Understanding Your Ideal Customer Profile
For digital marketing campaigns, it’s important to identify an ideal customer profile. Let’s take a look at how you can determine you target customer, and then how you can apply that knowledge to an online marketing campaign.
Why Do You Need To Make An Ideal Customer Profile?
Obviously, every business would love to have the maximum number of customers, and in theory would be happy to provide their services to anyone that was willing to pay for them. Unfortunately, very few businesses also have the resources to market to all 7 billion people on the planet. This would be extremely expensive and would probably result in a lot of irrelevant enquiries!
So, in order to run a marketing campaign which is affordable and effective, you need some degree of targeting. If you’re targeting your advertising, it makes sense to focus it on the most high-value individuals and those who are most likely to convert to into paying customers. A customer profile is important to have whether you use it for your PPC or SEO campaigns.
How To Create a Customer Profile
In order to have a target customer profile that is useful for a digital marketing campaign, it’s worth considering which targeting options online marketing channels give you. Each platform (Google Ads, Facebook Ads, LinkedIn Ads, etc) give you different targeting options, but some common ones are:
- Location
- Age
- Gender
- Job (either one job specifically or the wider industry they work in)
- Income Level
- Homeowner/Renter
- Parental Status (and age of children)
- Education Level
- Hobbies/Interests
By providing an answer to some of the elements listed above, you will have started to build out a customer profile. For example, if your company sells vegan snack bars for children’s packed lunches and you currently are only shipping to the UK, your ideal customer might look something like…
- UK-based
- Female
- 30-50
- An income over £30,000
- Parent of school-age children
- Has an interest in animal rights
If this in an accurate portrait of your business’s ideal customer, then restricting the targeting of online ads to just this target group would lead to a higher return on investment for your advertising spend. Remember to be realistic about who your potential customers are likely to be.
Your business may have more than one target audience. You may also have different target customers for different products or services you offer. However, determining the demographics of your target customer is only the first step, you also need to think about the customer journey.
How To Understand Your Customer Journey
After you have determined your ideal customer profile, you’ll want to go a step further and learn how they think. What is it that keeps them awake at night? What makes them emotional? What needs do they want met? How do they see themselves? What are their values?
While understanding the demographic of your audience can help you choose how to target your ads, answering the questions above can help you write your ads. When deciding how to target ads to a PPC campaign audience, you should think about how your ideal customer would use a search engine. What would they search for? What sorts of words would they use? What sort of results would they trust? Which product or services would be the best solution for them?
How To Use Customer Profiles In Your Advertising Campaigns
Different customers will respond to different ad text and images. Some customers might be motivated by an ad headline that reads “the best value dishwasher tablets, only 12p per load”. Others may be more motivated by social and environmental causes, and so a headline like “eco-friendly dishwasher tablets” might be more appealing.
You should never lie or make unfounded claims in your adverts, but instead choose which elements of your brand or product to focus on to appeal to your ideal customers.
If you are just starting out on your first advertising campaign, you should focus on a single demographic and customer journey. Target your ads only to that demographic. Write ad text and use images that would appeal to their motivations.
If you are successful, you can start to expand your advertising strategy to include other demographics.
Similar Audiences
Some digital marketing technologies allow you to build custom audiences based on users who are similar to your existing customers. This is only applicable if you have an existing business with a history of its customers. By uploading an email list of your customers, AI can match this group of people to potential customers with similar traits (age, gender, income level, etc). This can be an effective marketing strategy and a great way to leverage your past success.
How Carden Digital Can Help
At Carden Digital, we’ve spearheaded PPC and social ads campaigns for a range of different businesses. With our technical expertise, and your in-depth knowledge of your customer base, we can help create custom audiences for your online advertising. Increasing the chance of your ads converting users online into paying customers for your small business. Speak to our team today to learn more.
