How To Know If You Have An Ideal Customer Profile

When it comes to your advertising and marketing work, it’s all about making sure you’re maximizing your reach. Such is the case when it comes to having an ideal customer profile. That said, one of the major issues that emerges when formulating an ideal customer profile is that it is often confused with, or just plain used interchangeably with, a buyer persona. While the two have similarities, knowing their differences does make a big difference in terms of your campaign success.

In the most basic way, think of an ideal customer profile as the big picture, wider angle view of the perfect company/organization/outfit with which your company would like to connect. Finding customer profiles gives your company opportunities to better understand your own product/service, as well as think ahead to any possible changes down the line. They also help establish the best leads for your sales team based on bigger-picture qualities such as available revenue, type of industry, and geographic limitations.

This is a stark contrast to establishing buyer personas. Whereas ideal customer profiles are big picture/company-based, buyer personas are more about the individual. Important factors such as demographics, psychographics, income, and education level are ways in which customer personas are established. These personas allow for members of your company to do everything from create content to know where the best place to allocate resources may be.

With the ideal customer profile and buyer persona notions so closely linked, there is the inevitable question — are both necessary? Short answer, yes. Long answer…yes. But how does one know if their ideal customer profile is what it should be? It’s actually not as tricky as one might think.

Check for the following:

• input from all pertinent departments/teams on the campaign(s)
• concrete measure of campaign(s) performance/effectiveness
• changes over time

Different perspectives, different opinions, and different ways of thinking can greatly improve an ideal customer profile. Also, things changes over time, including people’s habits and industry best practices. It is imperative for success to keep up with the dynamic shift of time. And finally, it is crucial that any kind of advertising & marketing campaign needs to have an actual way of seeing whether it is going well or not. Otherwise, how will you know if you have to make vital changes?

Making sure you’ve got an ideal customer profile plan of action isn’t easy. So, why not call in the pros here at MindEcology? We’re an Austin advertising agency who turn data into usable information for our clients. Let us show you what data-driven problem solving can do for you. Call us today.