Customer Profiling → Knowing → Communicating
It takes all sorts to make a world goes a well-known saying. Truth or not, people who are involved in marketing (especially market research) should always bear in mind the importance of customer profiling.
Why? Easy: because customers are not all the same. Neither users nor respondents. Each group of customers has specific characteristic, different customer journey, a different approach to events, different interests and habits.
It’s potentially damaging not to be aware of your user/customer profile. Best-case scenario, you won’t get good results for your product or service. Worst-case scenario, you’ll get ambiguos, invalid and incomplete results.
That’s the reason why…
customer profiling means knowing
Knowing is for sure the foundation of every marketing strategy aimed to be effective.
This is particularly true in market research where everything is about communication with your target audience and potential customers.
Sample profiling allows to differentiate communication adapting it to your ideal customers. This guarantees higher accuracy and control on your resources.
Each customer/user carries valuable information for the researcher. Approaching these information correctly and with the right profiling method is the only way to use them for research.
Creating value with customer profiling
Sample profiling is useful to get to know your target better and to be well-informed on their requirements to elaborate strategies and proposals to turn customers into buyer persona.
What about a market research survey?
Profiling users is fundamental for any market research.
For example: we’ve been asked to design a survey on dry milk for newborns. If we don’t profile our users before, how can we find respondents? How and who are we going to interview?
Or how can we interview someone on smokers habits if we don’t even know if he smokes or not?
Obviously these are just two simple hypothesis but they’re useful to understand how important it is to have an updated and complete profiling results.
It’s crucial to invest the right resources in customer profiling and it has to be done in a precise and rational way.
It will be useful to:
- reduce time on design, management and launch of the project
- analyze and create a questionnaire fitted to your target
- start a suitable marketing campaign
- obtain a higher number of answers and interactions
- get in-depth communication which will be useful for your research goal
Using specific software for data collection you can collect and analyze a high number of information.
Profiling the customer doesn’t have to be a complex procedure: often you just need to ask a few (simple) questions to profile the person you’re going to interact with. You’ll be able to know at the beginning of the interview if the person is right for your research and if he/she will be able to bring value to you and your activity.
Key element: the target and the customer base
We know that profiling means getting a list of high quality contacts as a base for our research. This list is the starting point to define the target for our survey.
Let’s take our previous example again: we need to carry on a research on dry milk. First of all we need a list of women with children. But that’s not enough: we need to define the target. To do that, we need to select just women of our list with a child younger than 1 year old.
And here it is our final target.
Key element: the sample
Once you’ve defined your target, you’ll need to get a representative sample.
Going back to our dry milk survey, to have all situations well represented we’ll have to interview 49,5% of moms with a son, 49,5 % of moms with a daughter and 1% of moms with twins. So we can estimate with quotas the number of invitations needed, saving up time, energy and money.
For example, if our research is just on mothers of twins, sending invitations just to women who fit this category would be a huge advantage for us.
Just an accurate profiling of your customers or users will guarantee great results.
