7 Powerful Customer Profile Templates For Your Marketing Campaigns
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Introduction
Do you know why customer profile templates are critical?
They’re super important because you have better ways to spend your time than to be designing new customer profiles when you run new marketing campaigns.
In this article, we’ll be giving away examples and describe the best practices to save you time and money so you can be more effective in marketing, and measure how well your sales campaigns are working.
53% of marketers say they have “too much to do with too little time.” This means marketers need templates to automate tasks and save as much time as possible. Customer profile templates are one of the methods used to focus effort optimally and avoid wasted energy.
Why do you need a customer profile template ?
Customer profile templates help you save time. They provide a pattern for you to build your customer profiles for any campaign you’re working on.
However, building a customer profile template that rightly describes your buyers begins with in-depth research.
The more in-depth the research on your customer is, the better your marketing campaign will be. And by extension, a great customer profile helps your marketing campaign target the right people.
In this article, we’ll look at four customer profile templates (examples) for B2C and three for B2B businesses. Let’s start by exploring a variety of B2C customer profile examples you can work with.
B2C Customer Profile Templates
B2C basically refers to the type of transaction in which businesses sell products or services directly to consumers.
So here are four customer templates you can use to describe a B2C customer:
B2C customer profile example #1: Animal Loving John
Our first example is from a Dribbble User. This customer profile is as explanatory as they come.
This customer profile layout describes the customer’s current feelings, frustrations, and his needs. All of that information in your customer profile helps you understand what role your product or service will play in the daily lives of your target customers.
B2C customer profile example #2: Rachel, The Stay At Home Mum
You can get a good idea of who Rachel is, in this example, by learning about her background, lifestyle and challenges.
It’s simple and easy to understand as it displays the information of the customer in bullet points and the sentences are concise. No lengthy story here to describe the customer, just some points that are easy to act on.
B2C customer profile example #3: Stressed Susan
The customer profile example #2 above portrays Rachel as a customer who has her life together. Conversely, Sarah’s life, in this customer profile example from UX Mastery, does not seem so perfect. She’s overwhelmed and in need of help.
Not all businesses need a customer profile that describes their customers’ challenges to this extent, but many businesses do. For example, a health-related organization will include all possible medical issues a customer can have but may not take into consideration their financial profile.
On the other hand, a financial services company will include their customer’s financial issues in a customer profile rather than focus on health or marital issues a customer may have — unless there’s some connection between such customer challenges and their services.
But in general, and for most businesses, knowing your customer’s life, business or family challenges helps you more effectively create an amazing customer profile and, in the long run, great marketing campaigns.
B2C customer profile example #4: Trendy Brandi
This customer profile example from Indie Game Girl describes how Brandi Tyler, a woman with extremely narrow feet, has searched high and low for comfortable, stylish shoes. The specific details in the buyer profile help you see the process a customer like Brandi goes through when she needs to purchase shoes.
Knowing the customer to this extent also provides something extra to help you fully understand their frustrations. This customer profile also includes actual quotes gathered from surveys and interviews, lending insight into the personality of the people you are trying to reach with your campaign.
As stated in the Best Practices section above, interviews and surveys should be organized in order to glean accurate information to create the best possible customer profile. Real quotes were included in the above example, giving the profile a more personal touch.
If you’re a B2B business, here are three customer templates you can use to describe a customer:
B2B customer profile templates
As a B2B brand, you’re typically dealing with professional buyers or high-level executives. This means your customer profiles should target business owners, policymakers and people who influence and make decisions in their respective industries/organizations.
So while the B2C customer profile examples above heavily focus on individual customers, the B2B examples below include more specific details about the buyer’s workplace, their job role and how important they are within the organization. And if your target buyer is not always in charge of making purchasing decisions, you need to include that detail in your customer profile as well.
B2B customer profile example #1: Technical Decision Maker
Here’s how one customer profile example from Referral SaaSquatch shows how much more information about buying decisions can be included in a customer profile. It shows that the customer is the decision-maker and also influences the organization’s purchasing choices.
One key difference between the B2C and B2B customer profile examples is that this example has more detail — what internal influences can affect the customer’s purchasing decision, their attitude, how long-form content is his preferred content type.
B2B customer profile example #2: John Johnson
This ClearVoice customer profile is a great example of a concise B2B buyer profile. It explains who John is and provides the necessary information about his job position as well as his capacity to make or influence decisions in his company — as a marketing manager.
This example shows how you can be succinct and accurate when creating your customer profile and still drive home your point about an ideal buyer. This is especially useful when you have a campaign to run on a tight schedule.
B2B customer profile example #3: Diane, The Director
The last example is one of the finest customer profile templates around, and it’s from Buffer. Meet Diane, the Director:
It’s a jam-packed customer profile template. One of the key features you can appreciate about this customer profile is the way the details are placed around the image in such a way that it is easy to scan through.
Looking at this, you can quickly learn everything you need to know about Diane. Outside the regular demographic information, you can learn about her goals and values, the problems she faces daily, her job role (and who she reports to), her information sources and the experience she seeks when searching for products and services.
But in general, when building your customer profiles, you need to consider the following elements — depending on whether you’re a B2C (Business to Consumer) or B2B (Business to Business) brand:
Customer profile elements for B2C brands:
- Customer’s personal demographics:
— What is the age range of the target customer?
— Where do they live?
— Are they all male or female or mixed?
- Customer’s educational background:
— What level of education did they attain?
— What did they study?
- Customer’s socioeconomic status:
— What is their annual income?
— Can they afford what you are offering them?
- Job title/Role:
— What is their job title and how long have they been in that role?
— Are they self-employed or salaried employees?
Customer profile components for B2B brands:
- Value Proposition:
— How does your product or service improve their business?
— Identify the problems you are trying to solve.
- Nature and Size of the business:
— What industry category do they fall into?
— Which industry do they serve?
— What is the number of employees?
- The Customer’s USP (Unique Selling Proposition)
— What problem are they trying to solve for their own customers?
— What is your customer’s USP?
But while creating your customer profile, whether for B2B or B2C, you need to understand some ground rules (best practices) that will ensure your customer profiles make a definitive impact on your marketing.
Here are four key customer profile best practices you should follow:
- Focus on the rationale behind behaviours: Understand “why” the customer is doing A, B or C.
- Humanize customers (fictional or otherwise) with a real picture: Include a headshot of a specific customer in your customer profile template. Preferably, get the headshot of a real customer from their social account (LinkedIn, Facebook, etc.) and put it on your customer profile. This helps you keep in mind, as you run campaigns, that your customers are real people; sometimes it’s easy to forget that
- Build your marketing strategy by sticking to three or four customer profiles: Use three or four primary customer profiles to represent who your ideal customers are — because your customers don’t all have one personality. Veteran marketer Mark Schaefer estimates 90%+ of sales come from 4 to 5 types of buyers.
Identify your ideal customers and use their characteristics to build your customer profile. You can look at an existing customer’s social media profile — LinkedIn, for instance — and identify salient characteristics about them. You can also hold interviews with some of your best customers and get a better understanding of their daily lives and what makes them draw their wallets. Download a free sample script and process that helps you setup an interview and understand your customers better.
- Weave customer information into a story: Convert all the raw, demographic data gotten from research about your ideal customer into a story. This helps your team connect better to the customer when they understand all the elements used to build the profile.
But remember, developing your customer profile is only one of the first steps of a successful marketing or sales campaign. Think of it as the cornerstone that empowers your campaign to reach your target audience and convert them into customers.
How to get correct customer profile information
The best personas are created from real surveys and interviews — not from ballpark guesses, conjecture or assumptions, says Schaefer.
You can, of course, take wild guesses about your customers and stuff their profiles with misleading data. Or you can use a tool that helps you accurately pinpoint customer data. OpenTracker is one such tool.
Opentracker helps you profile your website visitors and helps you identify key characteristics like:
- Your customer’s location — OpenTracker helps you identify where the bulk of your customers are coming from. The tool helps you generate accurate reports so you can target the right buyers and drive them to your business.
- The type of device they’re using to visit your site. For instance, if you have an app that provides solutions to women and your company is based in Ireland, you can identify female Irish visitors who download your app via iOS.
- Identify the activities of visitors on your site. Opentracker is a very robust and powerful analytics tool as it can identify users and tag them so you can follow them or look them up through time. Just enter their details directly into the Visitor’s profile. This is especially useful for email marketing campaigns and tracking hot prospects.
- Beyond giving you details on which devices your customers are using to access your website, you can combine Opentracker with LinkedIn and/or Facebook. Learn how to build insights with Linkedin or Facebook, download the free course here.
- Identify multiple site visitors from a particular organization and get a peek into the discussions they’re having about your product or service based on the pages they visit on your site. If you’re a B2B brand, this is especially good news for you — because you get to see the potential clients who might be serious about doing business with you. This way, targeting those organizations in your campaigns becomes easier and more effective.
