What Is a Typical Customer Profile and How to Define It?

Understanding the typical customer profile of your consumers—or personas—allows you to precisely define who your customer types are according to their needs, personalities, intrinsic characteristics, and typical behaviours.

By profiling your customers properly, you will automatically save time and resources on your advertising, communication, and even personalized campaigns. All this will better boost your sales, the relevance of your messages, and the overall experience of your brand. 

Many companies put this step aside and deprive themselves of its benefits. Dialog Insight invites you to continue reading this article to fully grasp the importance of the typical customer profile for your marketing strategy.

 

 

What is a typical customer profile or buyer persona?

A typical customer profile answers the question: Who is my ideal customer?

According to L’internaute dictionary, the typical customer profile is an expression that emerged in the second half of the 20th century which means: typical characteristics or a set of elements that help define a customer profile.

In other words, the typical customer profile is the representation of the geographic, demographic, and psychographic characteristics of your ideal customer.

 

 

How to define a typical customer profile?

When to define the typical customer profile?

In personalization, it’s not always possible to use advanced data such as behaviour to plan communication campaigns. In this case, familiarizing yourself with your typical customer profile can help identify the areas of an email to personalize according to the previously mentioned characteristics.

That way, before even planning your communication strategy for the year, your calendar, or even a mailing in itself, ask yourself questions about the target(s) of your mailings to evaluate all the content to be included.

 

 

How many typical customer profiles do you need?

The ideal number of customer profiles really depends on your organization, your field of business, the products/services sold, and even the number of product categories. Refer to our article on personas to learn more about how to define them.

It is therefore up to you to evaluate the number of people involved in the buying process, as well as the profiles that appear to you as being primary and secondary. Once this number is determined, the next step is to describe them carefully by providing the necessary details for decision-making.

 

 

Create a kind of ID card for your target customer

You need to be able to draw a composite portrait of your ideal customer: the marketing persona. To do this, ask yourself a variety of questions and document the answers to narrow down your customer profiles.

In addition to the first and last name, age, address, family situation, and nationality of your target, you can determine: their personality, specific features, preferences, lifestyle, etc. The description of the typical customer profile will therefore include several demographic aspects, socioeconomic factors, and details on how your target uses the product.

• Generational aspects: The generation (baby boomers, millennials, etc.) and age group of your target are very important. This information can establish clear trends in their preferences and ways of acting.

• Demographic and socioeconomic factors: These will determine the gender, age, ethnic origin, civil status, education level, income level, place of residence, type of neighbourhood, and household composition of your target customer.

• Psychographic factors: This information corresponds to certain attributes that have to do with the passions, activities, interests, or trends that your customers pursue.

• Geographic aspects: These relate to the geographic area of residence and work of the customers that you are targeting. We are talking here about the country, the province, its number of inhabitants, or its climate and type of living environment.

• Reason for buying: This is about determining the advantages that your target is looking for by purchasing your products and services: recognition, convenience, identification, accessibility, status, etc.

• Common behaviours: Even if you are unable to recognize the individual behaviours of your contacts, you can determine trends by clarifying the products most often purchased by a segment, as well as the desired characteristics.

With all this information, you will get a very good identification of the needs and tastes of your target customer. That way, your campaigns can only be enriched! The better you know your target customers, the more able you will be to identify their expectations and thereby create value with your product and service offerings.

 

 

To collect information that you don’t have on your customers, you can:

• Send a form to your customers that they will complete, such as in the context of signing up for your mailing list (newsletter, promotions, etc.).
• Survey your employees by asking them who their best customers are, those with whom they most want to work. Then, ask them a wide variety of questions to familiarize yourself with these people.

 

 

Example of a typical customer profile

The description of the typical profile of a customer of a luxury women’s clothing store: Woman aged 35 to 55, living in Montreal in a downtown condo, single or married, economically independent, with annual income greater than $75,000, who is looking for aesthetics, style, and elegance in her attire, buys clothing to be identified with her social class.

 

 

And what to do with the typical customer profile after?

For the last step of this definition of the typical customer profile, it is simply a matter of matching your communication strategy with these buyer profiles!

To do this, define the line of your campaign according to each persona. Do you have several? No problem! Identify the commonalities between each customer profile and bring out the distinctive points as well to produce a campaign tailored to each one. In all cases, focus on subjects that highlight your expertise so that your strategy is as relevant as possible.

In short, defining your typical customer profile simply lets you understand your customers better. This is a very effective tool that summarizes all the information and observations related to your target. It allows you to position yourself intelligently in your market and carry out your campaigns more successfully.

And if you don’t have the time or simply the desire to embark on this operation, let us support you!