Building customer profiles is key to any marketing campaign.  They describe everything you need to know about a specified group of customers. You can leverage that information to create a marketing strategy that aligns with the wants and needs of your audience. A customer profile will help you make informed decisions about campaign messaging, creative and channels, and targeting tactics to use.

Here are three steps to build customer profiles for your marketing campaigns:

  1. Identify your broad audience. Focus on the problem your product, service, or business aims to solve and who needs that problem solved.
  2. Consider your customer’s journey. Understanding how a customer goes from awareness and consideration to evaluation and conversion enables you to narrow your audience further. Knowing the touch points that a customer passes through before making a purchase will help inform what channels and ad formats you should leverage for the best results.
  3. Create a profile description. You now have a more narrowed idea of your audience and their customer journey, so it’s time to consider their demographics and psychographics in detail, such as age, income level, occupation, education level, and marital status along with influences such as hobbies and interests. Some of this information can come from your customer database, especially geographic information that can also be important to a successful marketing campaign.

Customer profiles are especially important when there are different types of customers shopping for your product or service. For example, minivan shoppers include families with young children as well as empty nesters, both who like a minivan’s practicality and ease of getting in and out.

With all of the consumer data available today, building customer profiles is not that difficult and can make or break marketing campaign.