Let’s be real — you can’t deliver amazing customer experiences if you don’t truly know your customers. That’s where customer profiling comes in. Throughout my career, whether I was contributing to marketing strategies from the ground up or helping the business increase conversion rates, one thing always remained constant: a deep understanding of the customer is non-negotiable.
To connect with your audience, you need to understand their demographics, their motivations, their pain points – you need to get in their heads. Customer profiling gives you the insights you need to make this understanding possible.
Now, you might be thinking, “Okay, I get it. But what exactly is customer profiling?” Don’t worry, I’ve got you covered.
In this article, we’ll dive into the world of customer profiling, explore why it’s more important than ever in today’s world, and walk you through a practical 10-step process to create your own powerful customer profiles.
Table of Contents
8 Free Customer Profile Templates
Use these free templates to build out your customer profiles for your marketing, sales, and customer service teams.
- Long Customer Profile Templates
- Short Customer Profile Templates
- Designed Customer Profile Templates
- Simple Customer Profile Templates
Download Free
All fields are required.
What Is a Customer Profile?
A customer profile is a data-driven document that describes your current customers. Profiles are based on surveys that gather purchasing behaviors, pain points, psychographic data, and demographics. A customer profile can help you find segments of customers with commonality so you can target them in your sales and marketing campaigns.
I learned long ago that if you try to market to everyone, you end up connecting with no one. That’s why nailing your customer profiles is so important.
Think of a customer profile definition like this: it’s a detailed snapshot of your ideal customer. You’re gathering and analyzing data about their characteristics, behaviors, needs, and aspirations. This intel allows you to create a clear picture of who you’re talking to, so you can tailor your message and offerings for maximum impact.
Let's take a look at a sample below.
Customer Profile Sample
Download the Free Customer Profile Templates
Creating a customer profile can be simple. With our templates, you don't have to start from scratch. Just fill in the blanks and use the data from your service software or surveys to create a complete consumer profile.
I’ve found these customer profile templates to be a valuable, time-saving tool when creating customer and consumer profiles for my business. In my experience, it’s always been beneficial to take advantage of time-saving resources like this that allow me to focus more energy on delighting customers.
Before creating a customer profile, consider your target audience.
If your company is in the B2B space, you'll need to include more detailed information about your customers, such as industry size, regional location, etc.
If you‘re in the B2C space, you’ll want to create a customer profile focused on the individual.
Let's take a quick look at each component of the sample template.
Background & Demographics: Who Are Your People?
After spending over ten years in customer experience and operations across everything from B2B SaaS to DTC, I’ve learned that understanding your customers isn’t just about collecting data but about understanding why they tick. Sure, we need the basics like age, location, job title, etc. But here’s the thing I’ve seen time and time again at places like Skybound: it’s what you do with that information that matters.
I currently manage the customer experience for ecommerce at Skybound, and I knew customer demographics was just the start. What really has helped move the needle was understanding the whole person behind the store experience. Want an example? By building out our Insiders Loyalty Program, we’ve been able to better hone in on our target audience and create products and experiences they’re truly interested in.
The Decision-Making Process: A Deep Dive
Here’s something I learned while running support for Web3 startups – people make decisions in wildly different ways, especially depending on the channel of communication. Some folks will spend hours on Discord doing their research on a subject, while others make snap decisions based on gut feel. Having managed everything from enterprise software at Greenhouse to subscription services at Trendy Butler, I can tell you that understanding these patterns is pure gold.
Product Alignment: Finding That Perfect Product Match
This is where the magic happens, and I’ve seen it across every industry I’ve worked in. At Dapper Labs, we didn’t just launch chatbots to handle the majority of inbound support tickets. We built them because we understood exactly how our users wanted to interact with us. We knew our community was tech-savvy and wanted instant answers at all times, not email threads that dragged on for days.
When you understand your customer’s specific needs and what they see value in, you can start to build products and solutions that feel like they were made just for them.
Wants, Goals, and Desires: What Actually Drives Your Users?
While working with customers, I like to ask about their pain points — which, ideally, I can solve.
Say you’re running a cloud kitchen startup that helps restaurants manage their delivery operations. On the surface, your customers might say they want “better delivery management.” But when you dig into those 3AM support tickets and really listen to those post-resolution calls, you start seeing the real story. They’re not just worried about delivery times – they’re losing sleep over staff turnover, they’re stressed about food waste costs, and they’re desperately trying to maintain quality when orders spike unexpectedly.
You often see this pattern in the SaaS industry as well. What users say in feature requests versus what’s actually keeping them from solving for their needs can be totally different things. You have to be like a detective and piece together the clues from support conversations, surveys, usage patterns, and those candid moments when customers finally let their guard down and tell you what’s really going on in their world.
Once you understand these deeper motivations, you can start offering real solutions that make their lives better.
Behaviors & Tendencies: The Day-to-Day Reality
After years of building customer experience and support teams of all forms, I’ve learned that understanding your customers’ daily routines is just as important as understanding their wants and desires. At every successful startup I’ve worked at, we built our entire support structure around when and how our customers needed us, not the other way around.
Want to know the real secret? It’s not about the tools or the tech stack (though believe me, I love a good HubSpot automation as much as the next). It’s about never losing sight of the humans on the other side of those support tickets, chat messages, and conversations. When you nail that, everything else – the CSAT scores, the retention rates, the community growth – tends to fall into place.
Customer Profile vs. Buyer Persona
When I first started out in my CX career, I used to get customer profile and buyer persona mixed up all the time. But after years of working with companies from scrappy startups to Fortune 500 giants, I’ve learned that these two tools are like peanut butter and jelly – they’re great on their own, but together, they’re unstoppable.
Customer profiles, also known as consumer profiles, provide a bird’s-eye view of your target audience. You can think of it as a map of your customer base. You see the major landmarks like demographics, buying habits, and generally all the metrics behind the customer. We also call this the ideal customer profile (ICP).
Now, buyer personas? That’s where we get laser-focused. It’s important to craft a detailed picture of your ideal customer within a specific segment. Back when I was at Trendy Butler, we didn’t just look at demographics to craft our AI recommendation engine, we got to know “Mike,” the 35-year-old tech professional who hated shopping but wanted to look sharp for his Zoom meetings. The key difference is in the level of detail and granularity that you’re looking at.
Now that we’ve got the basics down, let’s talk about how to actually use these tools in the real world.
Customer Profile Use Cases
An ICP helps you pinpoint customers who are most likely to become your loyal fans. Think about their demographics, their desires, and the pain points that keep them up at night.
Here are some examples.
By understanding your customer profile, you can fine-tune your marketing messages and channels to hit the right target audience. For example, if they are “Mike,” the 35-year-old tech professional, then you might double down on your LinkedIn and X strategy instead of spreading yourself thin across too many social media platforms.
Additionally, your sales team can use the customer profile to prioritize leads and focus their energy on those prospects that fit the bill. This helps them avoid wasting time on dead-end leads and close more deals faster.
Overall, knowing your ICP’s needs and challenges can influence your product development roadmap. By building features that solve their specific problems, you’ll increase product adoption and keep those customers happy.
Buyer Persona Use-Cases
Okay, let’s talk about buyer personas. Customers crave personalized experiences. They want to feel seen, heard, and understood. That’s exactly what the buyer personas help you achieve.
By creating detailed personas of your customers, you can tailor your approach to meet their specific needs.
For example, you can:
- Craft blog posts, ebooks, and webinars that address the exact questions and challenges your personas face.
- Develop targeted messages that speak directly to the desires and aspirations of each persona.
- Empower your support team to anticipate customer needs and provide personalized assistance.
- Equip your sales team with the insights then need to build rapport and deliver compelling presentations.
Pro tip: Don’t cut corners, use both! Combining customer profiles and buyer personas gives you a panoramic view of your audience. This will help you build a better product or service and therefore provide a better experience once you do get those leads in the door.
8 Free Customer Profile Templates
Use these free templates to build out your customer profiles for your marketing, sales, and customer service teams.
- Long Customer Profile Templates
- Short Customer Profile Templates
- Designed Customer Profile Templates
- Simple Customer Profile Templates
Download Free
All fields are required.
Customer Profiling
Customer profiling is the act of describing a customer or set of customers using demographics, psychographics, buying patterns, and other factors. In other words, it's identifying the characteristics of the people most likely to purchase your product or service and derive a lot of value from it.
Why Is Customer Profiling Important?
When building a business, developing a go-to-market strategy, or giving your sales team direction, clearly describing your current customers is essential.
I’ve found that the customers most likely to purchase from me in the future are often quite similar to customers who I’ve worked with in the past. Coincidence? I think not.
Customer profiling helps you identify buyers likely to purchase from you, which is more valuable than targeting everyone everywhere. My experience has taught me that taking an informed, targeted approach to customer acquisition is far more effective than casting a wide net.
Trying to build something that solves 100% of the problems for 100% of the market is called “boiling the ocean.” You're “boiling the ocean” when your customer profile is too broad.
The irony is that targeting a broad audience solves only a few problems for only a few people. You end up spreading your product offering too thin and diluting your value across too many customers.
Customer profiles act like guard rails for product managers as they develop a new product, marketers as they craft positioning strategies, and salespeople as they search for potential customers.
Customer profiling is incredibly beneficial for all teams and your business members — let's look at the benefits in more detail below.
Customer Profiling Benefits
Creating customer profiles is crucial for taking your business to the next level. 66% of customers expect companies to understand their needs; customer profiling helps you do that.
A properly executed customer profiling strategy has far-reaching benefits across your entire organization. Read on to discover the many benefits of customer profiling.
It helps all departments become more efficient.
The benefits of customer profiling are impactful across your entire company. Each department in your company will use your customer profiles differently, but they will improve the bottom line.
- Marketing: Understanding the client is vital to creating engaging advertisements or emails for potential prospects and current clients. Marketers use customer profiles to customize messaging to most effectively speak to customer needs.
- Sales: With a customer profile in hand, your sales team will be able to highlight customer pain points and help better sell your product or service as the solution to their problems. Your sales team may even use the customer profile to find ways to create connections with current and future clients.
- Support: The customer profile contains all the necessary information your customer service team will need to assist clients in need. It can act as a record of queries, complaints, and previously tried solutions. This will help save time for your customer service team and keep everyone involved from becoming frustrated.
It allows you to identify better-fit prospects.
By knowing who benefits from your products the most, your organization can find better prospects and increase close rates.
If you're part of the service team, this might not mean much to you. But remember: A better-fit prospect is a happier customer down the line.
It lowers customer acquisition cost.
Customer acquisition cost (CAC) is the money you spend on marketing and sales campaigns to attract a single customer. Implementing customer profiling allows you to focus your efforts on people who are more likely to become customers, which brings customer acquisition costs down in the long run.
I’ve personally discovered this to be true when running social media ads for my business. A well-defined customer profile meant I could target the right people online and lower my ad spend.
It empowers you to serve customers better.
Knowing your customers is critical to serving them better. By documenting customer pain points, attributes, and characteristics, you can deliver a superior customer service experience before they ever request help.
Fellow writer for the HubSpot blog, Rami El-Abidin, agrees, saying “I found this accurate, having worked on the Support Team at HubSpot at the beginning of my career. We always kept detailed notes on each customer, including the issues they had in the past and their needs/goals. Armed with this information, I was much better equipped to meet customers where they were and guide them to success.”
This way, you can predict issues before they arise, provide practical self-help resources, and better align with their needs if they reach out to your service team.
It reduces customer churn.
Customer churn refers to losing customers. We can all agree we want to keep that number as low as possible!
By creating strong customer profiles from the start, you can attract and serve customers who actually want to use your product or service — reducing customer churn in both the short and long term.
Now that you know the benefits of customer profiling, which data should you gather for your customer profiles?
Let's take a look.
Customer Profile Data
A refined customer profile can help you find and attract more people likely to buy your product, develop a stronger relationship with your customers, build more impactful features, and put you on a better trajectory for market dominance.
It’s clear that customer profiling is valuable and effective, but how do you start? It’s easy to feel overwhelmed with so much customer data at your fingertips, but fret not; I’ve got you covered.
Below are the four different types of customer profile data you should be gathering.
Demographic
Demographic data are the concrete characteristics of a customer and can be used to understand consumer behavior, albeit broadly.
Demographics include the following traits (and more):
- Age.
- Sex.
- Job title.
- Income.
- Education level.
- Family status.
If you're in the B2B space, consider attributes such as company size, industry, and other organizational characteristics.
El-Abidin shared a good example of what this looks like in practice: “My music backline rental business is technically B2B, and my customer demographics are segmented by events such as weddings/bar mitzvahs/graduations, music festivals, and touring artists who can’t travel or fly with all their gear. Each type of customer has different needs, and understanding customer segments helps me anticipate and meet them.”
Psychographic
Demographics alone aren’t enough to understand how, when, and why people make purchasing decisions, and that’s where psychographics come in.
These factors relate to the attitudes and psychological makeup of a customer and may include:
- Lifestyle.
- Goals.
- Pains.
- Habits.
- Values.
- Interests.
Psychographics help you understand the buying journey and even the customer journey after they've already purchased from you. Psychographic segmentation in email marketing can raise open rates by up to 30% and increase conversion rates by an average of 25%
Behavioral
While psychographics relate to psychological attributes, behavioral segments look at how that's manifested in action.
You may consider segmenting by:
- Engagement.
- Readiness to buy.
- Purchasing history.
- Product usage.
- Satisfaction.
- Loyalty or account age.
- Attention required.
Segments based on behavioral traits are some of the most valuable in customer support. It can help service teams find insights about customer interaction and how these trends manifest into recurring revenue and satisfaction rates.
And once those things are measured, they can be improved. In other words, keeping a close eye on both sales and customer service data is necessary to get concrete details about your consumer base’s behavior. An all-in-one platform that blends sales tools with customer service and marketing features makes this process a lot easier — you get easy access to analytics data across multiple departments, along with the tools necessary to act on that data.
Geographic
Geographical factors are relevant when location affects how customers interact with a brand or receive their products.
Here are popular ways to segment based on geography:
- City.
- Area.
- Region.
- Country.
Gaining insights based on geography can help your organization think through logistics, support implementation, and marketing.
The relevance of Geographical data varies depending on the type of business you run. In my experience running a music backline rental company, geographic data is hugely relevant because I can only serve customers within a certain radius of where my gear is located.
However, if you run a software business or sell products online, geographical data has a different level of relevance. Regardless, knowing where your customers are is helpful in understanding more about them and their needs.
Once you have this data, you can profile customers based on specific types or “segments.”
Segments help you unearth trends in satisfaction, churn, and lifetime value that help you understand more about your ideal customer profiles.
Customer Profiling Strategies
Remember when I said earlier that truly understanding your customers is non-negotiable? You need a crystal-clear, data-backed customer profile to guide your marketing, sales, and product development efforts. With the right strategies and a bit of elbow grease, you can unlock a treasure trove of insights about your audience.
Here are some proven strategies to help you build a customer profile that’s both accurate and actionable.
1. Psychographic Segmentation
This is where we go beyond the basics. Sure, demographics are important, but they only tell part of the story. Psychographics delve into the “why” behind your customers’ actions. What are their values, interests, lifestyles, and motivations?
Pro tip: Back when I was at Yahoo working with clients on their programmatic ad campaigns, I learned that understanding their customers’ psychographics was important for crafting effective messaging. We didn’t just focus on who they were targeting but also why those audiences were likely to engage with their ads.
2. Consumer Typology
In this approach, we split up consumers into different segments based on their motivations, mindsets, and how to engage them. It’s true what they say. Not all customers are cut from the same cloth.
Here are the four main types of consumers:
- Loyal. These are your biggest supporters and VIPs. Through thick and thin, they remain loyal to your brand, praising you to everyone who will listen. When it comes to consumer connections, they are the ultimate goal.
- Discount. These buyers are all about finding deals. They may not be brand loyal, but they will seize the opportunity to get a good bargain.
- Impulsive. The wild cards of the consumer world, motivated by passion and spontaneity. They may not have a specific need in mind, but they are receptive to an alluring experience or offer.
- Need-Based. These customers are intent on meeting a certain need. They want a solution, and they want it quickly. They are not interested in the glitz and glamour.
Pro tip: Identify your most valuable segments and tailor your engagement strategies accordingly. For example, paper your loyal customers with exclusive perks and personalized recommendations, while enticing discount shoppers with targeted promotions and limited-time offers.
3. Consumer Characteristics
This method investigates what factors influence purchasing decisions. Modern consumers are defined by many common qualities — here are two that stand out to me.
- One quality that defines a modern customer is convenience. These folks may not have much free time, so they place online orders for goods and services in order to expedite delivery. Everything should be quick, straightforward, and user-friendly for them.
- Customers who are driven by connectivity want to be part of a community. If they buy the same goods as someone else, they sense a connection. Consumers who are driven by connectivity are more likely to hear what others have to say about businesses, goods, and services. They’d be more likely to buy the product if one person said it was good. This can be very beneficial when it comes to driving high-quality referrals.
Pro tip: Use behavioral analytics and A/B testing to validate and refine your consumer characteristics. They evolve with market trends and user expectations.
8 Free Customer Profile Templates
Use these free templates to build out your customer profiles for your marketing, sales, and customer service teams.
- Long Customer Profile Templates
- Short Customer Profile Templates
- Designed Customer Profile Templates
- Simple Customer Profile Templates
Download Free
All fields are required.
How to Create a Customer Profile
- Use customer profile templates.
- Choose your customer profiling software.
- Dig into demographics.
- Collect customer feedback.
- Review your customer journey map.
- Focus on the problem that your business is trying to solve.
- Examine contextual details.
- Understand your industry.
- Build personas.
- Analyze and iterate on customer personas.
1. Use customer profile templates.
You can shorten the customer profiling process by downloading and using pre-made templates.
You won’t have to develop different sections for your customer profiles. Instead, you’ll have them pre-written for you. The only thing you have to do is fill in the blanks.
We go into more detail about what you’ll find in these templates later in the post. But if you can’t wait, download them now and follow along as we cover the rest of the steps.
Featured Resource: Customer Profile Templates
2. Choose your customer profiling software.
Once you start creating customer profiles, you'll need several types of software.
Remember, you must collect data from your current customer base to create effective and accurate profiles.
Let‘s go over the tools you’ll need.
CRM
If you don't have one already, you should start using a CRM to keep track of contact data. Your CRM is going to be the foundation of your customer profiling operation. Companies that use a CRM see an average ROI of $8.71 from money spent on the software.
A CRM allows you to collect all the essential information you need about your customers, such as their name, business name, location, business type, and more.
Are you looking for a great, easy-to-use, free CRM trusted by thousands and thousands of businesses? Get started with the HubSpot CRM platform for free and track contact data now.
Customer Feedback Software
The next most important piece of software you need is a survey tool that will help you collect additional data about your customers — data you won't necessarily have stored in your CRM.
After choosing a survey tool, you should get familiar with running questionnaires and designing questions that get you the answers you need.
I’ve found that customer feedback is indispensable in discovering what customers are happy with and where they see room for improvement.
“Customers often know more about your products than you do. Use them as a source of inspiration and ideas for product development.”― David J. Greer.
I like this quote from author David J. Greer because it highlights that the customer is king. Customers are the ones who use and benefit from your products, so who better to turn to for inspiration on how to satisfy their needs better?
Pro tip: HubSpot's customer feedback software can help you set up effective surveys, and the results will be stored right within the CRM.
Analytics Software
While analytics software may seem like something only a marketing team needs, it's critical for your customer profiling efforts. It will help you understand the content your prospects most respond to, and it will unearth the types of customers who are visiting certain product pages on your website.
Jenny Sussin at Gartner says, “A good place to start is with listening projects, where customer data and analytics are used to find the voice of the customer and identify where they are satisfied and dissatisfied.”
I’m a big fan of this quote because it describes how the customer profile already exists, and you can sift through the data to uncover it.
Pro Tip: HubSpot’s analytics software keeps all of your customer interaction and engagement data in one convenient interface. And it’s connected to your CRM, too.
3. Dig into demographics.
You've got the customer profile templates and the software you need to start account profiling.
To define your customer profile, start by examining external demographics. Then, dive deeper into needs and look at your company's offering.
Here are some external attributes you can use to define your customer profile:
- What market does your product best serve?
- What specific vertical do they operate in?
- What is their annual revenue?
- How many employees do they have?
- Where are these companies located?
4. Collect customer feedback.
After detailing the demographic landscape, it’s time to dive deeper into gathering customer feedback. It’s easy to want to rely solely on the demographic data you get from your CRM for customer profiling. However, truly knowing your customers goes beyond the data in your CRM and necessitates engaging with them directly.
You need to meet your customers to understand what they’re like. Accordingly, customer surveys and interviews are the best resources to build your customer profiles. Through customer interviews, you can speak with customers face-to-face, which enriches real human connections and allows you to interpret non-verbal cues in real time. This type of direct interaction helps uncover valuable information that raw data simply can’t show.
If you can’t reach a specific group of customers face-to-face, consider setting up a phone or video call. While it’s less engaging than an in-person interaction, it's still an effective way of reaching your target audience.
If your customers are willing to schedule a call with you, you know they‘re loyal users and are worth the time investment. The more attention you pay to these customers, the more you’ll have in the future.
85% of people say they’ll likely provide feedback when they’ve had a good experience (SurveyMonkey), so if you treat your customers right, they will likely help you out in return.
In my experience, nothing beats building relationships with customers and getting to know them in real life. In my line of work, I spend a lot of face-to-face time with customers, which is invaluable in understanding their needs and the products/services they expect from me.
Consider cross-referencing data from your ticketing system with customer details for your CRM. This gives you further context on which customer segment is more likely to experience what issues — ideal for proactive customer service. A unified solution that packs all these details in the same place helps you with just that.
5. Review your customer journey map.
As you begin examining your customer profile data, you should contextualize it using your customer journey map.
A customer journey map is a document that outlines every touchpoint a customer must pass through to achieve a goal with your company.
While these take time to complete, they paint a detailed picture of who's buying your products and interacting with your brand.
However, you don‘t need to complete a customer journey map to create a customer profile. Simply considering the customer’s journey will help you understand who you're trying to reach.
Interacting with prospects through live chat is also a clever tactic to grasp how they progress through the customer journey. This way, you encourage consumers who are interested in your company to engage with you directly. At the same time, you get concrete evidence regarding their pain points and what makes them see your business as a potential solution.
By understanding their needs, challenges, and goals, you'll develop a stronger sense of what your customers want from your business. You can even take this one step further by interviewing customers about each stop on your map.
When creating HubSpot's customer journey map, we asked users how they felt about specific points in the customer experience. Then, we charted these stories on the map to see how customer perceptions changed.
This gave us a good idea of what our customers liked and didn't like about our products.
6. Focus on the problem that your business is trying to solve.
It’s easy to get lost with such a wealth of data. If you find yourself overwhelmed, return the focus to the problem your business is trying to solve.
Identify the type of people who face this challenge. Take a close look at your current users and their behavior.
The common denominator between these approaches is people. It doesn't matter if you only have a few customers or are well on your way to 10,000. You need to understand who your customers are and the problems they are having to solve for them best.
7. Examine contextual details.
Once you've defined the external factors that describe your customer profile, it’s time to dig deeper into contextual details.
For example, if I’m running a SaaS company, I’d want to understand the following things about my customer:
- How big is their team?
- What are the biggest challenges they face?
- What technology are they using?
- What are their goals for the next three months?
- What are their goals for the year?
- How do they assess problems?
- What does a perfect world look like for them?
- What impact does the specific problem have on their team?
- How are they trying to solve the problem today?
I could find the answers with concrete data from customer service software. I would look into my knowledge base and customer portals to identify common questions and issues.
You should fully grasp your potential customers' general makeup and goals based on these external factors and contextual details.
The final step is to look internally to see how you can help them based on all this information.
Below are some key questions to answer when completing your customer profile:
- What value can you provide these customers? (Save them money or time, grow revenue, etc.)
- Can you solve their key pain points?
- What are the features that differentiate you from competitors or a homegrown process?
- How does your solution fit into their short- and long-term goals?
8. Understand your industry.
One significant contextual detail you should consider is where your brand falls compared to others in the industry.
You should know how your customers perceive your brand and which companies you're competing with for their attention. This should give you a good idea of the type of customer you want to attract and retain.
Understanding your industry also helps you define your brand identity. If you're going to stand out, you need to find a way to differentiate your product and services.
If you know which marketing strategies your customers already respond to, you can mirror your competitor's successful techniques for introducing and educating customers about a new product or feature.
My experience has taught me that understanding my niche is vital. There are plenty of music backline rental providers on the market, many of which are larger and more established than I am. However, I differentiated myself as an individual who provides white-glove, personalized service, compared to larger providers who can’t offer a personal touch.
9. Build personas.
Remember that you're serving people with actual personalities, feelings, and needs.
Once you've identified the attributes for your customer profile, the next step is to identify the individuals within the company that you want to reach.
This will be helpful when trying to establish a relationship with the account and understand who the decision-makers and influencers are.
Here are some key things to uncover about the people in your customer profile:
- Title(s)
- Age range
- Education level
- Income level
- How will they use your product/service?
- What marketing channels can you use to reach them?
- What are the key responsibilities of their role?
- What role do they play in the decision-making process?
If you need a tool to help you build, visualize, and share your personas, try HubSpot's Make My Persona tool.
“Personas are often met with opposition because they're a lot of work to assemble, and once assembled, they are living, evolving things that must be maintained. Like people, buyer personas change over time with the market, the times, the ebbs and flows of products and services.” - Justin Gray.
10. Analyze and iterate on customer personas.
A clearly defined customer persona is a cornerstone of business growth. The definition of your customer persona will act as a guide when informing what products or features to build, what channels to use in a marketing campaign, and much more.
Without it, you risk offering a product or service that doesn‘t meet any potential customers’ specific needs. Or you end up marketing to prospects in a way that doesn't resonate with their understanding of the problem.
Your goal should be to sync up your business strategy with your customer personas to incorporate everything from your features to your go-to-market approach, ensuring it aligns with your customer's needs.
As you build your customer profile, gather the external factors, qualify the contextual details, and develop a deep understanding of how your business adds value to each customer type.
But remember: You don't have to start from scratch. You can use templates to compile your consumer profiles.
B2B vs. B2C Customer Profiles
B2B and B2C companies both benefit from the use of customer profiles. However, they differ in their focus and approach to the matter.
B2C companies cater to a much more comprehensive demographic range than B2B and will focus on demographic data such as age, marital status, location, income, etc.
Meanwhile, B2B businesses need to think about two categories. Firstly, they must consider firmographic data such as company size, budget, and industry.
B2B businesses must consider individuals as well. B2B teams should make customer profiles for both users and decision-makers at their target organizations.
Take me, for example. When renting out backline gear for a concert, the person who coordinates and purchases the rental (perhaps a tour manager) and the musician who uses the gear are typically two different people. Still, I must understand both individuals to ensure a successful job overall.
Customer Profile Templates
We've created customer profile templates you can use to walk you through these steps. You can download them here.
Download your free templates now.
Inside this kit, you'll find:
- A short customer profile template. This one-page template helps you lay out all the basic information about your customer. It gives you space to list your customer's demographics, pain points, retention tactics, and preferred products and services.
- A long customer profile template. This two-page template gives you more space to define your customer profile. It‘s ideal for B2B account profiles. You can list external attributes, such as the customer’s industry and internal attributes.
- A colorful customer profile template. This template is ideal for B2C industries where customers interact face-to-face with your staff members. You have space to list user behaviors, frustrating interactions, and customer communication notes.
- A corporate customer profile template. This template allows you to list a professional overview of your ideal customer, as well as challenges, benefits, and restraints. We recommend this template for more corporate environments due to its color palette.
- A simple customer profile template. This template lets you list your ideal customer's background, decision-making process, product preferences, wants, goals, and behaviors in easy-to-scan boxes.
- A modern customer profile template. In this template, you have space to list your target customer‘s company goals, team challenges, and retention tips. We recommend this template for B2B companies because you’ll be profiling an entire organization.
- A buyer's journey customer profile template. This template is unique because it gives you space to outline your ideal customer's discovery story — that is, how they found you and what their research process was like. You can also list their goals and pain points.
- A segmented customer profile template. If you'd like to create different segments as you profile your customers, this is the template for you. It lets you list critical information such as goals, benefits, and product constraints in a chart.
Do you need help with what your customer profile can look like?
Below, we list alternative consumer profile examples with methods that you can use to list your ideal consumer's attributes.
Customer Profile Examples
If you need help figuring out where to start, look at these top customer profile examples for a granular and overarching overview of your customers.
1. Scorecard
Customer profiles can vary depending on your company's needs and preferences. Some companies format customer profiles as a scoring system to determine whether a prospect fits the business.
The above example uses the BANT framework. The BANT framework helps salespeople assess prospects and gives them a score for each criterion ranging from zero to two.
If the total score meets a preset benchmark, that’s a green light for sales to reach out.
2. Segmentation
A segmented customer profile recognizes not every prospect is the same. What one customer needs from your business may differ from the next, and your customer profile definition is mutable. Each customer type is broken down by demographics, core values, and preferred communication channels in a segmented customer profile.
It includes a summary describing how the marketing team should advertise to these individuals.
With this information readily available, your marketing team can work alongside customer service to create effective campaigns that resonate with each segment of your customer base.
3. Basic Information
A basic information customer profile is just that — basic. This customer profile, available in our free customer profile templates, cuts right to the point.
It lists the fundamental information we need about each customer type, including background data, demographics, and pain points. I’ve found that the basic customer profile format is the easiest to get up and running, and you can always expand to a more involved customer profile type as you grow.
Download a free, editable copy of this customer profile example.
4. Buyer Persona
To construct a buyer persona customer profile, you must survey your current clients to understand their general buying personality.
It's important to note that the buyer persona usually comes after you know your customer profile.
Nonetheless, many buyer persona builders can get you thinking critically about your ideal customer by asking valuable qualitative questions.
Buyer personas can greatly enhance marketing efforts. Brands that utilize buyer personas have seen a 100% increase in web page visits, a 900% increase in visit duration, a 111% increase in email open rates, and a 171% increase in marketing-generated revenue.
Use HubSpot's Make My Persona tool as a starting point for mapping and profiling your customers.
5. Demographics, Psychographics, and Behaviors
A customer profile can be as detailed as you need it to be.
Many marketers find that the more they know about their audience, the better their chance of engaging with a prospect and making a sale.
Gathering demographics, psychographics, and behaviors in one document gives you an overview of your most profitable customers.
Write your answers in bullet points or paragraph format, and you‘ll be able to understand your customers’ purchasing behaviors better.
Customer Profiling Will Improve Your Service Experience
I’ve always believed in putting the customer first. All of my experience in service design has reinforced a fundamental truth: you have to know your customer.
That’s where customer profiling comes in. It allows you to:
- Zero in on your ideal customer.
- Keep churn at a minimum.
- Create customer experiences that WOW.
The more you know about your customers, the more detailed your customer profile and the more value you can extract from it. This translates to more effective marketing campaigns, increased sales conversions, and a superior customer experience.
Editor's note: This post was originally published in December 2018 and has been updated for comprehensiveness.
8 Free Customer Profile Templates
Use these free templates to build out your customer profiles for your marketing, sales, and customer service teams.
- Long Customer Profile Templates
- Short Customer Profile Templates
- Designed Customer Profile Templates
- Simple Customer Profile Templates
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