Marketing Basics: Creating an Effective Customer Profile

The key to building a successful marketing campaign is to really understand who your prospect is, what frustrates them and what they dream of for the future.

I would suggest developing a customer profile that clearly details the specifics about your most common customer.

Starting this process by taking out a blank sheet of paper and creating three columns:

  1. Attributes & Characteristic
  2. Fears & Frustrations
  3. Dreams for the Future

Start by listing all the actual characteristics you can think of about your prospective customer – gender, age, geographic location, income, etc. Then brainstorm what bothers them, what keeps them up at night, what bugs the heck out of them. Finally, what do they want the future to look like? If they could wave a magic wand and create their perfect life, what would that look like?

Once that is complete, you can distill everything down into an actual profile sheet of your most common customer.  I would suggest even including a picture, either of a real customer (you’ll only use this internally) or find one online that represents your typical customer.

Define everything, including giving them a name! That way, whenever you write a new marketing message, you can look at the profile, get really connected to your prospect and write something very personal that speaks directly to them.

You need to really get into the mind of your prospect to find out what conversation is ALREADY going on inside their head… then you want to position your solution in relation to that conversation.

Too many marketers try to dominate their prospect. To really stand out, become a co-conspirator with them, helping them get what they want.

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Paul Keetch is co-founder and lead trainer at Make My Marketing Work.

Comments

4 Responses to “Marketing Basics: Creating an Effective Customer Profile”

  1. Paul Keetch on September 28th, 2009 11:41 am

    Do you have a customer profile that you can rely on when writing marketing materials? I’d love to hear your thoughts on how creating and using a customer profile has positively impacted your marketing results.

    – Paul

  2. Tony Darrick Baker on September 29th, 2009 2:39 pm

    Love the idea of creating a customer profile for behavior analysis.

    By the way, you asked for candid responses so… your hand movements seem to be at an extreme. It’s true that nobody likes to watch just a talking head, but it almost seems like you are using your hands to compensate for nervousness instead of using them to bring out emphasis. That’s the body language I’m picking up. You have great stuff here, just be confident in yourself on camera as well as off.

  3. Paul Keetch on September 29th, 2009 2:48 pm

    Thanks for the feedback Tony – I appreciate it!

    I have always tended to gesticulate wildly when talking (just ask my friends who have been repeatedly (albeit accidentally) smacked in the nose when I am trying to make a point.

    It’s something I’m trying to consciously reduce in videos because of the distraction it can cause.

    Thanks again!

    – Paul

  4. HP van Duuren on October 8th, 2009 1:47 pm

    Although I do have to think about how I could practically apply it to all of my specific Blogspots, it does sound interesting, thanks for the info.

    All the Best,
    HP

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