How To Develop an Ideal Customer Profile

Few marketing activities are as crucial to your success as building an ideal customer profile. At its heart, marketing is all about communicating the right message to the right people at the right time.

Developing an ideal customer profile is a fantastic way to ensure you’re conceptualizing the right people and messaging them accordingly. Brands work to create perfect customer profiles for very understandable reasons; the better they can identify their most profitable customers, the better their marketing!

An ideal customer profile is a way to identify the key types of customers you want to reach out to as a business. This could take several different formats.

Some businesses might name their different types of customers and ascribe unique names to them to personalize the research process. Others might divide customers into psychographic segments based on lifestyle interests. Still, others might use more firmographic and technographic modeling to define their ideal customer profile (i.e., “liberal arts colleges with over 1,000 students who need to modernize their IT.” to use one fictitious example.)

There’s no right or wrong format; what’s important is that the ideal customer profile helps your business understand your customers and helps you message them more effectively. Now that we’ve defined a perfect customer profile, let’s review the process of creating one!

Research

Research is at the heart of creating an ideal customer profile. Without spending the time to truly learn what you don’t know, you can’t effectively market to your customers. The means of research will look quite different from industry to industry and client to client, but the idea is usually the same. We always recommend returning to the SWOT analysis framework to begin.

• Strengths: Internal core competencies.
• Weaknesses: Internal areas of improvement
• Opportunities: External chances to grow
• Threats: External challenges.

This is one of the most universal ways to research your business model, but there are others. Research into your industry, the market at large, your competitors, and emerging tech can all be key areas to delve into here. The specific research will vary, but what’s important is that you gather as much information as possible before you move on to the second step of this process.

Find Your Best Customers and Analyze

Now that you’ve done your contextual research, it’s time to focus on your best customers. It’s important to note that this is a view of your BEST customers, not your average customers. Typically, a core set of clients will make up an oversized portion of revenue for most businesses. If you’re developing an ideal customer profile, segment your customer base and drill down further to find out the similar attributes that make up your top clients by revenue.

Remember that the attributes that bind your top clients together could vary. For example, if you’re a tech startup analyzing your top clients, you might find that your client’s industry is critical to your ideal customer profile and that you need to hone in on specific sectors for the best results.

The industry might be vital to this ideal customer profile, but it might be insignificant for an outdoor equipment store. Their ideal customer profile could be focused on customers with psychographic attributes, like mountain biking, hiking, skiing, and other lifestyle and hobby interests. Remember, it will vary from brand to brand. What’s important is that you find the customers you consider your top clients and then find the throughlines that bind them, regardless of what those may be.

Understand Their Pain Points

Now that you have a core set of clients, it’s time to put yourself in their shoes. The Ideal Customer Profile is usually viewed from the eyes of the business, and this vantage point is still helpful. However, understanding the specific pain points of your ideal customers helps you better understand what problem your business is solving for your customers. Understanding this lets you see other potential use cases for your product or service.

Let’s go back to our example of an outdoor equipment store. Our store has done its homework and has determined that they are perceived as being a higher-end sports store in their area. This works out well for them. Our store has also decided that its ideal customer profile is centered on avid outdoor sportsmen who hate low-performance equipment and want quality, even if they pay a little extra. Knowing this pain point helps our store understand how they want to position their brand in the market.

Understand the Buying Process

If Step 2 was about your best customers and Step 3 was about their problems, Step 4 is about what deals advance or do not. At this point in the process, you should have a strong understanding of your business, the clients who drive it forward, and their problems.

However, your work is not complete just yet. Now, it’s time to know what leads to successfully closed deals. We recommend looking at your data and seeing what you can glean from past deal cycles. How long does it take to close a deal? Whose sign-off is required to close a deal? The more you understand this process, the better your ideal customer profile comes into focus.

Let’s say you’re a restaurant looking to cater more business team-building events. You understand that local businesses of 100-250 employees are the most common customers here and that law firms, marketing agencies, accounting firms, and doctor’s offices are the most common industries. You also have data that shows that a company’s HR department usually instigates your typical catering job.

However, when you analyze the average deal cycle data you have, you realize that bigger catering jobs can stall before closing without sign-off from customer higher-ups, such as the Chief Operating Officer. This insight now equips you to use this information in your marketing strategy.

Document & Revise

Ideal customer profiles change. It’s just a fact of life. You likely will need to tweak your ideal customer profile over time. That’s okay! It doesn’t mean that you did anything wrong. Marketing is dynamic; your audience profile will need to be as well. We recommend that you never revise your ideal customer profile more than once a year. Too much revision can muddy the waters and make it difficult to see trends. Tweaking every few quarters isn’t failure; it’s a fact of life.

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