How to use customer profiles for insight & impact in your branding
Why Customer profiles are important & how to discover yours
We are a brand studio based in Torquay, South Devon, offering branding, website design & brand video to creative businesses across the UK - this is part four in our series on brand process; an overview of the branding process and providing you with helpful tips on how to increase the impact of your brand. Find out more about our branding & visual identity services for businesses.
Sometimes it’s overlooked that branding is that it is part of marketing, which is essentially the process of winning and retaining customers. In other words, it’s all focussed on your audience.
If branding is to make an impact in your overall marketing (and hopefully that’s your aim), it needs to start with the customer first, identifying and defining that ideal person you would like to work with.
This is also known in marketing as creating customer personas or avatars.
Without that focus, a business brand can become ineffective or prone to distraction, reducing its ability to engage with the right customers overall through its marketing.
Below you’ll find more on why it’s important to define your customer base or audience; areas of customer profiling to consider; and then some practical steps to get going.
Why is customer profiling important?
These are three principles of why creating profiles for your ideal customer is important in your branding.
The laws of attraction
If you consider that the role of your branding within your overall marketing is to attract the right customers, if it is attracting the wrong ones, you are less likely to be able to convert that interest into sales.
You might think that simply attracting attention is a success in itself. However, if you are a luxury brand with a premium price point, dealing with a large volume of low-value customers is draining and a waste of time, as they won’t be aligned with your product or services because you are too expensive.
By knowing who you want to attract, you can ensure that your branding is designed to attract the right kind of customer who has the values and budget that align with the type of product that you offer.
Value matters
Sometimes it’s possible to over-focus on the customer, which may sound counter-intuitive.
What we mean by this is that it is important to focus on what your ideal customer values, but not at the cost of what you value.
Ideally, your ideal customer should value what you value; if not, it is very easy to sacrifice part of what you do for the expediency of sales. In the long-term that could lead to exhaustion and becoming disenfranchised.
When you align your branding with the right customer who values what is important to your business, you are more likely to attract those who are willing to pay; whether for speed of service; eco-credentials; or highly original and creative work.
Customer loyalty
Good branding that is centred on your customers also helps you build for the long term.
Transactional relationships in retail and business are very common through e-commerce and the mass marketplace. However, people and business also yearn for connection and stability.
By building a brand with a core customer focus, you set the foundations for longer-term relationships. This not only translates in to repeat business but also builds the type of loyalty that turns into advocacy.
Connect with people’s hearts and minds and they then begin to help build your brand with you because they love what you do and your motivations.
So that’s the theory and why examining customer profiles as part of your branding is important - let’s move on to how it can work for you in practice.
How it can work and get impact?
Here are a couple of further points in which we unpack why the principle of good customer profiling within your branding can make a positive impact for your business.
More appealing and attractive visuals
The first thing to say is that when you are clear on your customer profiles, you can then set up your brand aesthetic to appeal to these target groups.
Once you’re happy with your overall branding, you can look specifically at website material or social media content to deliver that aesthetic.
It’s worth saying too, that your branding should give you considerable scope for creativity with how you implement your content and visuals.
Your branding will provide helpful parameters to keep you on the right track and remind you of your target audience plus what appeals to it.
Tone of voice resonates
Within the customer profiling process, you should also look at tone of voice, which is to say how your brand comes across in your written content.
Depending on how you want to come across to customers or in your business sector, this could be more formal, corporate or informal and playful.
However you want to present your brand, the tone that comes across in your style of writing needs to resonate with customers.
If you use irreverent language when your audience prefers a level of respect or formality, the result could be to put off the very people you want to engage with.
To summarise, your visuals and written content (also known as copy) need to work in tandem for maximum impact. By identifying and defining your ideal customers you are better able to choose or commission your visuals, plus craft your words in such as way that they resonate with your audience every time.
Good customer profiles are critical to speaking a presenting your business consistently and coherently.
Now that we’ve covered the principles and impact of profiles, we’ll get more practical and go through area to focus on when you’re planning, plus helpful questions to ask yourself.
How to delve into your customer profiles
Unpacking customer profiles is all about identifying areas and asking lots of questions. Sometimes you may feel that you are covering the same ground, but it will all help to build up a rounded picture.
Here are some areas of customer profiles to get you going and corresponding questions.
Vital statistics
A quick way to think of this area is age, sex location (i.e., ASL) which covers the core areas to get the bare bones on your profile.
Helpful questions in this category include:
What age bracket to they fall into? (Rather than a specific age, e.g., 25-30)
Are they male or female? (Sex makes a big difference in how people engage.)
Where do they live? What are the main centres near to your business (e.g., Exeter, Plymouth, Torquay)?
Are you sure you want to work with anyone across the UK or a big regional area? (It’s often easier to get traction with those closer to home.)
Education
The level to which people have been educated can make a big difference on their outlook in life and so in their purchasing decisions.
Helpful questions in this category include:
Are they likely to be secondary school-educated or higher, and why might this make a difference?
How can you connect someone’s educational level with questions below on challenges and motivations?
Start to think about ‘so what’ when identifying particular aspects of a customer
Income, budget & purchasing
Income level is not always everything, as people and businesses often find finance for things that they value.
Nevertheless, an audience with a more expensive taste will look for a certain kind of aesthetic, so this area is important to nail down.
Helpful questions in this category include:
What sector does the customer work in and what inferences can we make about their income (or budget as a business)?
What sort of disposable income is our audience likely to have? Can we put a (rough) figure on it?
What are the sorts of things that it would buy, and would any of them compete with our products or services?
Are their purchases a monthly occurrence or more one-off or periodic?
Are they cautious about spending, focussed on ethical products or fairly free or impulsive?
Household
Sometimes the decision-maker is part of a wider family, so children can be a factor or influence in the bigger picture.
Helpful questions in this category include:
Is the customer likely to be single, married or in a partnership?
Do they have children or dependents? Are they the end recipients of goods and services?
Are there pets in the household (if so, how might they impact decisions on holidays, weekend activities etc.)?
Social life & hangouts
Where people hang out in their own time, as well as work, is an important consideration, as this will highlight places where you can interact with your preferred audience and tap in to the kind of conversations they are having.
Helpful questions in this category include:
Who are their friends, and who do they like to spend time with, whether on- or off-line?
What is their social media channel of choice? Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest etc?
How are conversations and interactions framed - video, text, photo?
How do they use the channel - for lifestyle or aspirational reasons, or for fact-finding?
How is their usage likely to change? Is it for a specific time of their life or event, such as a wedding?
Interests, motivations & causes
This is another area that can better help your brand resonate with your ideal kind of client.
Helpful questions in this category include:
What are your customer’s interests, whether personal, such as TV shows, interior design, faith and religion; or business-related, e.g., social media marketing
Do they have a cause, such as the environment, sustainable living, animal welfare, social justice
Fears & challenges
You may have heard people talking about addressing the problems an audience faces, and so being able to offer solutions.
This is all about identifying the things that affect people deeply, and they can be positive such as dreams and aspirations.
This level of motivation is highly emotive and therefore more likely to engage an audience, so understanding it is vital.
Helpful questions in this category include:
Is time or capacity a challenge (as above, ask why)?
What are the things that cause your customer pain?
What are the sorts of things that keep them awake at night?
Is there a place where they go to ask for help - where is that and can you find out what the questions are?
What are the things that would help make their life easier or add peace of mind? Working backwards, what problems are they addressing?
These categories and their questions should be more than enough to get you going.
Once you’ve worked through each of the categories, you should start to see some patterns and have an idea of your ideal customer or business to target.
In terms of making it very practical, we’ll touch on some initial steps below to help you get going, rather than floundering in a sea of questions and answers!
Practical tips to get going with your customer profiles
The key thing with getting going with customer profiles is to structure it and be orderly.
Here are some ways to keep on top of the process and make it manageable.
Start with 3 profiles
Although you may not have ‘the one’ customer, try to avoid having too many profiles
Three profiles is a good start; try to avoid more than four maximum
Use a table
As you will be looking at the same categories for each of your customer profiles, use a table to keep things in order
Layout your customers one per column and one category per row
This will also allow you to compare customer types with each other
Anything like Microsoft Excel, Trello or a table in a Google Document works fine, but make sure it’s accessible
Give them a name & a face
The more personalised you can make this the more meaningful it will be in the long term
By adding a generic name and face, you can better identify ideal customers or businesses when you come across them
This is especially helpful as and when you get into prospecting and sales processes on social media or elsewhere
Iterate
Embrace the journey - things often change, including your business
The best way to refine your ideal customer base is in action through doing and reviewing
Make time to review your customer profiles and ask whether they are still accurate
If need be, tweak them and then feed that back into your branding and marketing activities
Future posts in this series
Find your character
Focus your brand tone and voice, verbal branding
Design your brand logo and sub-marks, colour and font pairings
Curate your visual branding through photography, illustrations and patterns
Create your brand touch points - print and online
Cultivate your social media / content creation / storytelling
Engineer your user experience / physical spaces
Engage your audience, relationships and brand ambassadors
We hope this series will help you understand more about what goes into good branding and also help inform you why a brand is so much more than a logo.
These are our tips to help you get started with customer profiles and we’d love to hear any of your thoughts or reflections. Do head over to the corresponding post on Instagram to join the conversation and share your opinion.
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