What makes a good customer profile?

If you go on Google and search for “customer profile” you’ll get the following definition:

“A customer profile is a detailed description of your ideal customer. It provides demographic information, such as age, gender, income, education and location, as well as customer behaviors and interests.”.

“Age, gender, income, education, location.”

How useful do you think these attributes are?

And by useful I mean to have a real impact on your business… because a customer profile shouldn’t be only a document left in Google Drive.

I personally won’t say if they are good or bad, but I’ll show you a photo I shared a while back on LinkedIn:

This is age, gender, or location in “real life”.

And believe me, I saw a lot of customer profiles and in most of the cases, the focus was exactly on those attributes.

Attributes that don’t tell anything insightful and are not able to contribute to growth at all.

Basically, that’s how I ended up with the topic of today:

What makes a good customer profile?

What are the things to consider when creating one?

Don’t worry, I won’t bother you with a long list of attributes… I’ll just show you how a customer profile should contribute to growth.

So, when you open the document about the customer profile, does it tell you this?

Does it tell you how to make potential customers feel like their next logical step should be to reach out?

If you can’t say “Yes” in 5 seconds, your customer profile is not good enough. It’s probably focused on surface-level data that doesn’t actually tell you anything.

And yes, it should tell, because that’s how you have to execute the overall growth strategy.

Now, there is a long list of things I focus on, but I’ll share with you 2 questions that once answered will bring you closer to that “Yes”.

1. What is their biggest Challenge, Problem, or Need?

In one way or another, we all take action when we fall into one of these 3 categories.

Based on the customer profiles you have, my suggestion is to list the biggest challenge, problem, or need for each of them.

Being “forced” to name a single one, you’ll avoid spreading too thin and making your messaging broader than it should be.

2. What is their biggest Desire?

“Connected’ with the challenge, problem, or need, what they actually want to achieve? Think about this as the promise you will make to them.

The same thing as to challenges, problems, or needs, focus on a single one because you’ll be exactly as specific as you should.

And now guess what?

If you manage to make potential customers see your company as the way they can go from challenge, problem, or need to desire, it will make reaching out the next logical step.

You’ll be closer to the “This is for me feeling”, which makes the difference between “Not now” and “I need this”.

This is what makes a good customer profile.

And this is how impactful a document that is often forgotten in a Google Drive can be in the growth of your company.

If done properly, of course.