customer profile business plan

10 Easy Steps to Creating a Customer Profile [+ Templates]

Updated: March 29, 2024

Published: April 07, 2023

Customer profiling is essential to serve your customers and meet their needs effectively.

And it's clear why: To market, sell, and offer customer support properly, you must understand buyers and get to know them.

But, what is a customer profile? How can you create one? In this post, we've compiled tips to get you started.

Continue reading or jump ahead:

• What is a customer profile?

Why is customer profiling important?

Customer profiling benefits, customer profile data, methods of customer profiling.

• How to Create a Customer Profile (10 Easy Steps)

Customer Profile Templates

Customer profile examples, 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.

If you don't create customer profiles, you risk marketing to a nondescript audience, leading to wasted time and closed-lost deals.

Defining your ideal customers will help you identify the attributes and purchasing behaviors of the customers whose business you've already won.

What can it actually look like? 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. You can create a customer profile just like this one using our free customer profile templates.

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.

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

You're all set!

Click this link to access this resource at any time.

Fill out the form to download your templates.

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 element of the above template.

Products/Services Used

This section of the customer profile template describes which of your services your customers rely on and how they use them. You can also include other products or services customers use with your service.

If your product can be integrated with another service and customers are successfully meshing your service with another, add that to this section. This will help you better market to other companies or individuals later.

Demographics

Your customers' demographics are an essential piece of your customer profile. When writing this section, include your customer's career, industry, location, and gender identity.

Sure, not every customer will fit your demographic mold, but having a general idea of basic customer information is extremely helpful for your company's bottom line.

Understanding your customers' demographics will help you reach your goals and level up your marketing game.

Customer Benefits

Your customer profile should also include a list of benefits customers receive by using your product or service. How does your product or service provide value to your customers?

Think about how your product or service adds value for your customers and describe it in this section. The best way to answer this question is to ask your customer base. Compile and compare their answers and add a summary here.

Customer Pain Points

While you're surveying your customers, use the survey as an opportunity to ask about their pain points. Ideally, your customers' pain points will be solved by your product or service.

Be sure to list pain points that you can actually solve for your customers. You'll want to focus on these pain points in your customer profile.

Finding the Ideal Customer Profile For Your Business

The best part about customer profiles is that you create them from the already existing pool of customers.

Rather than coming up with ideal, imaginary attributes like you would for a buyer persona , you would survey your current customers and find out the consumers more likely to buy from you.

While a buyer persona provides a fictionalized individual who represents your customers, a customer profile is rooted in the data and factual information of your customer base.

Everything you need to know about a group of customers is captured within this one description. For this reason, a customer profile comes first, and then you build a buyer persona from it.

Once you've defined these qualities of your target audience, you can segment your customer base into different customer profiles.

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.

When building a business, developing a go-to-market strategy, or giving your sales team direction, it's important to clearly describe your current customers.

That way, you know who's more likely to buy your product in the future based on who has bought it in the past.

It also helps you identify the buyer who'll purchase a product from you, which is more valuable than targeting everyone everywhere.

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 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.

Creating customer profiles is critical if you want to grow your business.

Customer profiling helps you do the following.

It helps all departments become more efficient.

Its benefits are impactful across your entire company, starting from your sales team all the way to your service organization. Each department in your company will use a customer profile differently.

Understanding the client is key to creating engaging advertisements or emails for potential prospects and current clients. Marketers use a customer profile to determine how to customize a message for potential prospects and existing customers.

With a customer profile in hand, your sales team will be able to highlight a customer's 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.

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.

A customer who doesn't benefit from your product is likelier to submit an unhappy ticket to your service desk.

It lowers customer acquisition cost.

Customer acquisition cost (CAC) is the amount of money you spend on marketing and sales campaigns to attract a single customer.

By knowing your customer, you can better target your campaigns and increase click-through rates and form submissions.

To summarize: The more specific your customer profile, the less you spend and the more successful your campaign will be.

It empowers you to serve customers better.

Knowing your customers is key to serving them better.

By documenting their pain points, attributes, and characteristics, you can deliver a superior customer service experience before they ever request help.

You can predict issues before they arise, provide effective self-help resources, and better align with their needs if they reach out to your service team.

It reduces customer churn.

Customer churn happens when you lose customers over a predefined period.

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.

A refined customer profile can help your company build more impactful features.

It can also help you find and attract more people that are likely to buy your product, develop a stronger relationship with your customers, and put you on a better trajectory for market dominance.

For these reasons, it's a good idea to include different types of data in your customer profiles.

Here's the data you should gather for your profiling process.

Demographic

Demographics are the concrete characteristics of a customer and can be used to understand consumer behavior, albeit broadly.

Demographics include the following traits (and more):

• Education level
• Family status

If you're in the B2B space, consider attributes such as company size, industry, and other characteristics of the organization.

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:

Psychographics are helpful to understanding the buying journey and even the customer journey after they've already purchased from you.

Whether it's for understanding the triggering events that lead them to purchase or crafting value-based messaging to attract prospects, psychographics are extremely useful to consider.

While psychographics relate to psychological attributes, behavioral segments look at how that's manifested in action.

You may consider segmenting by:

• 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.

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:

Gaining insights based on geography can help your organization think through logistics, support implementation, and marketing.

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.

You can divide the ways you approach customer profiling into 3 main buckets.

The typology method uses what drives the customer to interact with you, or their motivation type.

The brand characteristics method uses customer traist that influence purchasing behavior.

Now that you have this extra guidance, let's dig into creating a customer profile.

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 come up with 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 (we don't blame you), download them now and follow along as we cover the rest of the steps.

Featured Resource: Customer Profile Templates

Download Your Free Templates Here

2. Choose your customer profiling software.

Once you start creating customer profiles, you'll need several types of software.

Remember, you need to collect data from your current customer base to create effective and accurate profiles.

Let's go over the tools you'll need.

If you don't have one already, you should start using a CRM to keep track of contact data.

This software will give you all the basic information you need about your customers, such as their name, business name, location, business type, and more.

This type of basic information is foundational for customer profiling.

Hot tip: 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.

Hot 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.

These are just two examples of the important data points you can get from an analytics tool.

Hot 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 laying out the demographics, it's time to dive deeper. That's where gathering customer feedback comes in.

When building your profile, it's easy to rely on the basic demographic data you get from your CRM. But getting to know your customers is hard if you don't spend time with them.

You need to meet your customers to clearly understand what they're like. This makes customer surveys and interviews one of the best resources for building a customer profile.

Customer interviews allow your team to speak with users face-to-face. They can read their reactions to questions in real time and foster human relationships with your customers.

This helps them uncover valuable information that raw data simply can't show.

If you can't reach a specific group of customers, 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.

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 thinking about the customer's journey will help you understand who you're trying to reach.

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.

With so much data in hand, it's easy to get lost. If you find yourself overwhelmed, bring back 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

7. Examine contextual details.

Once you've defined the external factors that describe your customer profile, digging deeper into the contextual details is critical.

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?

Based on these external factors and contextual details, you should now have a strong grasp of your potential customers' general makeup and goals.

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 major 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.

But, you also don't want to advertise changes that your customers will react negatively to.

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.

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, as well as understand who the decision-makers and influencers are.

Here are some key things to uncover about the people in your customer profile:

• Income level
• How will they use your product/service?
• On what marketing channels can you 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.

10. Analyze and iterate on customer personas.

A customer profile is a key lever for growing your business.

This definition 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 operate in step with your customer profile to inform everything from feature development all the way to go-to market strategy .

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 Versus B2C Customer Profiles

While both types of companies can benefit from customer profiles, B2B and B2C brands will need to survey different audiences.

B2C customers are looking at shoppers from a vast range of demographics. Let's consider Kellogg, for example.

Both parents and college students will add cereal to their shopping carts (albeit different brands). Customer profiles will need to segment these vast buyers.

B2C companies also need to consider geography and how people shop. In-store shoppers will be different from those who get their products online.

Meanwhile, B2B businesses need to think about two categories. Firstly, they'll need to consider the types of organizations they target.

Is the B2B offering crafted for a certain industry? A certain company size? You'll need to look at buyers at an organizational level.

Additionally, B2B businesses need to think about individuals. These teams should make customer profiles for both users and decision-makers at their target organizations.

Having an in-depth understanding of these customers can help you target marketing and sales efforts.

Download your free templates now.

Inside this kit, you'll find:

• Short Customer Profile Template (Word / Google Docs): This one-page template helps you lay out all the basic information about your customer in a convenient bullet-point format. It gives you space to list your customer's demographics, pain points, talking points, retention tactics, and preferred products and services.
• Long Customer Profile Template (Word / Google Docs): 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.
• Colorful Customer Profile Template (PowerPoint / Google Slides): This template is ideal for B2C industries where customers interact face-to-face with your staff members. You have space to list user behaviors, joyful interactions, frustrating interactions, and customer communication notes.
• Corporate Customer Profile Template (PowerPoint / Google Slides): 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.
• Simple Customer Profile Template (PowerPoint / Google Slides): This template lets you list your ideal customer's background, decision-making process, product preferences, wants, goals, and behaviors in easy-to-scan boxes.
• Modern Customer Profile Template (PowerPoint / Google Slides): In this template, you have space to list your target customer's company goals, team challenges, points of satisfaction, and retention tips. We recommend this template for B2B companies, because you'll be profiling an entire organization.
• Buyer's Journey Customer Profile Template (PowerPoint / Google Slides): 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.
• Segmented Customer Profile Template (PowerPoint / Google Slides): 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 with different customer groups.

At a loss for 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.

If you're not sure where to get started, take a look at these top customer profile examples for getting both a granular and overarching overview of your customers.

1. Scorecard

The above example uses the BANT framework . Using 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, the company will reach out to this potential customer with a sales pitch.

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. In a segmented customer profile, each customer type is broken down by demographics, core values, and preferred communication channels.

It includes a short 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

Download this Template

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 to know about each customer type. This includes background data, demographics, and pain points.

This is a great format to use if you want to build a basic customer profile. While the information is surface-level, it's enough to give you an accurate description of your target audience.

Download a free, editable copy of this customer profile example .

4. Buyer Persona

To construct a buyer persona customer profile, you will need to survey your current clients to get an idea of their general buying personality.

It's important to note that the buyer persona usually comes after you have some idea of your customer profile.

Nonetheless, many buyer persona builders can get you thinking critically about your ideal customer by asking valuable qualitative questions.

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 the more they know about their audience, the better chance they have at 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 better understand your customers' purchasing behaviors.

Customer Profiling Will Improve Your Service Experience

By creating thorough customer profiles, you can target better customers in your sales and marketing campaigns, reducing customer churn and resulting in happier customers later down the line.

The more detailed your profile, the more value you can extract from it, making your marketing, sales, and service experiences more effective and valuable for your customers.

Editor's note: This post was originally published in December 2018 and has been updated for comprehensiveness.

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Free templates to build customer profiles for your marketing, sales, and customer service teams.

Service Hub provides everything you need to delight and retain customers while supporting the success of your whole front office

Sales | Templates

What Is a Customer Profile? (+ Free Templates, Examples & Benefits)

Published March 1, 2024

Published Mar 1, 2024

REVIEWED BY: Charity May Amancio

WRITTEN BY: Lorraine Daisy Resuello

This article is part of a larger series on Sales Management .

• 1 Free Templates
• 2 B2B & B2C Profile Examples
• 3 What Are the Benefits of a Customer Profile?
• 4 What Is Customer Profiling?
• 5 Types of Customer Profiling
• 6 How to Build a Customer Profile
• 8 Bottom Line

A customer profile, also called a consumer profile or client profile, is a document that shows the data of a lead who is likely to buy your product or service. Sales teams can create client profile templates to improve lead generation and qualification, increase customer retention, decrease sales team turnover, and align sales and marketing. Read on to learn what a customer profile is, its types, and its benefits. Use our free consumer profile template below as your guide.

Free Templates

The free customer profile templates below, one for the business-to-business (B2B) model and one for the business-to-consumer (B2C), will guide your data collection efforts and provide a sleek vehicle for sharing that information with your team.

FILE TO DOWNLOAD OR INTEGRATE

B2B Customer Profile Template

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B2C Customer Profile Template

B2B & B2C Profile Examples

Here’s a look at two client profile examples for business-to-business (B2B) and business-to-consumer (B2C) sales teams. Feel free to use them as a guide to create your own ideal customer profiles for your sales team to hit your goals with flying colors.

What Are the Benefits of a Customer Profile?

Creating client profiles is an ideal method to better understand your current clients and how they interact with your business. More than that, the process can help you grow your business, especially with these key benefits.

Better Sales & Marketing Alignment

According to Superoffice , aligning their sales and marketing efforts led to a 34% revenue increase. One of the best ways to achieve sales and marketing alignment is through a common understanding of the business’ ideal customer. By developing and sharing a consumer profile example, sales and marketing teams can stay on the same page, from lead generation to sales targeting .

Improved Lead Qualification & Generation

Lead qualification is the analysis of a potential deal’s likelihood of closing. It helps sales reps weed out the most unlikely buyers so that more time can be spent nurturing the leads most likely to become paying customers. By generating leads that match a profile example, sales and marketing teams increase the number of qualified leads sales reps carry to the next step of the sales process.

Decreased Sales Team Turnover

Building sales efforts around an ideal consumer profile template can reduce this frustration and improve sales reps’ chances of success. This helps them save time and effort, improving their efficiency and boosting their morale by working on core sales activities, like product demos.

Increased Customer Retention

Creating these profiles ensures sales reps and other team members know their clients well, from where they live to their overall spending habits. Whether answering an online complaint or offering a new product add-on, this information can be used during every customer interaction. This results in top-tier service and customers who remain steadfastly loyal .

What Is Customer Profiling?

Customer profiling is the process of identifying the fact-based characteristics of customers based on demographics, psychographics, spending habits, brand interactions, and other factors. Sales teams use client profiles as a basis to determine the likelihood of a new customer or lead buying their product or service. If your lead matches the client profile you created, you can tag the prospect as a warm or hot lead.

Types of Customer Profiling

The profile of a customer tells a lot about their needs, interests, and preferences, which is crucial in personal selling or personalizing the sales experience. Sales teams should segment customers by gathering accurate and relevant data to create the best customer profile. Here are the different types of customer profiling:

Demographic Profiling

Demographic profiling segments customers by age, gender, marital status, and ethnicity, as well as by education, job title, and income. Marketers and customer support agents often use demographic data to personalize messaging and determine the communication preferences of leads and customers.

For example, let’s say you find a customer who lives in Philadelphia, earns $150,000 per year, and sends their kids to a private school. You can use that data to find additional context, including how much they spend on vacations each year, the approximate value of their home, and how often they buy a new car. Use that information to adjust your sales plan template and product offerings.

Psychographic Profiling

Psychographic profiling segments customers by their traits, beliefs, values, opinions, lifestyle, political affiliation, religion, and other qualities. Gathering psychographic data, despite its subjective nature, gives you valuable insights into what your leads and customers think about your offerings.

For instance, you can survey customers about their purchasing motivation, how they typically engage with company outreach, and preferred methods of communication. To supplement this data, a conversation with sales reps can be beneficial, as they have regularly interacted with customers and can provide key insights.

Behavioral Profiling

This type of customer profiling defines overall customer interaction with your brand. Behavioral profiling covers the spending habits, buying patterns, and feedback or reviews of your prospects and customers and how they use your product or service. You can use behavioral data to provide tailored recommendations and find upsell and cross-sell opportunities.

For example, if you own an ecommerce store and want to determine the peak days consumers usually buy your highly in-demand products, you can use advanced analytics in a customer relationship manager (CRM) to determine their buying patterns. You can also study the ratings and reviews left by verified customers.

Geographic Profiling

Among the different types of customer profiling, geographic profiling describes customers by their physical location, language, workplace, and culture. Geographic profiling is influenced by cultural and environmental factors, which can impact people’s shopping habits.

For instance, you can profile your customers by their first language, such as English or Spanish. You can also profile customers according to their culture or customs. Chinese customs, for example, have a strong sense of family as influenced by Confucianism. Hence, if you run a restaurant, products that further promote the qualities of a united family, like glutinous rice cakes and Feng Shui lucky charms, will surely be in demand for this customer segment.

How to Build a Customer Profile

Using the free templates above, you can create customer profiles that match your target audience, starting with identifying the data type you want to collect and organizing them in a way that sales reps can easily identify similar qualities. The steps below can guide you on how to manage these datasets and share your customer profiles to your team.

1. Collect & Organize Demographic Data About Your Audience

Customer relationship management (CRM) systems are great resources for the demographic data you’ll need when creating a profile. CRM software is designed to catalog contact names, titles, email addresses, purchase histories, and other client details.

To gather the psychographic information that reveals lifestyle, values, attitudes, and beliefs, administering a survey to current customers is an ideal method. HubSpot, Salesforce, and Zoho CRM integrate with SurveyMonkey, for example, making soliciting responses from your client base even easier.

Salesforce’s Customer 360 Data Manager gathers customer information from multiple sources and presents it on a “360 View” dashboard. (Source: Salesforce )

SurveyMonkey seamlessly integrates with HubSpot and other CRMs, allowing you to easily survey current customers. (Source: HubSpot )

Visit HubSpot or Visit Salesforce

Even after you gather customer information, you may have some holes in the data you’ll need to fill with further research from external sources. In this case, the U.S. Census , Brandwatch , and Resonate are all tools that can assist with this.

Once you have your data, sort the information and look for shared traits. For instance, imagine you own a B2B public relations firm. When you sort your customer data by yearly revenue, you find clients grossing more than $2 million annually spend, on average, $75,000 on public relations (PR) services.

You discover those companies have an in-house team focusing on local publicity while seeking outside assistance for national efforts. With this information, you create a profile that will assist sales management as you seek additional clients in that category.

2. Build Out & Share Your Profiles

There are multiple ways to build your profile. You can use our free templates above, or you can use software like HubSpot’s Make My Persona . (Make My Persona can be used for customer profiles and customer personas, which are semi-fictional.)

HubSpot’s Make My Persona software provides turnkey consumer profile templates. (Source: HubSpot )

The most important aspect of creating a singular profile, or even an entire customer profile database, is developing something that is easily shareable. Once passed along to members of your sales and marketing teams via templates, email, web form, or any other sales enablement resource, these profiles can help you create a new sales process or refine your existing ones.

With Zoho CRM, you can also tag leads with profile names if they share similar traits, which is valuable in creating a sales and marketing customer profile. This allows you to easily filter contacts based on shared characteristics and deploy that newly refined sales process to close more deals.

Zoho CRM dashboard showing lead information (Source: Zoho CRM )

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Frequently Asked Questions

What are the 4 types of customer profiles.

Demographic, psychographic, behavioral, and geographic profiles are the four types of customer profiles. Each client profile has a set of data specific to each customer or lead, which marketing, sales, and customer service teams collect to create the best customer profiles and sales and marketing customer profile templates.

What is an ideal customer profile example?

The ideal customer profile includes a combination of qualitative and quantitative data. Aside from the client’s personal information, the best customer profiles include communication preferences, interests, and purchase browsing history. All this data is securely stored and managed in a customer relationship management (CRM) system.

What is the best way to profile customers?

Building customer profiles accurately involves collecting and using information that describes your customers, their experiences, pain points, preferences, and behavior. The best way to gather data for profiling is by sending out surveys, reading through product or service reviews, conducting focus group discussions, and responding promptly to customer support queries.

Bottom Line

Consumer profile refers to a fact-based description of a lead or customer who’s likely to purchase your products and services. Sales teams can use these profiles to improve lead generation and qualification, boost customer retention, reduce sales team turnover, and align sales and marketing efforts. You can use our free customer profile templates above and populate them with data from your current customer base to reap these benefits for your small business.

About the Author

Find Lorraine Daisy On LinkedIn

Lorraine Daisy Resuello

Lorraine Daisy Resuello is a specialist at Fit Small Business who focuses on Sales and Customer Service topics. Before joining FSB, she worked as a freelance writer covering technology, digital marketing, and business topics. She collaborated with companies in the US, UK, Canada, Singapore, and the Philippines. Additionally, she has experience in customer service in business process outsourcing (BPO). At present, she uses her decade-long writing experience to provide FSB readers with the best answers to their questions.

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How to Write the Customer Analysis Section of Your Business Plan

Written by Dave Lavinsky

What is a Customer Analysis?

The customer analysis section which incorporates the essential steps of writing a business plan step-by-step is a key component of your business plan and assesses the customer segments your company serves. The objective of the customer analysis is to justify your market choice, identify differentiators, and prioritize the segments you are targeting.

Components of a Customer Analysis

A complete customer analysis contains 3 primary sections:

• Identify your target customers
• Convey the needs of these customers
• Show how your products and/or services satisfy these needs

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Why Conduct a Customer Analysis?

A thorough customer analysis provides the following benefits:

• Supports your market choice and helps you avoid entering too broad a market
• Helps you focus on serving current customers rather than trying to find new ones
• Enables you to determine which segments to prioritize and how much effort to put into each one
• Helps you craft a strategic marketing plan and platform to reach these customer segments

How to Write Your Customer Analysis

The first step of the customer analysis is to define exactly which customers the company is serving. This requires specificity. It is not adequate to say the company is targeting small businesses, for example, because there are several million of these types of customers. Rather, an expert business plan writer must identify precisely the customers it is serving, such as small businesses with 10 to 50 employees based in large metropolitan cities on the West Coast.

When defining your target market, be sure to identify the following:

• The market segment you are choosing to serve (i.e., age range, annual income, etc.)
• The geographic location of these customers (i.e., city, region, state)
• What is the average revenues/income of these customers?

Once the plan has clearly identified and defined the company’s target customers and the customer demographics, it is necessary to determine the size of your target market: How many potential customers fit the given definition and is this customer base growing or decreasing?

Next, the business plan must detail these customers’ needs. Conveying customer needs could take the form of past actions (X% have purchased a similar product in the past), future projections (when interviewed, X% said that they would purchase product/service Y), and/or implications (because X% use a product/service which our product/service enhances/replaces, then X% need our product/service).

Prioritize the needs of your target customer according to how critical they are, and include a description of each in your customer analysis. Be sure to answer questions such as: 

• What pain points do these customers have? How is their current situation lacking? 
• What will your product/service do to help solve these problems?

The business plan customer analysis must also detail the drivers of customer decision-making. Sample questions to answer include:

• Do the customers find price to be more important than the quality of the product or service?
• Are customers looking for the highest level of reliability, or will they have their own support and just seek a basic level of service?
• Why will customers purchase your product and/or service rather than look for cheaper alternatives?

Prioritize the benefits of your products and services according to how much difference they make for customers and include a description of each in your customer analysis. Be sure to answer questions such as:

• What does your product do? How is it unique or better than other similar products?
• What type of customer could benefit the most from this feature/benefit and why?

Be sure to also show an understanding of the actual decision-making process. Examples of questions to be answered here include:

• Will the customer consult others in their organization/family before making a decision?
• Will the customer seek multiple bids?
• Will the product/service require significant operational changes (e.g., will the customer have to invest time to learn new technologies, and will the product/service cause other members within the organization to lose their jobs? etc.)

Finally, identify each segment you are targeting and how much effort you will put into reaching them. Be sure to answer questions such as:

• How many customers are in each segment and how much revenue will they generate?
• What percentage of total industry sales does this represent?
• What market potential did we estimate for each segment and how does that compare with actual sales? Include the number of leads converted and average deal size.

Example Customer Analysis Template for a Candle Making Company

The needs of this customer segment are that they are looking for high-quality candles that are made with all-natural ingredients. The benefits of their product that are most important to them are that the candles are vegan, eco-friendly, and made with essential oils. Drivers of customer purchase decisions include quality, price, and unique offerings. The company’s target market size is 750,000 people which represent a significant portion of the candle industry. They will put effort into reaching these customers through online advertising, social media posts, and word-of-mouth.

It is essential to truly understand customers to develop a successful business and marketing plan. That’s why including a customer analysis in your business plan is so crucial. Likewise, sophisticated investors require comprehensive profiles of a company’s target customers. By spending the time researching and analyzing customers in your target market, you will develop both enhance your business strategy and funding success.

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Other Resources for Writing Your Business Plan

How to Write a Great Business Plan Executive Summary How to Expertly Write the Company Description in Your Business Plan How to Write the Market Analysis Section of a Business Plan Completing the Competitive Analysis Section of Your Business Plan The Management Team Section of Your Business Plan Financial Assumptions and Your Business Plan How to Create Financial Projections for Your Business Plan Best Business Plan Software Everything You Need to Know about the Business Plan Appendix Business Plan Conclusion: Summary & Recap

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How to Write a Customer Analysis Section for Your Business Plan

Free Customer Analysis Template

Ayush Jalan

• February 12, 2024

A successful business idea equips customers with the tools necessary to help them reach their goals and fulfill their needs—professional or personal. To create such products and services that meet (and exceed) your customers’ expectations, you need to study their personas via customer analysis.

Customer analysis is a vital part of your business plan that helps you identify, define, and understand your customer base. Analyzing your customers is also crucial for creating a successful marketing plan, as it helps you communicate better with your customers.

In this article, you will learn how to conduct a customer analysis section for your business plan paired with a customer analysis example to help you create customer personas to study their personality traits, goals, challenges they face, and more.

What Is Customer Analysis?

Customer analysis is a comprehensive understanding of your customer base. It helps identify and describe your ideal customer. Through this in-depth analysis, you determine their needs, challenges, goals, and other important considerations. Given this info, it then helps you understand how effectively your products cater to them.

It further helps you optimize your strategic marketing process to create targeted advertisements, customize and prioritize specific features during product development, and make adjustments in your current business plan to align with your customer’s ever-changing demands.

How to Write a Customer Analysis Section

Writing a customer analysis includes extensive research and collecting data from various sources. This data consists of qualitative and quantitative aspects which help you write an accurate customer analysis for your business plan.

Writing a customer analysis has four main steps:

Step 1: Identify your customers

The primary step is to identify your potential customers and define their specific characteristics about them. The attained factual information is segmented into the following categories:

• Demographic: Age, gender, income
• Geographic: Location, type of area (Rural, suburban, urban)
• Psychographic: Values, interests, beliefs, personality, lifestyle, social class
• Technographic: Type of technology the buyer is using; tech-savviness
• Behavioral: Habits, frequent actions, buying patterns
• Industry (For B2B): Based on the industry a company belongs to.
• Business size (For B2B): Size of the company

To obtain the above data, a great place to start for established businesses is your customer database. If you aim to expand this information, you can use your existing communication channels to gather further details through surveys.

If you are a startup, conducting an audience analysis  might seem impossible as you don’t have an existing customer base. Fortunately, there are numerous ways through which you can study your potential customers. A few of them are:

• Identifying who would benefit from your product/service
• Analyzing your competitors to understand their target customers
• Using social media to prompt potential buyers to answer questionnaires

Want to create a Customer Persona in Easy Steps?

Generate valuable customer insights in minutes with Free Customer Persona Generator .

Step 2: Define the needs of your Customers

Now that you have identified your customers, the next step is to understand and specify their needs and challenges. This is the step where you need to go hands-on with your research. Getting to know your customers’ needs helps you determine whether or not your product or service hits the mark.

To understand the needs of your customers, you can adopt the following approaches:

1. Engage directly with potential Customers

A very reliable way to get to know your customers is to simply ask them, either in person or on a call. You can reach out to your customers, conduct one-on-one interviews, create focus groups, and invite buyers to test your new products. You can collect an ample amount of data through these techniques.

However, we recommend prioritizing accuracy over the quantity of data.

A technique that can help you get a deeper insight into your customer’s needs and opinions is the five whys technique . While practicing so, be mindful of the way you conduct the interview. It is essential to keep the customers in a comfortable and conversational environment to attain accurate answers.

2. Collect data from your Customer support

Customer support is the place where you can find feedback and criticism given by your customers. Analyzing this data helps you understand the pain points of your customers. You can further elaborate on this data by interacting with the customers who had issues with your products.

3. Run surveys and mention statistics

Talking to your customers helps you get qualitative information that you can use to alter your product or services according to your customers. The next part is to attain quantitative information, in other words, presenting numbers to support the previous data.

Conducting surveys is one of the commonly used methods for quantifying information. You can conduct in-app surveys, post-purchase surveys, or link surveys in email and apps, etc.

The second method is by collecting statistical data to support your conclusions from the interviews. These include stating studies related to customer choices, results from popular surveys, etc.

Step 3: Create a Customer Persona

Now, it’s time you present the information using a customer persona. A customer persona is a representation of a segment of customers with similar traits. Creating customer personas helps you process the data more efficiently.

You can use customer persona templates that are available online. To help get you started, we have created a customer persona example.

Customer Persona Example

Customer profile example of an internet service provider:

• About: A lot of customers remain at home and have a minimal and easy-going lifestyle. They need high-speed, interruption-free internet access.
• Demographics: Age is between 30 and 40, has a laid-back lifestyle, lives in suburban areas, and the income range is between $10,000 to $40,000.
• Professional role: Shop owners, employees, freelancers, etc.
• Identifiers/Personality traits: Introverts, like routines, makes schedules prefer online shopping, and stick with the companies they trust.
• Goals: Wants easily available service, and 24×7 customer support, prefers self-service technologies and chatbots over interacting with representatives.
• Challenges: Fluctuating internet connection while working or consuming media. Not enough signal coverage.

Step 4: Explain the product alignment to the Customer’s Needs

You’ve gathered info and created customer personas. The final step is to explain how your product or service caters to the needs of your customers. Here, you specify the solution you offer to your customers to tackle the challenges they face.

Mention the USPs of your product and its features, and they benefit the customer. Here, you also mention how your offerings make your customers’ lives better.

Create Better Solutions with Customer Analysis

Understanding your customers inside out helps you assist them better in solving their problems while also achieving success. Analyze your customers as often as required to stay updated about their ever-changing needs.

This helps you create better offerings to consistently fulfill their expectations. As a result, this builds up loyalty over time with each success.

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About the Author

Ayush is a writer with an academic background in business and marketing. Being a tech-enthusiast, he likes to keep a sharp eye on the latest tech gadgets and innovations. When he's not working, you can find him writing poetry, gaming, playing the ukulele, catching up with friends, and indulging in creative philosophies.

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What Is a Customer Profile? 5 Steps to Create Your Customer Profile

Imagine having to cook dinner for a friend’s parents without getting to know them first. 

You could end up making sugar-filled desserts for diabetics. Or worse, serving meat to vegans. 

Marketing without a customer profile is essentially just that.

A leap in the dark.

Most business owners have big dreams: exponential growth, market-leading companies as clients, and millions in revenue. 

But before your company can make it big, you need a plan for how you’re going to build a solid customer base. 

That’s where a customer profile comes in handy. It makes it easy for you to tailor campaigns to the specific behaviors, pain points, and needs of people who’re most likely to buy your products and services. 

In this article, we’ll cover everything you need to know about a customer profile – including what it is, how you can benefit from it, and how to create one for your business. 

Post Contents

What Is a Customer Profile?

Targeted content, cheaper ads, customer loyalty, product/market fit , 1. identify your best customers, 2. list their notable attributes.

• 4. Fill in your customer profile template

Examples of Customer Profile [Templates]

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A customer profile (sometimes referred to as consumer profile) is a document that lists pain points, interests, buying patterns, and demographic characteristics of a company’s customers. 

The document is presented in a manner that makes it look like a description of a real person, with a full name and an image or avatar. Below is an example :

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Building a customer profile can help you run better marketing campaigns that, in turn, increase your profits. With all that useful information, you can decide which strategy to implement and which ones to avoid. 

For example, if the profile says your ideal customer loves engaging with brands on Instagram, then you should probably focus on improving your Instagram marketing .

It’s worth mentioning that a customer profile for a B2C company would look different than that of a B2B firm. The latter defines the ideal customer using firmographics, such as:

• Company size
• Location 

So if you sell to other companies, you’ll need to find out how big they are, what sector they are in, and how much they make on average in a year.

Advantages of Customer Profiling

You can’t be all things to all people, but you can create a customer profile to learn more about your ideal customer, who they are, and what they do. This can help you in the following ways.

Let’s say you’re a nutritionist and you send out a weekly newsletter to your clients that includes dietary recommendations. 

If your customer profile reveals that young gym-goers between 20 and 30 are your main customers, you can tailor your content in a way that augments their lifestyle and preferences. 

For example, you can feature a recipe for a low-calorie pizza or burger in your email newsletter , as millennials love eating these food items. 

With an ideal customer profile on your screen, you’ll know the exact characteristics your target audiences share. Such insights help improve your marketing because you can use the information to actively target precise consumer segments. 

For example, if your customer profile notes that potential buyers use iPhones to browse and shop online, you can include their device preferences in audience targeting when creating Facebook ads for your business 

Put simply, it’s much easier to run cheaper ads when you know a thing or two about who you want to reach.

When you’re  aware of your customers’ likes and dislikes, you can engage with them on a personal level. This should improve their overall experience with your company and build loyalty towards your business . 

According to Customer Experience Matrix , 79 percent of consumers are more loyal to a business that understands them. Considering that a 7 percent increase in loyalty can boost company profits by as much as 85 percent, taking steps to enhance the customer experience will help improve your bottom line.

As you uncover the desires and pain points of your target audience, you can personalize their experiences and also provide better resources to make them loyal to your brand. 

Improved Account-Based Marketing

If your company uses an account-based marketing (AMB) strategy, you’ll need to find ways to personalize the communication you have with each client.

This requires putting time into learning about every individual client, which can be difficult for a small business . 

Fortunately, you can create a customer profile to identify the traits of your target accounts and ABM techniques to deliver highly personalized campaigns based on those particular attributes.

Here’s an example: Suppose your target account is a midsize construction company with 25 employees, and customer profiling reveals the owner likes to read case studies to learn more about other businesses. You can write a case study of your own on how you have helped companies that fit this profile increase their revenue. Personalized content is as good as any other tailored strategy for boosting ROI. 

In many cases, companies have multiple consumer groups that have different behaviors, tastes, and preferences. If you’re one of such companies, you need to know what each consumer group wants and how they want it.  

You can generate a lot of sales by running promotions and discounts, but at some point, you’ll need to segment your customers and tailor your offerings to match their needs. By creating a customer profile for each audience group, you’ll have the information you can use to tailor products to different segments.

In case of an ecommerce product, you might offer different features based on whether a senior or a young adult has ordered your item. For example, it can be a good idea to send a basic instruction manual with products that are going out to older customers.

What Is the Difference Between A Customer Profile and A Buyer Persona?

Marketers often use ‘customer profiles’ and ‘buyer personas’ interchangeably, but they are two different terms that serve different purposes.

A customer profile represents the type of person who would be a good fit for your product or service. It tends to include demographics, lifestyle attributes, and behavioral attributes of the individual.

On the other hand, a buyer persona is a hypothetical representation of customers you want to reach based on qualitative data points like aims, motivations, pain points, etc. 

So while both a customer profile and a buyer persona represent the type of customer you’d like to serve, a customer profile allows you to dig deeper into their demographics and other attributes. The insights can help you find new prospects and tailor marketing campaigns to customers.

How to Create a Customer Profile in 5 Steps

Don’t just rely on guesswork when deciding what to include in your customer profile. 

Instead, take a systematic approach to gathering information and data on your ideal customers. 

By understanding things like a customer’s needs, shopping behaviors, and more, you can figure out the best ways to reach this target audience.

Here are five simple steps for creating a customer profile. 

The first step is to find and analyze people who are in love with your products or services. 

From your existing customer base, list down five to ten clients who’re getting the most value out of your offerings – value in terms of how you are helping them achieve their objectives.

Some questions to ask yourself to find your best customers are: 

• Which customers have been with my company the longest?
• Who’s been referring my business to their friends and family?
• Which customers have I featured in my case studies?

If you’re a new company and don’t have a whole lot of clients to work with, think about the type of people who would get the most out of your product or service. 

If you’re selling ergonomic table stands, for instance, you can consider computer users to be one of your best customers.

Once you’ve compiled a list of your best customers, write down all their important attributes. The main attributes usually relate to:

Demographics 

Demographic attributes reveal the age, gender, race, ethnicity, and religion of your ideal customers. With this information at your fingertips, it becomes easy to build products or services that they’d find useful. 

For instance, a chic female clothing store should only market its products to young female audiences who have an interest in buying stylish apparel. 

Psychographics

Psychographics offer a deeper understanding of your customers’ beliefs and values. They include things like:

• Activities : Netflix, exercise, baking, etc.
• Lifestyle : Extrovert, stay indoors, socialize thrice a week, etc. 
• Values : No alcohol, moderate views, etc. 
• Aspirations : Work-life balance, grow following on Instagram, etc. 
• Pain points and fears : Low-quality product, hidden charges, etc. 

The psychographic part of your customer profile helps you create and market products that speak to the way people think, their pain points, and their emotional triggers. 

Socioeconomics

Most ideal customer profiles also feature attributes related to education, income, neighborhood, and household size. But you can even research what socioeconomic class your best customers fall into.

The main socio-economic classes are:

• Upper class
• Middle class
• Lower middle class
• Skilled worker class
• Unemployed class

Your chances of meeting your customers’ expectations should significantly improve when you have a clear picture of their socioeconomic attributes.

Geographic segmentation

Do your customers live in a tax-free state? What’s the culture like in their town or city? Geographic segmentation helps you answer these and other location-specific questions about your customers. 

This information can be particularly valuable if you sell items that are subject to differences in regional taxes, population, or climate. 

A car company, for instance, would be able to use geographic segmentation to determine the type of vehicles they should produce in greater quantities. 

If most of its best customers reside in rural areas, it’d make sense for the company to make cars with thick and heavy tires that allow customers to navigate bumpy roads with ease. 

Firmographics (if it’s a B2B customer profile)

As we mentioned earlier, B2B customer profiles tend to include firmographics. This is where you write down the industry, size, geography, total employees, number of customers, and annual revenue of your clients. 

If you’re using a CRM tool to track the sales for your company, you should be able to source most of these firmographics with ease.

Crunchbase is also a goldmine for researching company-related data. The platform offers filters such as categories, number of employees, and total funding amount to help you gain insight into the firmographics of a particular company. 

3. Survey them

As you’re writing out the above attributes, you’ll realize you have more knowledge about some customers than about others.That’s where surveys can help fill the gaps.

You can use tools like SurveyMonkey or Google Forms to create surveys on specific customer traits . Below are some ideas for the type of questions to include in your survey:

Demographic-related questions

You should keep in mind that these are very personal and sensitive questions. 

As a result, you have to pay special attention to the way you structure them. One idea is to give consumers multiple answers to choose from for some demographic questions. 

Here are a few examples you can replicate:

• What is your nationality?
• From 1944 to 1964
• From 1965 to 1979
• From 1980 to 1994
• From 1995 onward
• Other (please specify)
• What is your relationship status?

Socioeconomic-related questions

These questions also ask for private information, so it’s best to use multiple-choice answers here as well. Below are a few examples to give you an idea of which questions to ask in order to gain socioeconomic data:

• Employed full-time
• Employed part-time
• Self-employed
• What is your highest educational qualification?
• $14,999 or less
• $15,000 to $34,999
• $35,000 to $49,999
• $50,000 to 74,999
• $75,000 to $99,999
• $100,000 or more

Psychographic-related questions

Since there are so many potential answers to these types of questions, you can ask open-ended questions like the ones below:

• What hobbies do you enjoy?
• What do you value most in life?
• What factors affect your decision to buy a product or service?

Geographic-related questions

These are generally easy-to-answer questions about a consumer’s geographical location, such as:

• In what region are you situated?
• How would you describe the weather in your area?
• Are you exempt from paying taxes in your region?

Firmographic-related questions

Again, the answers to these questions are not complex or sensitive, so you can use open-ended questions like:

• How many years has your company been in business?
• How many workers are currently employed by your company?
• What industry does your company specialize in?
• How many branches does your company have?

4. Extract data from your online channels

Your online channels are a goldmine of customer data, so tap into them to learn more about your audience. Each marketing channel can reveal new insights on who your customers are, what topics they are interested in, and what they’re sharing on the web. 

Analyze your:

• Email Data – Reveals how often your customers engage with your brand and what type of content (newsletter, blog links, plain emails, etc.) gets them to read your messages.
• Web Analytics – Shows the content and products they are interested in and gives insight into how they navigate your webpages.
• Social Media Analytics – Determines the platforms they follow you on and what type of content they like to share and comment on.

With that, you have gained tons of valuable insights to inform your customer profile.

5. Fill in your customer profile template

Now that you’ve surveyed your top customers, covered all their attributes, and gained a complete overview of why they give you their business, compose your research into one single document – this will serve as your customer profile.

If you’re of how to structure the document, list the information in the following order:

• Give your customer a name 
• Put a face to their profile
• Add their demographic information
• List their psychographic and socioeconomic attributes
• Include a quote from the customer
• Add their goals, pain points, and motivators
• Add the type of communication channels they would prefer to use

When creating a customer profile, the level of detail you go into is entirely up to you. But we recommend keeping it simple to avoid analysis paralysis with the insights.

While you can create a customer profile document from scratch, it’s always easier to use a template. 

Many different customer profile templates are available to help you in creating powerful user personas. Just fill in the fields with the details you have. You can also remove or add fields based on the data you and your business have available.

Even if you don’t prefer templates, these customer profile examples are a good starting point to give you an idea of what real-world profiles look like and the type of information you can include in your document.

So, here are a few customer profile templates:

Research & Discovery’s Customer Profile Template

Research & Discovery offers a simple template that’ll cover most of your ideal customers’ attributes. 

Minimalist.Business’ Customer Profile Template

Though a barebones document, Minimalist.Business’ customer profile template lists all the important attributes. 

Red Caffeine’s Customer Profile Template

Red Caffeine’s customer profile template is ideal for B2B companies because it covers most of the firmographics required for effective outreach and client nurturing.

Creately’s Customer Profile Template

Creately’s customer profile template is easy to fill. You can use the first 5 boxes for listing your ideal customer’s attributes, and the last one for sharing a verdict or opinion on the findings. 

The Five Abilities’ Customer Profile Template

The Five Abilities’ customer profile template reminds us to narrow down our field of potential customers. While some businesses feel that everyone can benefit from their offerings, it doesn’t mean everyone is a good fit. 

That’s it. You’ve learned everything you need to know about creating a customer profile.

Once you create one, make sure to share it with your business partners, employees, sales and marketing teams. 

Doing so will give them a better idea about what kinds of strategies to adopt. Plus, they’ll  be able to use them to guide their buyer personas and create even better promotional campaigns.

In summary, here are the five steps to build a customer profile:

• Identify your best customers
• Make a list of their notable attributes 
• Create surveys on specific customer traits
• Extract customer data from your online channels
• Fill in your customer profile template

Have you created a customer profile for your business? Let us know in the comments below.

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How to Write a Customer Analysis

Elon Glucklich

9 min. read

Updated October 27, 2023

You’ve been hard at work conducting market research into your potential customers— developing a deep understanding of industry dynamics and the potential size of your market .

Hopefully, you’ve also spent time interviewing potential customers—learning about their behaviors and needs, and digging into publicly available data to support your research. 

But you still need to document these findings in a way that gives you an actionable road map to grow your customer base.

This is where a well-written customer analysis can be extremely useful. 

Including a customer analysis in your business plan will boost your marketing efforts by identifying your target customers , their needs, and how your product or service addresses these needs.

• Customer analysis vs market analysis

A market analysis is a broader exploration of the market and potential customers.  A customer analysis zooms in on the specific behavioral or demographic characteristics of individual customer segments in your target market.

The market analysis includes details like the number of customers you hope to serve and the types of competitors you must contend with. 

By contrast, the customer analysis looks at the specific attributes of your potential customers – their personal habits, values, beliefs, and other characteristics that might affect their purchasing decisions.

• What should a customer analysis include?

Demographics

Some of the earliest information you’ve collected probably about your customers includes:

• Gender/ethnicity
• Income level
• Geographic area
• Education level

Example: Suppose you own a business that creates an environmentally friendly cleaning product . Your customer demographics might include: 

• Age range: 30-60 (old enough to have used a variety of cleaning products in their homes)
• Income: Above average (more likely to buy a higher-priced alternative to discount cleaning products)
• Education level: college degree or equivalent (high enough education level to understand the product’s societal benefits).
• Employment: full-time employee

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Values and beliefs

This section captures the psychological and emotional factors that influence customer behavior. 

• Cultural backgrounds
• Ethical values

Let’s return to the environmentally friendly cleaning product example. You are more likely to attract customers who prioritize sustainability and are willing to pay more for products that match their values.

Buying behaviors

Analyzing buying behaviors involves understanding how, when, and why customers purchase. These behaviors impact:

• The channels customers prefer for shopping
• Price sensitivity
• Factors that trigger a buying decision

Example: Suppose you’re running an environmentally friendly cleaning products business. In that case, you might discover that most of your customers buy their cleaning products from a magazine for homeowners or that they typically buy multiple cleaning products simultaneously. 

Technology use

Nearly three-quarters of small businesses have a website . Even if your business doesn’t have one, your customers are, without a doubt, browsing the internet. 

So it’s critical to understand how your target customers interact with technology and to set up an online presence for your business if you aren’t already active. 

Key questions about customers’ technology habits include:

• Are they active on social media? If so, which platforms? 
• Do they prefer online shopping or in-store visits? 
• Are they more likely to respond to email marketing, blog content, or social media campaigns?

Example: Let’s say you discover that significantly more of your target customers visit websites like yours on a smartphone than a desktop. In that case, it would be important to optimize your website for mobile viewing or develop a user-friendly app . 

• 5 steps to write a customer analysis for your business plan

Now that we understand the individual pieces of a customer analysis, we’ll examine how to write a customer analysis for your business plan .

1. Use existing data

Regardless of your country, there are likely numerous sources of data published by government agencies, private industry, or educational institutions that could be relevant to your business.

Finding existing data is the best starting point for your customer analysis. It’s easy to find, it’s regularly updated, and it’s immensely valuable for providing context for your research. 

For instance, if you determine that your target demographic is people between 30 and 60, Census data can help you determine the number of residents in your selling area within that age range.

We’ll look at some examples of publicly available data for businesses operating in the United States.

U.S. Census Bureau

The Census Bureau publishes official population counts for the country, states, and local communities. Demographic characteristics like age, gender, and race sort the data. Census data also includes useful data for businesses, such as the total number of businesses, employment counts, and average incomes in local communities across the country.

Bureau of Labor Statistics

Data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics tracks changes in the U.S. workforce and the overall state of the labor market. The BLS publishes the Consumer Price Index , tracks consumer spending, and gauges overall consumer confidence. 

Examining this data can give you insights into the willingness of consumers to pay for your product or service.

Bureau of Economic Analysis

The Bureau of Economic Analysis takes a broader look at the performance of the U.S. Economy. You can use BEA data to find personal income and corporate profit data by industry. 

If you make a product or service used by other businesses, these figures can help you understand the financial health of the broad customer base you’re targeting.

Federal Reserve

The Federal Reserve publishes various financial reports, such as consumer credit and spending statistics , as well as the health of banks. 

This data can give you important context about the financial health of your customers, which could help you determine pricing strategies—like whether you should offer flexible payment plans.

Industry associations

There are thousands of private sector industry associations in the United States alone. These organizations not only advocate for the businesses in their field. They provide members with a wealth of helpful information, such as “state of the industry” reports and business surveys. 

You should leverage customer data from these peer organizations as a business owner.

Academic institutions

Many university business schools make their research publicly available online. Scholars make a career out of researching market and industry trends, and much of their work is available through online searches. 

2. Review customer feedback

One of the most direct ways to show an understanding of your customers in your analysis is by reviewing their feedback.

If you’re a new business without direct customer feedback yet, that’s OK. Instead, look around at what people are saying about your competitors . You might find common complaints from customers in your industry about the products available. 

You can then reach out and interview potential customers to better understand their needs.

If you have an existing business, there may already be reviews of your company on Google or social media sites like LinkedIn. Doing so can help you determine if customers are struggling to use your product or have suggestions for improvements. 

Read as many reviews as possible, and use them to show an understanding of your customers’ needs in your analysis.

3. Use third-party data

So far, we’ve discussed free, publicly available sources to find information about your customers. 

But for those willing to dig deeper, third-party data providers can help you uncover information that’s truly unique to your business and your customers.

Google Analytics

Third-party data providers like Google track the activity of users across numerous websites. Google has its own tool, Google Analytics , which makes that information available on your company’s website.

This data is a gold mine for understanding your customers. Besides giving you a demographic and geographic breakdown of your visitors, it can tell if they view your site on a desktop or smartphone, what pages they’re clicking, navigating around your site, and much more.

For new business owners, Google Trends is a powerful tool to discover what people are searching for online. 

For the environmentally friendly cleaning products business we’ve used as an example—you could see how many people are searching on Google for information about products like floor cleaners or dishwasher detergents.

Social media metrics

If your business uses social media, there are plenty of tools to help you understand your audience on these platforms. 

Many social media companies make their data available to businesses at a cost. For instance, the Facebook Audience Insights platform gives you information about the types of people who visit your page or interact with your posts.

There are also third-party tools like Hootsuite, Sprout Social, and Buffer, which track various metrics across social media platforms.

Wherever you find the data, including social media metrics in your customer analysis provides instant feedback about how customers interact with your business.

Specialty tools

Software companies have created numerous tools that collect and analyze customer data from various online sources. 

Audience research tools like SparkToro and FullStory analyze large amounts of data online and spot trends—such as the topics people discuss online and which websites or social media accounts those audiences visit. 

These are insights that would be incredibly time-consuming to get directly from customers. However, understanding where potential customers spend time online and what they talk about can easily turn your analysis into a targeted marketing campaign that addresses their needs.

4. Create a customer persona

After gathering and analyzing all this data, you should have plenty of information about your customers. The next step is to create a customer persona . In case you need a refresher, the customer persona is a semi-fictional representation of your ideal customer based on your collected data.

For example, a customer persona for that environmentally friendly cleaning products business will reflect that audience’s demographics, behaviors, and needs. 

In addition to being an effective tool to focus your marketing efforts, creating this persona can help determine the size of your customer base and how to prioritize your time and resources to attract them to your business. It’s also helpful to show potential investors you know your target audience.

5. Connect to your problem/solution statement

Many business plans include a problem and solution statement as early as the introduction. It’s a reasonable way to start, considering that successful businesses identify a problem and provide a solution. 

So as you put your customer analysis together, ensure the research is grounded in the problems they’re experiencing. Doing so will keep you accountable by making you validate your product or service as the solution they need.

• Get started with your business plan template

A customer analysis is a key part of any business plan. But it’s just one piece. At Bplans, we take some of the pain out of business planning. 

We’ve developed a free business planning template to help reduce entrepreneurs’ time to create a full, lender-ready business plan.

Bplans has also collected over 550 free sample business plans across numerous industries. Find one that fits your industry to get inspiration and guidance when writing your plan.

See why 1.2 million entrepreneurs have written their business plans with LivePlan

Elon is a marketing specialist at Palo Alto Software, working with consultants, accountants, business instructors and others who use LivePlan at scale. He has a bachelor's degree in journalism and an MBA from the University of Oregon.

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A step-by-step guide to creating your target customer profile

Director of Product Marketing at 7shifts

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At some point, you’ll likely struggle with not understanding who your core target customer(s) are.

One powerful strategy that’ll help you on this journey is actually something you might be doing already: customer segmentation. This process involves dividing your customer base into distinct groups based on specific criteria, thus facilitating a clearer definition of your target customer profile.

However, creating target segments requires a thoughtful and systematic approach. 

In the comprehensive guide, I’ll take you through a step-by-step process to create effective target customer segments for your business. From gathering data and defining segments to leveraging insights, you’ll walk away with the knowledge and tools necessary to establish a deeper connection with your target customer profiles, ultimately driving meaningful results.

It's crucial to note that the successful implementation of this strategy hinges on having a product-market fit backed by sufficient data. 

Now, having covered the essential practice of customer segmentation for a comprehensive audience understanding, let's begin by exploring the key differences between a target consumer profile, an ideal customer profile, and a buyer persona. Understanding the nuances between these terms is vital for crafting effective go-to-market (GTM) strategies that cater to specific customer needs and preferences.

Target Customer Profile vs. Ideal Customer Profile vs. Buyer Persona

Target and ideal customer profiles are often used interchangeably but have distinct meanings. While a target consumer profile focuses on identifying several potential customers, an ideal customer profile represents one you're targeting. 

Buyer persona complements both types of customer profiles.  

Having clarified these terms, let's explore how each contributes to a robust GTM strategy.

Target Consumer Profile

Target customer profiling provides a foundational understanding of the audience your SaaS business aims to reach.

It's a broad classification that outlines various segments within the overall market. This profile focuses on identifying different types of potential customers based on demographics, geographic location, industry, company size, and other general factors. 

Ideal Customer Profile (ICP)

In contrast, an ideal customer profile represents a more refined and specific subset within the target consumer profile. It goes beyond basic demographics to include criteria that make a customer an ideal fit for a company's offerings.

When developing an ICP, businesses use insights from their target consumer profile to identify a customer's most valuable and desirable characteristics. This helps concentrate efforts on customers who are not only part of the broader target but are also the most likely to derive significant value from the products or services.

Buyer Persona

A buyer persona complements both the target and ideal customer profiles. It is a detailed and semi-fictional representation of an individual within the broader audience.

This specific contact is the focus when prospecting, and the buyer persona helps understand customers better.

SaaS businesses can tailor their content, messaging, and product development to meet specific needs and interests by delving into the persona's demographics, behaviors, and concerns.

Buyer personas contribute depth and specificity to the target consumer profile, aiding in the creation of an ideal customer profile by identifying the attributes that make a customer an ideal fit.

The impact of defining your target customer

Defining a target customer provides a crystal-clear understanding of who your SaaS product is trying to serve. This, in turn, empowers your company to strategically tailor your marketing, product development, and customer service efforts. Doing so, ultimately, leads to stronger acquisition, retention, and monetization .

The impact of defining your target customer profile manifests in several key benefits, including: 

Improved marketing messaging

Craft a compelling value proposition that resonates with your core target customer. By understanding their needs and preferences, you can tailor your marketing messages to directly address their customer pain points, fostering a stronger connection and engagement.

A more focused product roadmap

Utilize target customer profiles to inform and prioritize your product development roadmap . By honing in on your core customer's specific pain points and requirements, you can ensure that your product enhancements are aligned with their expectations, resulting in a more focused and impactful customer experience.

Pricing undefined packaging

Develop a well-defined pricing strategy by building product tiers that bundle the most relevant features for your target customer. This approach ensures that your pricing and packaging align with the perceived value of your core audience, maximizing monetization opportunities while providing tailored solutions.

Understanding the impact of defining your target customer, let's now explore the practical methods to achieve this through customer segmentation and buyer personas.

Two methods that help define your target customer

The two methods that help define your target customers are:

• Customer segmentation
• Buyer personas

Let’s dive deeper into these concepts and how to choose when to use them.

1. Customer segmentation 

Through quantitative data analysis, customer segmentation divides the company's customer base into distinct groups or segments based on shared characteristics such as demographics, behavior, or purchasing habits.

The segmentation is like dividing your party guests into general categories, such as children, teenagers, adults, and seniors. Doing so helps you understand each group's different needs and preferences, allowing you to plan activities, select music, and arrange the party layout accordingly.

2. Buyer personas

Buyer personas are fictional, generalized representations of the company's ideal customer. 

They are based on qualitative insights from market/ customer research and are used to create a detailed profile of your target customer.

A buyer persona represents a fictional yet highly detailed profile.

Example of buyer personas

For instance, within the adult segment, you might have the following:

• A buyer persona named "Adventurous Annie" loves outdoor activities, values sustainability, and enjoys trying new foods. 
• Another persona, "Busy Bob," might be a professional seeking convenience and time-saving solutions.

The 5-step framework to create target customer segments

Let's break down this 5-step framework that will guide you from defining segmentation criteria to sharing impactful target customer profiles across your SaaS organization.

Step 1: Define segmentation criteria

Choosing the right profiling segmentation criteria is a bit of art and science based on the stage of your business. The goal should be finding a way to segment the base that creates differentiation between each customer profile.

The first step is to determine the criteria to segment your customers. It could include demographics, psychographic traits, or behavioral characteristics.

The goal is to define a set of criteria to segment your user base.

Depending on the size of the company, there are two methods you can use:

• First Principles: Use a set of criteria to segment your base (e.g., business industry, annual revenue, # of employees).
• Correlation analysis : see what characteristics have a strong connection.

SaaS example

Say you’re a B2B SaaS company that targets SMBs. Based on past analysis and customer research, you have decided the best way to segment your customer base is by the business industry.

So, you define grouping customer segments by the following:

• Field service businesses (e.g., landscaping, trades, etc.)
• Knowledge-based businesses (e.g., consultants, marketing agencies)
• Retail service businesses (e.g., hair undefined nail salons)
• E-commerce businesses (e.g., Shopify store)
• Retail product businesses (e.g. bakeries, restaurants)

This will then inform your data analysis by grouping your customers into these five categories.

With the criteria established, let's move on to the next step — conducting a segmentation analysis to derive meaningful insights from your customer base.

Step 2: Conduct segmentation analysis

This next step is conducting your analysis by segmenting your customer base into distinct groups based on how you defined your segmentation criteria (see step #1).

Doing so ensures you get the data you need by each segment and analyze for clear themes.

Data spreadsheet organization

To get started, you want to dump data into spreadsheets, each tab being a specific customer profile. Each tab should list specific behavioral data points and define how large the customer segment is within your user base.

The spreadsheet should include the following:

• Clearly defined customer segments
• The size of each segment within your customer base
• Specific behavior data points for each customer segment

Let’s continue with our example.

SaaS example 

Picture you are a B2B invoicing SaaS company. Your customer profiles are based on business industries, and now you want to overlay your in-product data for each segment.

This would include data points such as:

• Number of invoices sent
• Number of customers they have
• The size of the invoice amount
• Number of methods they get paid by
• Monthly revenue from invoices

Step 3: Overlay demographic data across customer segments

The next step in this segmentation process is to overlay the demographic data you collect on each user. 

Adding in demographic data makes these customer profiles more actionable for employees in the company to use because you can start to put a face to a name.

Collecting data in SaaS onboarding 

Much of the data collected by SaaS companies at onboarding is demographic-related and starts to put a face to your customer segments. This data might include their industry, annual revenue, number of employees, how many years they have been in business, etc.

To illustrate, consider Shopify’s use of a multi-step signup process. 

On the initial page, users are prompted to provide three essential pieces of information about their e-commerce business.

Upon completion of these initial fields, the next page appears with ten additional questions related to the business - that offer great customer profile data.

The strategic aim is to integrate this collected data into each previously defined customer segment. By doing so, each segment's impact is heightened by including behavioral and demographic insights.

The subsequent step involved adding demographic data (e.g., annual revenue, number of employees, business age, etc.) into the five customer segments we created.

Step 4: Build your target customer profiles

Now that you have finished your data exercise, the next step is to build out these customer profiles into an artifact.

The goal is to build an artifact so that anyone at your company can easily understand who your customer segments are.

Create a PDF or slide deck

The best way to do this is to create a PDF or slide deck that showcases each customer segment.

These customer segments should include the following:

• Name of each customer segment
• Photo of them
• Description of who they are
• Key demographic data points
• Key behavior data points

Make your artifact 

Our next step is to create our five customer segments with a designer's help to create a visually appealing artifact that people can easily understand.

I have included a template you can use here .

Step 5: Share your target customer profiles

Our final step is to share the artifact across the company to get people to understand how to use it.

Getting teams to understand how to use this artifact is critical to driving internal adoption. The best way to do this is the following:

• Present these customer segments at an all hands.
• Include this artifact as part of new hiring/onboarding training.

Getting all teams to understand how to apply the insights from the customer segmentation artifact is essential.

The two ways to apply the customer segmentation artifact include: 

• Marketing teams can use this to help target better, brainstorm new channels to acquire, and improve their positioning/messaging on their website.
• Product teams can use this to help prioritize the most critical product features for each of their segments.

Regularly revisit and refine your target customer profiles

Your customer segments are constantly changing as the SaaS company scales, but completing this initiative will help the entire org make better decisions to drive more revenue for any PLG company. 

You should be revisiting your customer segments every six to 12 months.

Creating target customer segments is a strategic process that can significantly enhance your marketing efforts and customer engagement.

With a well-defined and data-driven approach to customer segmentation, you'll be better equipped to deliver personalized experiences, drive customer loyalty, and ultimately achieve your business goals. 

Start implementing my five-step framework today, and unlock the power of target customer profiles to elevate your business strategy. Then, continue on your journey of building your product-led business, be sure to check out the ProductLed GTM System™️ . This free framework shows you step-by-step how to drive predictable, profitable growth for 7-figure product-led businesses – without the chaos and overwhelm that most founders deal with.

Learn the nine components of the ProductLed System now!  

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• How to Create Your First Customer Profile [Checklist, Template, and Examples]

Now it’s personal.

The relationship between a brand and a customer is no longer only professional or transactional; it has become personal.

Every person representing the brand must know the customers, their likes, dislikes, and pain points, inside out.

It goes beyond a sales rep hiding behind the curtain and observing their buying patterns. It demands a detailed understanding of why customers make those choices.

For instance, 72% of consumers expect companies to understand how their needs and objectives change during times of disruption.

A customer profile makes it easy to document all observations plus insights from your experiences and customer data to create a repeatable and scalable business strategy . 

Let’s look at what a customer profile is, how to build one, and tools that can help in the process.

What is a customer profile? 

The customer profile or buyer persona is a document containing information about individual customers. It consists of age, gender, location, spending habits, and other details, helpful for determining the needs and preferences of target audiences. This information helps you perfect your sales pitch and marketing messages while being relevant to the buyers.

Customer profile data that is up-to-date and reliable is critical for business. It generally comprises of the following information:

• Demographic  details such as age, marital status, gender, and so on.
• Geographical  information includes nationality, race, state, city, and residence. 
• Psychographics  consists of habits, values, lifestyle, and interests.
• Socio-economic status , which classifies them into various categories of salary, education, and job. 

If you’re wondering why it is necessary to create customer profiles, I’d like you to imagine the following scene.

The importance of creating customer profile

Say you’ve invited your partner’s friends to dinner at your home for the first time. You have no clue who eats what and, your partner blithely tells you her friends aren’t picky. You follow their words, and lo and behold, someone has a nut allergy, someone’s vegan, and someone is on a strict diet. 

And your menu is none of those things. Oops. 

We don’t want to make such mistakes when selling to consumers. We’d rather know what our consumers have in mind than blindly selling. 

Customer profiling helps here.

• Demographic details give you insights into what product will and won’t work. For example, you can only sell a stroller to parents with infants. 
• If you have geographical details, you’ll also know the weather and climate conditions. That is, if you sell umbrellas, people living in high rainfall areas will be more likely to buy them. 
• It helps you hyper-personalize the product, making it one of a kind to the customer. 
• You can price products according to the customer’s economic status. For instance, you can’t market expensive meals to broke college students when they can’t afford them.
• Finally, you can distinguish qualified leads for your business only when you create profiles. 

Now let’s see the benefits of customer profile information. 

Benefits of creating customer profiles

As we see, customer profiling helps you streamline your sales and marketing efforts. Instead of shooting in the dark, you’ll be approaching potential buyers wisely.

You can also use the customer profile information to:

• Devise scalable strategies. Prioritize campaigns for those who fit your Ideal Customer Profile (ICP).
• Create highly targeted marketing campaigns.
• Personalize your messaging.
• Explore the untapped market potential .
• Identify upselling and cross-selling opportunities
• Update and customize your offering as per market demands.

In short, customer profiling opens a lot of doors to explore customers, their needs, and more. 

However, a  lot of people confuse customer profile and ICP. Are they the same thing? 

Here’s why:

What’s the difference between a customer profile and an ideal customer profile (ICP)?

Now let’s look at the steps to create and use customer profile information.

7 Ways to create your first customer profile

1. assess your target customers.

To explain this concept, let me give you an example.

Not more than a decade ago, Canon was struggling to sell their low-range DC cameras.

“Consumers’ preferences and behaviors have shifted. They now prefer smartphones for capturing snapshots at the expense of digital cameras,” says Maggie Wong, director and general manager, Canon Hong Kong.

However, there was a window of opportunity.

Parents were reluctant to buy cell phones for their children as they didn’t want their children texting, talking, or using apps. 

This psychographic information about buyers helped Canon realize the potential to sell digital cameras to kids.

They created a marketing strategy that tapped into children’s passion for photography. And within a year, they had a  40% share  in the low-range digital camera industry.

So, follow these steps to assess your target customers.

• First, identify the people who have a practical use for your product. What does your product offer for its users? Who can overcome an issue using your product?
• Once you discover who benefits from your product, identify your regular customer’s lifestyle, demography, geography, and socioeconomic status. 
• The final step is to discern what context your customers inhabit. Do they use your product to aid their business? Or does your product cater to fulfilling personal needs?

Remember that  creating a customer profile is a collaborative process . That is, sales, marketing, customer support, and other teams must discuss their perception of customers. Also, when in doubt, don’t just assume. It’s better to over-communicate.

You can use tools like  Mural  or  Airtable  to collaborate effectively.

2. Track and map your customer journey

The next step is to track and map the lead-to-customer journey .

A customer journey map depicts a customer’s interactions with your company. These representations show how a client progresses through your sales funnel . Include all possible touchpoints in your customer journey map. 

The idea is to get a sense of the behavioral pattern of your target customers. For instance, buying habits – do they decide instantly, or do they research thoroughly before buying. It will help you craft your sales enablement strategy .

Lead management or CRM tools are helpful to track the customer journey . They record all the interactions a client has with your brand and present them in an easy-to-understand fashion. Some of the tools that can help here are  LeadSquared ,  Zoho , and  Salesforce .

In case you’re thinking that tracking customer data is impossible, you’re possibly wrong.

87%  of Americans are ready to have their activity tracked if: 

• They can get better rewards in exchange for sharing information and
• Companies can personalize products to suit their preferences.

3. Choose criteria to qualify and score leads based on their profile.

70% of marketers  say that improving lead quality is the foremost goal of their lead generation strategy .

You can use the customer profile information to improve leads quality.

Let’s take an example.

You own an e-commerce site where you sell various types of puzzles and board games. 

Your ICP consists of an English-speaking, high-income family. Most of their traits relate to interest levels in games that cater to large groups of people.

So, you can filter your leads based on those specific traits. If you can only ship to specific regions, create a filter for that as well.

Also, whenever a lead fulfills a criterion, say they are English speakers, you can increase the score and prioritize them. The goal is to find people who are most likely to buy and to whom you can serve first.

You can use tools to automate the lead qualification process . Many CRM software tools (such as LeadSquared ) provide lead qualification facilities.

Thus, in this manner, you can use your customer profile to build a highly functional sales pipeline . 

4. Get feedback and information directly from customers.

While inputs from your team members are inherent, you should not overlook customer perceptions.

Here’s one example.

In 2017, Spotify started crafting its listeners’ personas. 

First, they analyzed the song preferences of the US audience but soon realized that this does not give the reasons behind those preferences. (Studying market)

So, they expanded their scope of study to include listeners of different ages, incomes, family types, lifestyles, music cultures, and more. (Studying behavioral and socio-economic patterns)

They noticed a consistent pattern in the listening habits of people. However, this data couldn’t reveal the value consumers saw in paying for the music.

So, in the next attempt, they interviewed people to understand if they could pay for music or not. (Customer interviews)

Rest is history. 

Today, Spotify has  172 million paid subscribers  worldwide.

And they achieved this by studying their customers thoroughly and by interviewing them.

You can read the full story here .

So, to understand what your customers want, the best way is to ask them. You can do it through:

1. Interviews

It will give you an in-depth understanding of what your customers are like.

While it’s okay to be candid with the customer, preparing a questionnaire will help you have a targeted conversation.

For example, you can prepare questions about their job responsibilities, challenges, etc.

2. Surveys 

If interviews are much too expensive and time-consuming, surveys are the next best option. Customer feedback surveys are a quick and effective way to get inputs from your consumers.

All you have to do is request them to fill out a questionnaire and then review the findings. Both methods have their positives and negatives, and the best would be to try out both sources.

You can use the following survey tools.

• SurveyMonkey
• Google Surveys
• SurveySparrow

5. Encourage reviews and engage with your customers on social media.

Customer reviews help get online traction. But they also serve as an excellent source of customer profile characteristics. 

A review gives you insights primarily into customer experiences and satisfaction levels. Several reviews inform readers about the pros and cons of a product, which is also a source of feedback for your company.

6. Make it easy to read and understand

There are two most popular formats for building customer profiles.

• The who (demographic information), what (their challenges and requirements), why (your differentiation from others and how you can address their pain points) format
• A brief biography or biodata format (describing all relevant characteristics of a customer)

For example, here’s a customer profile we’ve built recently.

If you noticed, it puts together  a complete picture of the customer in just a few words. That is, you can get a sense of  their likes, interests, personal and professional life.

Don’t make your customer profile document text-heavy or theoretical. If it looks like a textbook, not everyone would like to read it. So, to make it easy to consume,

• Use pictures
• Use different font styles and colors
• Write short texts, preferably bullet points

There’s no hard and fast rule to add visuals. But putting a face to the profile makes it interesting to read and understand.

Also, since you’ll have to update the customer profile information frequently, keep an editable version handy.

You can use  design collaboration tools like  Canva  to create interesting graphics and update them whenever needed.

HubSpot’s Make My Persona tool is also a great place to start building your customer profiles.

7. Update your customer profiles frequently

Your customer profiles will evolve as time goes by and improve in their accuracy. 

Typically, brands update customer profiles when:

• They introduce new products or features
• Expand market reach across geographies
• They have to accommodate/manage changing customer preferences.

The first two scenarios are more operational, and you will automatically update your ICP. 

But the third scenario requires behavioral  reports and analytics  to facilitate the updates. Without analytical tools, you won’t be able to figure out when your customer profile needs an update. 

Customer profiling and updating customer profiles are far easier if you use  CRM software . With this, you can get a 360-degree view of customers – from the first interaction to buying and retention. 

However, a lot of us tend to get overwhelmed by the wealth of information we receive. On the opposite end of the spectrum, we might feel like we don’t know enough.

Don’t worry. 

Anybody would feel that way in the beginning. 

But it is also important to address challenges along the way.

Below are the problems you might face while creating customer profiles and their remedies.

Challenges when creating a customer profile

1. unintentional biases.

Customer profiles aren’t biographies written by your customer. The information you receive can end up stereotyping or grouping your customers. 

For example, you may believe that only men buy some skilled sports equipment. But several women want to buy this equipment, and you’ll end up not selling to them. 

Narrowing down customer profiles may end up feeding into negative stereotypes. So, when you view a profile, verify their level of interest first and don’t make any assumptions .

2. Data privacy

Data privacy is another challenging aspect of creating customer profiles. These concerns aren’t coming from a small group of people as:

• 79% of Americans  worry  about how businesses use their personal information. 
• 84% of customers  seek  greater control in terms of how companies use their data. 

Data security and privacy concerns are greater than ever. Creating customer profiles demand a level of personal information that may feel invasive. But this doesn’t mean customers aren’t willing to share information. Rather they prefer to know whether they can trust your brand with their data .

3. Ideal, but not ideal

Sometimes, we create a perfect customer profile, to only forget it exists. 

For instance, we may come up with all the categories and segments we’re targeting. But salespeople may never make use of these data points because of slow implementation. 

In another case, the ICP may be far too narrow for any actual person. So, your reps will discard the persona you painstakingly made. 

That is why create an ideal persona who exists and share it across the board. 

4. Misalignment

Lack of involvement of all departments that are part of the selling process may again lead to ineffective customer profiles. 

For example, the sales team is bound to know more about who fits into your customer profile. And your customer service will know what changes customers want from products. 

Your marketing team will help get information through campaigns. Finally, your product team will help personalize what your client wants. 

If any of these teams fail to communicate with each other, you may face profound losses. 

So, make the information accessible to all the relevant teams. 

The bottom line

With most of the interactions between brands and customers happening digitally, it’s hard to stay in touch with customers in real-life.

That’s why building, updating, and using your customer profile info is crucial for your teams to deliver a consistent experience across channels.

You can fetch a big chunk of information for customer profiling from your CRM software itself and start making sense of the data. Try LeadSquared, a one-of-a-kind CRM software to track the entire customer journey with a real-time dashboard and automated report generator.

To help you get started with customer profiling, I have two useful resources for you.

Editable customer profile checklist and template

These are free, editable pdfs. You can use them whenever you need or create copies and share them with your colleagues and friends. 

• Customer profile checklist
• Customer profile template

You can edit and use the customer profile template anytime you wish. Or, if you want to create your own design, you can follow the customer profile checklist to ensure that the information you plan to include covers everything.

If you need any further information/resources, feel free to write to us. :)

Padma is a Content Writer at Leadsquared. She enjoys reading and writing about various financial and educational topics. You can connect with her on LinkedIn or write to her at [email protected].

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Examples of a Market Segmentation Profile

How to hide blocked users on facebook, how to write a good marketing message.

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Next to a business plan and marketing plan, there is no more important document for a business owner to create than a customer profile. A compendium of demographic, psychographic, attitudinal and behavior information, this profile creates a picture of a business’ most likely or ideal customer. Once the picture comes into focus, it can guide an array of business decisions – from the location of a business and its operating hours to advertising and promotions. Just as your customers grow and mature, your customer profile must continually do the same as time and conditions warrant.

Define the demographics of your target customer. Demographics refer to age, race, gender, income, marital status, educational background and occupation. Provide a range, if necessary, with regard to the last two criteria. Not every customer of yours will have attained the same level of education or will work in the same field.

Refine your profile by geography or in terms of where your target customer lives. You might be able to say, for example, that your target customer is “most” likely to live in a single-family home valued at X dollars.

Take a look further inside your customer’s home by profiling her household size, structure and family type. In other words, include children, extended family members and cohabitation style, if any. Define the “head” of the household, if you can, in terms of who is most likely to guide buying decisions.

Describe your target customer in terms of psychographics, a social research term that refers to someone’s personality, interests, lifestyle and values. Think in terms of your customer’s hobbies and favorite sports, what type of restaurants she enjoys, what she most likes to do in her free time and if she likes to travel, cook and work out.

Flesh out your profile by describing your target customer’s behaviors, particularly in terms of choosing products and services. Think in terms of how convenience, customer service, price and promotions might motivate her. Consider to what extent she is driven by loyalty to a business.

Finesse your profile by identifying the attitudes of your target customer. Think in terms of how she thinks and feels about products and services, balancing her emotions with her rational thought process. For example, her desire for prestige might trump her desire for the lowest price, or vice versa. She might put a premium on products and services that make her look and feel good and ignore price altogether.

• U.S. Small Business Administration: Create Your Business Plan
• M4B Marketing: Tips to Create a Customer Profile
• Entrepreneur.com: Business Plan
• Management Help.org: Product and Service Development
• Business Knowhow.com: 7 Habits of Less Successful Salespeople
• No one ever said that writing a customer profile is easy; it isn’t. While educated guesses are a good start, there is no substitute for accurate and reliable research, so conduct regular surveys of your customers so you can identify changing dynamics. Talk to your customers directly; open communication will help you develop a solid rapport with them, too.
• Review your customer profile periodically and tweak it as need be. You must keep this profile current if you expect to make informed decisions about sales, marketing, advertising and promotions – activities that can be costly – and avoid expensive missteps.

With education, health care and small business marketing as her core interests, M.T. Wroblewski has penned pieces for Woman's Day, Family Circle, Ladies Home Journal and many newspapers and magazines. She holds a master's degree in journalism from Northern Illinois University.

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How to build and use customer profiles.

11 min read What is a customer profile, and how do you use it? In this guide, we outline why customer profiling is a key activity to improve customer experience and the bottom line.

What is a customer profile?

A customer profile is all the relevant information and data that you’ve captured for a customer, including the key interactions they have had with your brand. This includes both operational data and experiential data, such as:

• Demographic data with basic details such as age, location, job role, income etc.
• Psychographic data such as values, interests, attitudes, and personality traits
• Purchasing preferences and intent (goals, motivations)
• Pain points
• Buying behavior and purchasing patterns
• Brand contact frequency
• Customer lifetime valu e
• Which communication channels they prefer to use

Customer profiles are used to identify the customers you have and provide an in-depth understanding of who they are, what they want, and how they behave. It helps you to identify and analyze key customer segments based on shared characteristics, enabling more targeted customer experiences.

Rich customer profiles not only help you better target your existing customers, but also gives you insights in how to better engage with potential customers. understand common pain points and the motivations behind purchases or sign-ups. Creating a customer profile is the basis of a lot of business outreach, whether that’s for marketing strategies or for product development.

B2B and B2C customer profiles

There are differences between a B2B customer profile and a B2C customer profile, mostly in terms of the information you include. Usually, with a B2B customer profile, you’re trying to understand a business that you’re targeting, rather than an individual.

In B2B account-based marketing, you might use an Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) , which actually refers to a company you think would make the best customer for your business. In this type of customer profile, you might also include firmographic information, which could be company size, annual turnover, employee count, and more.

However, sometimes you might create a personal customer profile for someone within that business who you’re aiming to sell to, such as a finance manager. This would follow the more usual customer profile template. Of course, you might be targeting various people within the same company too, but who work in different departments.

The difference between a customer profile and a buyer persona

Though both customer profiles and buyer personas include similar information, a buyer persona is a fictional version of your customer. It’s based on the same data as your customer profile, but it’s a creative imagining of the ideal customer you’d like to target.

Using a buyer persona can be valuable, particularly when creating sales and marketing campaigns designed to reach a target audience. However, a customer profile only includes true data about your customer (i.e. Customer X is a systems analyst making $8k/month in Chicago), whereas a buyer persona also includes fictional details (i.e. Brad is a systems analyst who’d like to start a family with his wife in Chicago, but wonders how to spend his $8k/month salary wisely on baby products).

Capture experience data and create customer profiles with Experience ID

Why is building customer profiles essential for business?

Customers are seeking experiences that feel tailored to them, with their needs met and expectations exceeded. By creating customer profiles, you can provide a personalized experience that will encourage them to come back for more.

Customers expect a personal approach

In a world full of targeted advertising, customers expect a personalized approach from brands. Accenture discovered that 48% of consumers expected a brand to treat them as special if they were a good customer. Not offering a personal approach is costly; the same study found 33% of those that had ended a brand relationship had done so because they didn’t feel their experience was personalized to them.

Buyers are happy to share their feedback and experiences for personalization

Customers are often willing to provide information, such as as feedback, preferences and interests, if it means getting a personalized experience, demonstrating just how popular a personalized approach can be. Salesforce found that 79% of customers are content to share data for personalization, with 88% keen to do so if the result is personalized offers.

Personalization leads to better business outcomes

When you personalize your approach to customers with a deeper understanding of who they are, what they want and how they’re likely to behave, you encourage customer loyalty and satisfaction. Higher satisfaction leads to lower customer churn, meaning better business outcomes for your brand. We found 42% of consumers cut their spending after having a bad experience with brand, leaving 9.5% of your revenue at risk of being lost . By creating unique customer profiles, and understanding the journey they’ve taken with you, the issues they’ve encountered and their expectations, you can take decisions that you know will positively impact their likelihood to stay a customer. That might be in your marketing, or during customer service . Customer profiles are a key part of getting customer experience right.

How to create a customer profile

There are basic ways to create customer profiles. However, for the most valuable insights and effective customer profiling, you need to go deeper into your data, beyond just demographic information .

Collect thorough feedback

Your customer feedback is the most vital data to collect when customer profiling. Who better to tell you about themselves than your existing customers?

Blending direct and indirect feedback will help you add context details to specific customer profiles’ basic demographic information. As such, you’ll need to send feedback surveys, post-interaction surveys and leverage conversational analytics to capture the full journey and how that made them think and feel. You can also perform market research, such as in-person interviews and focus groups, for insights gained from your customers themselves.

Customer profiles are a picture of their time with you. Sometimes they will tell you how they feel, what they want and sometimes they will do so indirectly with how they behave (what they do, and don’t do). Having a platform that can collate that information to give you the full picture is essential.

Create rich profiles based on customer experience

Rather than using basic demographic data, it’s best to assess customer data for key insights on customer experience. It’s not only what your current customers are telling you that’s important for to include in a customer profile – it’s what they’re not telling you that helps you build a complete picture. Pull actionable insights from unstructured data, such as social media posts, reviews, customer support conversations and more, with tools such as natural language understanding (NLU).

For example, customers might tell you they’re unhappy with a product with a simple review score (three out of five stars, for example), but in an open text chat with your customer service team, they might indicate that there was significant customer effort to use it, and they are frustrated with a particular pain point. You might note they have had repeat contact on the same issue when cross-referencing with your operational data.

Having customer profiles that includes all of the information above means that when customer service engages with them or when you initiate sales and marketing campaigns, you’re able to address the customer’s needs more effectively. Rather than sending them an update on the same product they’ve taken issue with, for example, you might upsell a better product or service that will result in fewer negative interactions and contact.

Equipped with direct feedback from tools such as post transaction surveys and indirect signals such as chat commentary, online reviews or social posts, you’re able to create rich, dynamic profiles that help you segment and target more effectively.

Use technology for creating a customer profile

Putting together a customer profile that unifies all your customer data, adds context through operational data and provides you with the necessary analytics is hard without the right tools.

Customer data platforms (CDPs) can be a useful tool in your arsenal to store operational data related to customers, but miss all the experiential data that provides a complete understanding of the customer.

For example, Qualtrics Experience iD is more than a repository for customer data – it’s a single, unified system for all experience data, from c ustomer feedback to signals in unstructured data. This allows you to build and act upon a rich customer profile, helping you to win over your ideal customer with experiences that delight.

Customer profile examples

To help you build out an in-depth customer profile, here is a customer profile example that gives you a good foundation to work with.

Here’s an example of a customer profile created on Qualtrics Experience iD:

With a dynamic customer profile, you can go into more depth for each experience.

When to use customer profiles

Whether you’ve used a simple customer profile template or done a deep-dive into your data to help you create a customer profile, knowing when to use them is important.

In an ideal world, every interaction you have with your customers should be informed by your customer profile. Every interaction with your customer service teams, every transaction, all your sales and marketing campaigns – every step of your customer journey can likely be improved with valuable insights gleaned from a customer profile.

Equipped with these important data points and insights, you can add more value to every point of contact with your customer base. Each customer profile is a blueprint for how a customer thinks, and how they’d like to be treated. Armed with this information, your customer profile becomes a great reference for predicting future behavior.

Create the ultimate customer profiles with Qualtrics

Qualtrics Experience iD allows you to pull all relevant customer and operational information into one centralized location within a connected, intelligent system. Your customer profile data, as well as experience data, is collated with every single signal from every channel to give you a customer profile like no other.

Best of all, you can apply powerful analytics to apply your customer profile knowledge to every interaction, offering the best customer experience possible to your customer base, current and future.

An important concept that might be good to weave in somewhere is that targeted customer experiences can be at the individual customer level, or targeting an entire segment of customers.

Related resources

Ai & customer experience 13 min read, customer experience transformation 15 min read, customer lifecycle management 19 min read, customer experience automation 11 min read, customer centricity 16 min read, customer data platforms 14 min read, customer experience insights 12 min read, request demo.

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Crafting the Customer Analysis in Business Plan: A Comprehensive Guide

In today’s competitive business environment, understanding your customers is the key to success. Customer analysis in business plans plays a crucial role in driving business growth and providing a competitive edge.

Imagine unlocking the hidden potential within your customer base, tailoring marketing strategies, and developing products that resonate with their needs and preferences. This comprehensive guide will explore the ins and outs of customer analysis in a business plan and how to leverage it for maximum impact on your business.

Short Summary

• Customer analysis is an essential part of any business plan, allowing businesses to understand their target customers and create tailored products/services.
• It involves identifying a market, assessing demographics & analyzing customer behavior in order to inform marketing strategies.
• Utilizing insights from customer analysis can help optimize marketing campaigns & product offerings for maximum return on investment.

The Essence of Customer Analysis

Customer analysis is an essential element of any business plan, emphasizing the comprehension of target customers, their requirements, and how your product or service fulfills those requirements. By performing customer analysis, businesses can better tailor their products and services to their target audience , ultimately leading to increased sales and a thriving business.

Understanding the needs of your target customers is key to success. Knowing who your customers are

Purpose of Customer Analysis

The primary objective of customer analysis is to recognize potential customers, prioritize customer segments, and provide guidance for marketing and product development strategies. Understanding your customers’ wants, needs, pain points, and objectives is crucial to creating targeted marketing campaigns and product offerings that resonate with them.

By closely monitoring customer feedback and support requests (Voice of Customer analysis), businesses can gain insight into customer pain points and preferences and even discover unexpected uses for their products.

Key Components of Customer Analysis

The essential elements of customer analysis encompass target market identification, demographic analysis, and behavioral analysis. Demographic analysis provides insights into factors such as age, income, and location, which can be used to create targeted marketing strategies.

Behavioral analysis, on the other hand, entails comprehending the customer’s decision-making process for the purchase, including the steps taken, information sources consulted, and who has the authority to make the final decision. By understanding these components, businesses can better cater to their customer’s needs and preferences, ultimately leading to success.

Conducting an Effective Customer Analysis

An effective customer analysis involves a thorough research process that focuses on customer pain points, goals, and insights on what influences their buying decisions. This process begins with identifying your target market, which is crucial in ensuring a successful business.

By analyzing customer demographics and examining customer behavior and purchasing patterns, businesses can tailor their marketing strategies and product offerings to address the specific needs and preferences of their target customers.

Identifying Your Target Market

Identifying your target market is the first step in conducting a comprehensive customer analysis. By precisely defining the target customer your company is serving, you can focus your marketing efforts and resources on the most profitable customer segments.

Small businesses with 10 to 50 employees located in large metropolitan cities on the West Coast can benefit from having a business plan. This plan should provide clear guidance and instructions for the successful execution of tasks, including target market analysis.

With a clear understanding of your target market, you’ll be better equipped to develop a targeted marketing strategy that resonates with your audience and drives sales.

Analyzing Customer Demographics

Analyzing customer demographics is crucial for tailoring marketing strategies to specific customer groups. By examining your current customer base, you can determine which demographics to focus on for future marketing efforts. Demographic information, such as:

• education levels

A comprehensive view of the messaging that is most likely to appeal to customers and the marketing channels that are most effective in reaching them can be achieved when customers seek multiple bids, as it provides valuable insights into their preferences and decision-making process.

By constructing a marketing strategy around the types of people who have already made a purchase, you can maximize the return on investment of your marketing budget.

Examining Customer Behavior and Purchasing Patterns

Analyzing customer behavior and purchasing patterns can yield valuable insights through customer behavior analysis. By monitoring customer interactions with your products and services, such as website visits, purchases, and customer reviews, you can identify customer needs and preferences and devise strategies to enhance customer retention and loyalty.

Additionally, understanding the drivers of customer decision-making is crucial for creating targeted marketing campaigns and product offerings that resonate with your target audience.

Utilizing Customer Analysis Results

Customer analysis results can be leveraged to enhance marketing strategies, drive product development and innovation, and strengthen customer retention and loyalty. By recognizing customer feedback and customer support requests, businesses can acquire advantageous insights into customer behavior and preferences, which can be utilized to provide direction to marketing and product development strategies.

In this section, we will explore how customer analysis results can be utilized to improve various aspects of your business.

Enhancing Marketing Strategies

Customer analysis results, including customer segmentation analysis, can inform targeted marketing strategies that lead to increased sales and revenue. By leveraging insights from customer demographics and behavior, businesses can create personalized marketing campaigns that resonate with their target audience. For example, a company catering to young professionals may focus its marketing efforts on social media platforms, while a company targeting older adults may prioritize direct mail or email campaigns.

By tailoring marketing strategies based on customer analysis, businesses can optimize their marketing efforts and achieve greater success.

Driving Product Development and Innovation

Insights from customer analysis can guide product development and innovation, ensuring that products and services meet customer needs and preferences. By understanding customer pain points and objectives, businesses can create new products and services that address these needs, resulting in increased customer satisfaction and loyalty.

Additionally, existing customer feedback can be utilized to refine existing products and services, making them more appealing to the target audience and driving business growth .

Strengthening Customer Retention and Loyalty

Understanding customer needs and preferences through customer analysis can help businesses improve customer retention and loyalty. By tailoring products and services to the specific needs and preferences of your target audience, you can enhance customer satisfaction and encourage repeat business.

Furthermore, by identifying gaps in the customer experience and optimizing touchpoints, businesses can improve the overall customer journey and nurture long-lasting relationships with their customers.

Tools and Techniques for Customer Analysis

To effectively conduct customer analysis, businesses can employ various tools and techniques, including data collection and analysis, creating buyer personas, and customer journey mapping. These methods enable businesses to gain a deeper understanding of their customers and make informed decisions regarding their products, services, and promotional activities.

In this section, we will explore the different tools and techniques that can be used in customer analysis.

Data Collection and Analysis

Data collection and analysis play a critical role in customer analysis, as they involve gathering information on customer interactions, demographics, and purchasing patterns. Businesses can utilize various methods for data collection, such as surveys, focus groups, and interviews, as well as analytics tools to track customer behavior online.

By analyzing this data through market research, businesses can identify trends, patterns, and areas for improvement, ultimately informing their marketing strategies and product development efforts.

Creating Buyer Personas

Creating buyer personas is an essential technique in customer analysis, as it helps businesses visualize their ideal customers and tailor marketing and product development strategies accordingly.

Buyer personas are fictional representations of major customer segments, taking into account factors such as:

• demographics
• professional status
• purchasing habits

By developing accurate and detailed buyer personas, businesses can ensure that their marketing campaigns and product offerings resonate with their target audience, leading to increased sales and customer loyalty.

Customer Journey Mapping

Customer journey mapping is an invaluable tool in customer analysis, as it enables businesses to identify gaps in the customer experience and optimize touchpoints to improve customer satisfaction and loyalty. A customer journey map is a visual representation of the stages a customer goes through when interacting with a business, from initial awareness to loyalty.

By understanding the customer journey and identifying areas for improvement, businesses can enhance the overall customer experience and nurture long-lasting relationships with their customers.

Case Study: Successful Customer Analysis in Action

A prime example of successful customer analysis in action is the Buxton case study. Buxton, a leading provider of customer analytics and consulting services, utilized customer analysis techniques to help businesses expand, grow, and market themselves more efficiently. Through a combination of data collection, buyer persona creation, and customer journey mapping, Buxton was able to gain a deep understanding of their client’s customers and develop targeted marketing campaigns that resonated with their audience.

As a result, their current customers experienced increased sales, customer loyalty, and overall business growth and success.

In conclusion, customer analysis is a powerful tool that can drive business growth and success by helping companies understand their target customers, tailor their marketing strategies, and develop products and services that meet customer needs and preferences.

By utilizing tools and techniques such as data collection and analysis, buyer persona creation, and customer journey mapping, businesses can gain valuable insights into their customers and make informed decisions that lead to increased sales, customer loyalty, and overall business success. Don’t miss out on the opportunity to unlock your business’s full potential – start conducting customer analysis today and reap the rewards.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is a customer analysis in a business plan.

A customer analysis is an essential part of a business plan, which identifies target customers and outlines how a product or service meets their needs.

It helps businesses understand their customers better, so they can create marketing strategies that are tailored to their target audience. It also helps them identify potential opportunities and threats in the market.

By understanding their customers, businesses can better serve their customers.

What is an example of customer analysis?

Customer analysis involves understanding consumers’ behaviors through observation and measurement of analytics, analyzing brand recognition and awareness, understanding how customers feel about the competition, and testing different customer acquisition approaches.

This process helps businesses better understand their target audience and develop strategies to reach them. It also helps to identify potential opportunities for growth and improvement. By understanding customer behavior, businesses can create more effective marketing campaigns and better serve their customers.

What should be included in a customer analysis?

A customer analysis should include details on the customer’s demographics, professional status, purchasing habits, values and goals, influences, and challenges. It should also assess their buying patterns, product usage history, spending habits, loyalty metrics, and more to gain an understanding of their wants, needs, pain points, and objectives.

What is the primary objective of customer analysis?

The primary objective of customer analysis is to recognize potential customers, prioritize customer segments, and inform marketing and product development strategies.

By understanding customer needs and preferences, businesses can create targeted marketing campaigns and product offerings that are tailored to the needs of their target audience. This helps to ensure that the company is reaching the right people.

How can customer analysis help improve marketing strategies?

Customer analysis provides valuable insights into customer’s needs and preferences, enabling businesses to create tailored marketing strategies that drive sales. It is an essential tool for effective marketing.

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Resource Library

Introduction to customer analysis.

A customer analysis (or customer profile) is a critical section of a company’s business plan or marketing plan. It identifies target customers, ascertains the needs of these customers, and then specifies how the product satisfies these needs.

Customer analysis can be broken down into a behavioral profile (why your product matches a customer’s lifestyle) and a demographic profile (describing a customer’s demographic attributes).

A customer profile is a simple tool that can help business better understand current and potential customers, so they can increase sales and grow their business. Customer profiles are a collection of information about customers that help determine why people buy or don’t buy a product. Customer profiles can also help develop targeted marketing plans and help ensure that products meet the needs of their intended audience.

Behavioral Analysis (Customer Buying Criteria)

A behavioral analysis of customers (or psychographic profile) seeks to identify and weigh the relative importance of factors consumers use to choose one product over another. These factors, sometimes called buying criteria, are key to understanding the reasons that customers choose to buy your product (or service) versus the products offered by your competitors. The four major criteria that customers use to distinguish competing products are: price, quality, convenience andprestige.

In consumer transactions, price and quality tend to be the dominant factors. However with business-to-business (B2B) transactions (also called industrial marketing), service issues such as reliability, payment terms, and delivery schedule become much more important. The sales transaction in an industrial marketing scenario also differs from consumer marketing in that the purchase decision is typically made by a group of people instead of one person, and the selling process can be much more complex (including stages such as: request for bid, proposal preparation and contract negotiations).

By identifying customer needs through market research and analysis, companies can develop a clear and concise value proposition which reflects the tangible benefits that customers can expect from the company’s products. And once the primary buying criteria have been identified, marketing efforts can influence the customer’s perception of the product along the four main dimensions (price, quality, convenience and prestige), relative to the competition’s product.  

Behavioral Analysis (Purchase Process and Patterns)

Occasionally, customer behavior analysis requires a more in-depth understanding of the actual decision-making process of the customer purchase. This may be especially true in an industrial marketing scenario. Examples of purchase process questions to be answered here include:

* What steps are involved in the decision-making process? * What sources of information are sought? * What is a timeline for a purchase (e.g., impulse vs. extended decision-making)? * Will the customer consult others in their organization/family before making a decision? * Who has the authority to make the final decision? * Will the customer seek multiple bids? * Will the product/service require significant modifications?

Behavior profiles can also focus on actions, such as: which types of items were purchased, how frequently items are purchased, the average transaction value, or which items were purchased in conjunction with other items. To understand the buying habits and patterns of your customers, answer the following questions:

* Reason/occasion for purchase? * Number of times they’ll purchase? * Timetable of purchase, every week, month, quarter, etc.? * Amount of product/service purchased? * How long to make a decision to purchase? * Where does the customer purchase and/or use the product/service?

Customer Demographics

 The second major component in customer analysis is identifying target market segments that are predisposed to preferring your products over those of your competitors. A market segment is a sub-set of a market made up of people or organizations with one or more characteristics that cause them to demand similar product and/or services based on qualities of those products such as price or function. A marketing program aimed at individual segments needs to understand and capitalize on the group’s differences and use them strategically in all advertising campaigns. 

Gender, age, ethnicity, geography and income are all market-segmenting criteria based on demographics.  

Typical questions to ask when determining the demographics of the target market include: * What is the age range of the customer who wants my product or service?  * Which gender would be most interested in this product or service?  * What is the income level of my potential customers?  * What level of education do they have?  * What is their marital or family status: Are they married, single, divorced? Do they have kids, grandkids? * What are the hobbies of my target customers?

The target market segments are specified by demographic factors: age, income, education, ethnicity, geography, etc. Then by having a well defined set of demographic factors, marketing will be able to identify the best channels to reach these specific demographic segments. 

Customer Analysis Example

Customer Analysis References

Market Analysis {U.S. Small Business Administration (SBA) Website’s content on Marketing Analysis} http://www.sba.gov/content/market-analysis

“Analyzing Customers in Your Business Plan” 2011 {Growthink, Inc.} http://www.growthink.com/businessplan/help-center/analyzing-customers-your-business-plan

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Customer profile template to reach your target audience

Successful small business owners and marketing managers share a common understanding — you can’t reach your target customers if you don’t know who they are! That’s why they build ideal customer profiles, also known as buyer personas. But this can be a challenging, time-consuming process. That’s where a customer profile template comes in.

In this article, we’ll discuss why such templates are so important. We’ll also share with you a helpful customer profile template built on the monday.com Work OS to get you up and running immediately.

Get the template

What is a customer profile template?

Customer profiles — or ideal customer profiles, ICPs, marketing personas, buyer personas, or customer personas — are detailed descriptions of the typical people who would purchase your products or services.

Customer profile templates are editable, customizable documents that include headers and fields to organize and analyze this type of information.

Customer profile templates provide a framework for marketing persona development. They help you stay on track and work more efficiently while creating these crucial assets and drawing from the expertise and experience of leaders who’ve come before you. They allow sales and marketing teams to design ICPs more efficiently, as they’ll be able to pull up the document and plug the necessary information in right away, rather than starting from a blank page.

Businesses may have multiple customer profiles — particularly if they have multiple service offerings or product lines, and therefore have different types of customers purchasing each — all of which should include:

• Customer data like age range, gender, location, and household income
• Client psychographics such as interests and hobbies
• Goals and motivations of your customer base
• Any challenges or pain points your current customers face relevant to your product or service

Here’s what a typical template could look like:

( Image Source )

Why use a customer profile template?

ICPs are an important starting point for designing a marketing strategy, but creating a customer profile can be a cumbersome and time-consuming process. Templates make the whole ordeal a lot more efficient because they provide a solid starting point with predefined headers and fields to enter information relevant to your company and customers.

That obviously makes customer profiling a lot faster — which is especially helpful if you’re designing multiple — but it also provides an element of consistency and uniformity across your ICPs. That way, when new hires or marketing contractors need to access the profiles you’ve designed, they’ll be able to easily interpret and understand the points you’re making.

In the long term, using a consistent customer profile template can also improve your lead generation because you will have a better idea of how to serve each of your customers based on their profiles.

Of course, it’s worth mentioning that not everyone is an experienced graphic designer, so you may have found yourself creating documents that look and feel as if they were made in MS Paint! If you’re less-than-gifted when it comes to design work, using templates is a good idea as they can help you present your information neatly and efficiently.

What are some examples of customer profile templates?

Are you looking to create your own template? Check out these customer profile examples for a little bit of inspiration.

Simple customer profile template

Though the general rule with customer profiles is “the more information, the better” — you certainly don’t have to create multi-page documents that describe every single habit and characteristic your ideal customer might exhibit.

This customer profile template is a great example of how a simple ICP can still offer actionable insights. As you’ll notice, it includes the most crucial customer information, such as:

• Demographic information
• Their decision-making process
• The products you offer that apply to their needs
• Goals and desires
• Typical behaviors and tendencies

Hierarchical customer profile template

A great way for your sales team to score leads and prioritize outreach is to compare them against a hierarchy of fitness. That is, you create several customer profiles that indicate different levels of fit for your company, with the most complete fit being your ideal customer profile.

This customer profile template example follows that approach. It includes a “no fit” profile — also known as a negative persona — where you can detail behaviors, characteristics, or demographics that determine when a potential customer isn’t a great fit for your company.

Visual customer profile template

This customer profile template is another one that takes a very simple approach and lays out the required information in an effective visual format. Your sales and customer service teams may find it helpful to include a stock image or caricature of your ideal customer to help them visualize who they’re talking to — this can be particularly helpful for employees who only engage with customers over the phone.

At the bottom of the template, you have the opportunity to write a brief description of your customer. Narrative approaches like this make information easier to digest, so your ICPs become more relatable.

monday.com’s customer profile template

We’ve covered some pretty helpful ideal customer profile template examples, but you may have noticed that they all share a common problem — they’re static, disconnected documents. To help you level up your ICP creation and make the whole process more collaborative, we’ve built you an effective template on monday workdocs .

monday workdocs is our very own online word editor with advanced collaborative features and a beautiful visual design. Here’s why you’ll love creating customer profiles in workdocs. You can:

• Pull information directly in from your existing monday.com boards
• Include helpful graphs from the monday.com reporting suite
• Assign tasks to colleagues to collect the necessary information
• Share ICPs with your entire team and with contractors outside of your company

Plus, because workdocs is part of the monday.com Work OS, you’ll gain access to a ton of other super valuable tools and features. For example, monday sales CRM makes capturing and storing customer information easy. You can build a dedicated customer outreach board to manage customer interviews, an important part of buyer persona creation. Personas guide the decision-making process of many teams when creating project roadmaps. A buyer persona template can help your team reach cross-functional alignment and uncover insights about potential customers.

Customer profile template tips & tricks

If you’ve never created a customer profile before, read these tips and tricks before you start and put your best foot forward — if you’re well seasoned, here’s a few ways to get back to basics!

1. Leverage real-life customer stories

The best way to get a great understanding of common customer experiences is to jump on the phone — or video call — with your existing clients. Use your email marketing platform to send out a bulk email to your current customer base, ask if anyone would be willing to answer a few questions, and be sure to include an enticing offer or perk.

2. Consider building negative personas

Negative personas — a description of the type of customer you don’t want to attract — can be a useful tool for comparing with your regular customer profile template, allowing those responsible for your sales efforts to understand important behavioral attributes and identify when they’re speaking with an ideal client more readily.

3. Talk to your team

While customer interviews are rich sources of data, keep in mind that you may also find some value in talking to your customer success and sales team members. They’re speaking with your customers all day, every day, and have a strong understanding of the common challenges they face and processes they go through to purchase.

4. Focus on common pain points

One of the main things you’ll use your customer profiles for is to inform marketing and sales tactics, which generally aim to appeal to common challenges and pain points your prospects face. When speaking with your customers and sales agents as part of the customer profiling process, make sure to dig deep into pain points. Ask:

• When does the pain point arise?
• What are they doing about it now?
• What is the impact of that issue?
• What solutions exist?

Read also: Everything you need to know about effective Customer relationship management

FAQs about customer profile templates

How do you write a customer profile.

Follow these steps to write an effective customer profile:

• Arrange to interview existing customers about the challenges, goals, and demographic makeup.
• Speak with your sales and service reps to gain internal insights.
• Collect the information.
• Make a copy of your customer profile template.
• Identify the most common information across all discussions, and add this data under the relevant header.

What should I include in a client profile?

Customer profiles should include the following information, at a minimum:

• Customer demographics such as age range
• Common challenges and pain points
• Customer goals and desires
• Typical behaviors and characteristics
• Potential product/service fit

How do I create a customer profile in Excel?

In your Excel spreadsheet, add the following titles in the top row:

• Demographics
• Pain points
• Behaviors and characteristics
• Product/service fit

Then, fill in the appropriate information based on the customer interviews you’ve conducted. However, if you’re looking for a simpler solution that will save you time and ensure you include all the important information you need, consider using monday.com’s template.

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