Your website’s user experience is everything in 2023. Creating a personalized experience increases the chances of customer loyalty to your brand and products as your customers will feel seen, heard, and valued. But perhaps more importantly, customer-centric brands also report profits that are 60% higher than those that fail to focus on customer experience (CX).
Boosting sales doesn’t always mean investing in paid ads to make sure your brand becomes easily recognizable. In fact, 73% of customers now say that CX is the number one thing they consider when deciding whether to purchase from a company.
Sometimes, the best data points to help you increase profitability come from the customers themselves. So, keep reading, and we’ll go through 8 customer profile analysis methods and data sources for you to gain all the insights you need!
See Related: What Is SEO And How Does It Work For Your Business?
Customer profiling involves organizing your company's ideal customers through a data-led process in an effort to inform future marketing campaigns. Segmenting customer profiles based on their demographics, behaviors, interests, and more can give you greater insight into your target audience.
And the customer profile analysis process also lends itself to enhancing the customer journey you craft as well as the customer's experience of your brand. While customer profile analysis requires a lot of time and effort, this isn't to say that such analysis doesn't come with its own benefits.
41% of customer-obsessed companies achieved at least 10% revenue growth in their last fiscal year, compared to just 10% of less mature companies.
Not only does customer profile analysis help you to gain insight into your target audience. But it can also help you determine their pain points, and more importantly, what they expect to experience from your brand.
With a deep and thorough customer profile analysis, you can increase your conversion rates, simply by understanding paying customers better.
So, where exactly can you pull said data from? Below are our top tips for analyzing your target customers and their behavior.
Creating your ideal customer profiles with CRM software will allow you to make better business decisions while informing your next marketing strategy. So, here's where you can find and interpret customer data for maximum results.
Existing customers may not all fall within your ideal customer profile. But this doesn't change the fact that these customers can provide immense insight into how your business currently functions.
Conducting customer surveys amongst your existing customers is a great way to discover what drives the most value in your company. Plus, investing in your existing customers already comes with its own set of benefits as well.
Retaining existing customers has been shown to increase profitability from 25% to 95%.
This isn't to say you shouldn't be reaching out to potential customers (more on that below). But drawing from your current pool of customers can deeply inform your customer profiling process to start.
Potential customers include anyone who has interacted with your website and marketing campaigns but hasn't committed to buying yet. Most often, these types of customers will reach out via social media in order to gain more information about your product or services.
And this is the perfect opportunity for you to analyze how customers interact with your brand and deliver an excellent user experience to entice them to further their business with you.
63% of customers express that businesses should improve their responsiveness to consumer feedback.
So, if you find that the majority of customers within your target market are hanging out on social media, make sure you boost your social presence while increasing your response time.
This way, those within your target market will see that you're a reliable brand they can count on. And they'll be more likely to engage with your brand further!
Digital tools offer a wealth of knowledge when it comes to both qualitative and quantitative data. Whether you use Google Analytics, CRMs, social media, or all of the above, all sets of tools can help contribute to your ideal customer profiles while giving you insight into your target market.
You might think it's common sense to utilize these digital tools when it comes to analyzing customer behavior. But consider this statistic for a moment:
Only 20% of businesses use advanced customer analysis methods.
That's not a lot of competition. With this in mind, leveraging these digital tools to your advantage can deeply impact your customer profile analysis while giving you a competitive edge over other companies who fail to do so.
When you can combine these data sources together, you can start to piece together what your ideal customer profile looks like. And this will only enhance your marketing strategy overall.
But if this seems like too much work to do solely on your end, then you might want to team up with an SEO company that's perfected its own customer profiling methods.
From 2020-2021, we managed to 35x one luxury beauty company's organic visitor growth, resulting in 605 unique organic sales in 10 months and ranking them for 6,500 keywords in Google's Top 100 results.
But all of these results wouldn't have been possible without our unique Search & Discover Roadmap method, the first step in our proven four-step process that helps you effectively scale growth without relying on ad spend.
Identifying your Customer Avatar, we help you target the most profitable search terms while giving you a better idea of who exactly you're looking to do business with. In this way, our whole SEO campaign rests on customer profile analysis.
The sales department is likely on the phone all day long with customers. And this is the perfect opportunity to gain some deeper insight into your customer base!
Based on the existing insights the sales team has to offer, craft the right discovery questions for them to ask on future sales calls so reps can better learn which customer profiles the company is really resonating with.
Additionally, such discovery questions offer up the chance for customers to provide their own set of feedback. And this can do wonders for the user experience as well.
75% of CEOs acknowledge the importance of customer feedback analysis for business growth.
Not to mention that customers enjoy giving their feedback. It demonstrates to them that the company is invested in their happiness and committed to making changes according to what customers claim is best.
You can utilize any type of customer profile template you want. But one such data source that you can't ignore when crafting those profiles is the competition.
Analyzing everything from competitors' website structure to who they're targeting on social media can give you great insights into the industry as a whole. Plus, there are a number of competitor analysis tools available to help you analyze the competition's strategy.
At this point, 80% of organizations expect to compete mainly based on CX.
So, take a look at where they're directing their efforts. And see if it's a space where you can similarly gain insight while posing a threat to their marketing strategies as well.
Bonus: How To Write Blogs That Are SEO-Friendly In 2023
Knowing where to pull your data from is a crucial step in setting up a successful customer profile analysis. Now, it's time to implement customer profiling methods that will deepen your understanding of customers as a whole.
The psychographic method of customer profiling focuses on the consumer's qualities, traits, and lifestyles. These data points can be found in the:
Customer's demographics: age, location, gender, marital status, ethnicity, income, job title, educational level, homeownership, etc.
Customer's lifestyle: hobbies, activities, interests, values, attitudes, opinions, etc.
Piecing together these data points is useful for understanding their buying behavior and can help to inform how you craft their ideal customer journey.
The typology method involves analyzing what drives the customer to interact with you and your business. These motivations can be segmented into four unique areas:
Need-based: customers who only buy what they need.
Deal-based: customers who actively seek out discounts and care the most about price points.
Impulse-based: emotionally-driven customers who spend their money based on their feelings and impulses.
Loyalty-based: customers who consistently buy from you and act as brand ambassadors for your company among people in their network.
Being able to segment customers based on their motivations and mindsets will teach you how they typically engage with the brand, further informing your marketing strategies down the line.
Lastly, the characteristics method of customer profiling looks at the traits that influence a customer's buying decisions. Common traits include:
Convenience: You make buying a fast and easy opportunity for customers to do business with you.
Personalization: You appeal to customers on a personal level and they recognize that their experience is tailored to their specific needs and wants.
Belonging: You have cultivated a community that customers feel like they are a part of, so much so that they connect with other customers, follow along with reviews, and regularly interact with your brand.
While these methods may focus on different areas of the customer's experience, all of these data points combined can help you round out the ideal customer profile you're looking to do business with.
Taking the time to perform customer profile analysis might feel tedious. But the benefits you'll reap far outweigh the effort you put in.
Keep reading: 20 Pros And Cons Of Social Media Marketing In 2023
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Up Inc. eCommerce Agency is a digital marketing agency based in Los Angeles, CA. Founded in 2021, Up Inc. specializes in eCommerce, generating growth for brands by focusing on visibility, customer loyalty, and digital revenue. For more SEO tips and industry insights, follow us on Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn.
