How to Create a Client Profile for Your Target Audience

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“Client profiles”, “customer profiles”, “buying personas”… are terms that are thrown around pretty often and more or less boil down to the same thing: a semi-fictional representation of your ideal customer.

Functioning as a how-to guide for reaching your target audiences, client profiles help you to build a comprehensive and informative template for your ideal client, thus better positioning you to understand the messaging that will appeal to them most.

However, you may be wondering how best to go about creating your client profile. This is what we’re going to be digging into today, so without further ado, let’s get to it!

Why is client profiling important?

At the end of the day, attempting to sell services or products to the general public without first understanding your target audience really is akin to taking a shot in the dark. For this reason, when you’re building a business, developing your market strategy or providing direction for your sales team, it’s incredibly important to have a thorough understanding of your customers, both current and future.

If you’re targeting an audience that is, in reality, too broad to be effective, you’re essentially diluting your company value. This is where client profiling comes in.

Client profiles act as signposting for all the members of your team. From managers to marketers to salespeople, the benefits of client profiles in providing guidance and direction can be felt by all. Without properly considered client profiles. it’s far more difficult to create content that your audience can really connect with.

Four tips for creating a succinct client profile

Trying to build your buying personas and customer profiles can be daunting. It’s often difficult to know where to start, so we’ve put together a quick list of our top tips for building comprehensive client profiles.

#1 It’s all about feedback

Without understanding your current customers, it’s pretty impossible to build an idea of your future customers.

That’s why it’s essential that you reach out to some of your best customers in order to get a better idea of who they are and why they have chosen you and your business, perhaps time and time again.

What you’re asking them should help you to build an idea of the kind of people who your services are best targeted towards. Questions don’t need to be (and shouldn’t be) too personal, and some details you may want to look for could include: their job role, career path to date, industry, age, hobbies and location.

A major key question to explore is: how your product or service meets their needs or tackles problems they have previously had.

This is essential. By understanding your client’s hurdles and problems you can identify the solutions that your business or brand can provide.

For instance, if you are a web design company, a number of your previous clients may express that a large hurdle for them was finding a way to target their online content to local demographics. With this information in mind, you can start to build a picture of how you may best market your company SEO services to small businesses.

#2 Ruling out your non-target audience

All businesses have individuals and groups that they shouldn’t target, whether they’re aware of it or not. These individuals and groups are referred to as “negative personas”.

Only giant corporations have the budgets necessary to create products, services and their related campaigns that target a vast and broad spectrum of people. Corporations like Apple or Amazon, for instance.

If you’re a smaller business, it’s absolutely necessary that you create an image of your non-ideal client. This way, you can avoid funnelling money into marketing strategies that just won’t cut it with an audience who are, ultimately, not on the lookout for your products or services.

Once you have an idea of who these people are, you can exclude them from your target audience.

For instance, if your business operates in the luxury sector, there will be certain demographics you don’t need to target.

#3 It’s time to put pen to paper

Now that you’ve got an idea about who exactly you ought to be targeting, it’s time to draft up your client profiles so that you can build from there with your marketing strategies!

By creating a finalised, formal document you can ensure consistency and accuracy when your writers, salespeople and marketing team are carrying out their work.

Additionally, you can regularly revisit your client profiles so that you can review and rewrite them in accordance with new insights on your target audiences as your business grows and evolves over time.

Many websites such as Uplead offer free templates from which you can build your customer profiles.

#4 Figure out your marketing strategies

Once you’ve spent some time researching and considering your target (and non-target!) audiences, it’s time to figure out exactly how to market to each of those audiences.

Maybe you have an idea for one client profile or perhaps as many as ten. Here’s where you figure out exactly how to talk the talk and walk the walk, in order to appeal to your target demographics. You can figure out strategies that speak to each client profile individually, as well as strategies that target everyone at once, perhaps.

For instance, if you run a sustainable clothing brand, you’ll be wanting to create strategies that target a variety of client profiles. From chatting to previous customers, you may have gathered information that has helped you form two client profiles in particular.

One client may be a young, socially and environmentally conscious woman in her twenties. The other main client profile may be her twenty-something partner, whose looking to buy her a gift card for, say, a birthday, Valentine’s Day or Christmas gift. You can create separate marketing strategies for these two profiles.

Wrap up

We hope that you’ve got a clearer idea now of how to best build and utilise client profiles. By painting comprehensive portraits of your ideal customers, you’re setting your business up for true success. Period.

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