Pandecta's Guide To Accurate Customer Profiling

CUSTOMER PROFILING IS ABOUT UNDERSTANDING YOUR CUSTOMER

Do you speak your customer's language?

There's a lot of hype around the importance of customer profiling. That's because customer profiling really is one of the big differences between Internet companies that make money and the ones that don't.

Pay close attention.

Even if all your customers are English-speaking westerners from
more or less the same demographic, they don't use a standard
language. Each industry has its own language. In fact, wherever people form a group, an identity culture evolves which includes a unique jargon.

To reach them, you have to talk to THEM - not to a random crowd.

The sooner you use their language in your marketing efforts, the sooner you become part of the group. Don't underestimate the importance of this. When you use the words your customer uses - in the way she uses them - you gain trust. On the Net, trust is gold.

3 EASY TECHNIQUES FOR CUSTOMER PROFILING

1
Read any and all customer feedback attentively. Do they call it a widget or a gizmo? Take notes.

2
Subscribe to newsletters that target your audience. If "WSP" is a buzzword in your industry, you'd better find out what it means.

3
Attend conferences & trade shows whenever possible. Face to face is still the best way to familiarize yourself with the attitudes and values of the people in your industry.

CUSTOMER PROFILING & PICTURING YOUR CUSTOMER

Ok, let's get serious about customer profiling

Write down key attributes of your ideal / typical customer based on the following:

• Income range
• Age
• Sex

Next, try to picture your customer in her office.

• Is she a real go-getter with not a minute to waste?
• Maybe she's short on self-confidence and needs reassurance.
• Bossy?
• Outgoing?
• Gullable?

This is doable.

Let's do an example:

Say you're selling a book on dieting the right way. There's no specific income or age range here. Your customer is determined to loose weight, but demoralized. She has tried 10 diets in as many months with no results. She's not easily impressed. You'll have to prove your claims. She's skeptical even when you offer proof, so a money-back guarantee will help a lot. But the most important thing about this customer is that she wants to look and feel good. Speak to her emotions. She does not care about the chemical composition of the product. Don't go there. She just wants to fit into her jeans again.

Another example:

Most of the content & products we produce here at Pandecta Magazine are aimed at Net-savvy entrepreneurs. I'm guessing that you have a web site and are either selling from it or planning to do so in the near future. You know that there's a lot of absolute garbage on the Net, so you probably scan through web sites. We write our sales copy specifically to be scanned with lots of descriptive headlines that gives you a summary of the content of the page. Our Search Engine Yearbook is an excellent example of a customer-oriented product. It's an e-book that really sets a new standard in fast navigation and supreme usability. It was built around our target customer's needs - and the feedback we're getting indicates that we got it right.

THE BOTTOM LINE ON CUSTOMER PROFILING

From experience I know - if you spend time on customer profiling, you'll make more money. Don't make the mistake of thinking you are your own ideal customer. Chances are that you are not.