your customers will change and evolve. Your brand may reach a new demographic, or your customers’ needs and wants might change over time. Generating a customer profile should become a regular part of your marketing plan, so you can make sure your marketing is relevant to your audience.
How often you create a customer profile will depend on your business, but for most people, we recommend 1-2 times a year. Typically, businesses won’t see a dramatic shift over night, but you will see changes over time. If you fail to acknowledge or incorporate those changes, your marketing will stop speaking to the people most likely to respond.
Should you test your marketing?
Once you have a customer profile and tailor your marketing for your audience, it’s still important to test your marketing. When you know exactly which individuals you are targeting, it becomes a lot easier to see which message and design or even which channel is working best for your customers.
Marketing isn’t static, and it’s critical to keep fine tuning your process. The more you test your marketing and analyze the responses, the more you’ll understand your customers. This will enable you to create marketing pieces and campaigns that resonate with your audience, and more importantly, get responses.
Knowing who your customers are and understanding what they want and need is critical for your business’s success. Stop guessing who your target audience is and take the time to really get to know them. Data modeling is a powerful tool that can help set you up for success.
If you have questions about how data modeling works or would like to see if data modeling is a good fit for your business, our team would love to speak with you. Just send us an email.