Let’s Talk About How to Create Consumer Profiles

Every great marketing strategy starts with creating consumer profiles. By making buyer profiles for your target audience, you'll better understand their behaviors, allowing your marketing to be more compelling. Consumer profiles get two times more email open rates and receive five times more clicks. Additionally, using customer data for behaviorally targeted ads makes them twice as effective and websites two to five times more efficient. 

Let's go over a customer profile, how it can benefit your business, and how to create these profiles accurately. 

What is a Consumer Profile? 

Also known as a customer avatar or buyer persona, this hypothetical profile outlines the demographics and interests of one of your brand's average customers. It should include primary identifiers like the customer's age, gender, family size, geographic location, income range, and other identifiers. You can further develop profiles with the types of podcasts, music, television shows, and other media your target consumes. 

A few of these profiles can tell you precisely what a customer is looking for when choosing their favorite brands. This information is vital to helping you create unique marketing campaigns that will attract your target's attention. 

Why Are Consumer Profiles So Important? 

Without up-to-date customer avatars, you risk using ineffective marketing strategies that won't hit the mark with your consumers. 91% of consumers will only engage with brands that show them relevant ads for products they want or need. Similarly, customer avatars can also help you pinpoint the weaknesses of your current marketing campaigns. 

Customer avatars also help you enhance the quality of your digital ads. It's estimated that 40% of media advertising budgets are wasted on subpar ads placed on the wrong platforms. The buyer insights you gain from creating well-researched profiles will help you avoid those pitfalls.  

Customer avatars can also help you maximize your advertising budget. For instance, social media ads provide a good ROI for many businesses because these ads have excellent reach. However, if your target spends more time listening to podcasts, too many social media ads can be a waste of money.  

How to Create Your Brand's Customer Avatars 

1. Do Your Research 

Thoughtful, accurate research is the first step to creating your brand's consumer profiles. If your company has a website, it's easy to track information about your customers using data analytics software. We recommend creating customer avatars for your most frequent buyers first to get the quickest initial results. 

2. Gather Information 

Next, find all the attributes that most of your customers have in common. It's good to start with the basic demographic identifiers (age, location, income, etc.). 

Research the typical customer behaviors of your target audience. How often do they shop for your brand's offerings, what kind of products do they buy, and what are some problems that they might experience? You should also find out the behaviors that lead up to them engaging with your brand. For example, do most of your customers visit your website through social media links or email ads? 

Now it's time to consider all of the interests that your customers might have in common.  If your target audience loves fitness content, that's one of the things that you should focus on when creating marketing copy. You can also ask your customers directly what kind of ads they'd like to see with surveys. 

3. Build Hypothetical Customer Avatars 

Once you're satisfied with the information you have, you can start building your consumer profile. You don't have to use any specific software to do this. However, it should be written out in a document that's easily accessible to your entire marketing team. Don't be afraid to seek out the expertise of a media partner if you need help cohesively organizing your consumer profiles. 

For best results, we recommend creating at least two or three customer avatars for your business. Even if your brand only sells one kind of product, you likely have customers of multiple age ranges with varying interests. Creating unique consumer profiles for more personas only ensures you'll attract as many leads as possible. 

4. Do Periodic Updates 

Once you have your consumer profiles, remember to update them periodically. Your target audience can change over time, so changing those profiles is necessary to satisfy your customers. Now that you know the basics of customer avatars making the required improvements and building new profiles will be easier. 

Start Your Mixed Marketing Campaigns with Mid-West Family LaCrosse 

Customer avatars are proven to understand your target demographic better to build the most effective marketing strategy possible. Using these profiles will improve customer loyalty, reduce unnecessary ad spending, and keep your business on track for success. 

When used with other marketing tactics, consumer profiles are even more effective. Mid-West Family LaCrosse can help any business create mixed marketing campaigns tailor-made to suit your customer avatars. Learn more about our approach by contacting us today.