How to Create the Ideal Prospect Profile to Boost Your Sales

When it comes to online marketing, knowing how to reach out to the right audience is important. This helps you build a strong foundation for your marketing strategies and be able to increase your return on investment (ROI). But just as important as your marketing strategy is knowing the right people to target. With so many companies competing for the attention of customers, it only makes sense that you become more strategic with how you reach out to your prospects and avoid overwhelming them with marketing calls and emails that they might just disregard.

Creating the right prospect profile matters. If you want to optimize your marketing efforts, you should be certain of who you are contacting and how you are targeting your marketing strategies to resonate with them. To be able to create the ideal prospect profile for your brand, you should first understand the different elements needed to create a prospect profile.

Elements of a Prospect Profile

1. Demographics

Demographics pertain to the age, gender, and race of your prospective customers. To know your ideal customers, you should be able to segment majority of them into groups. What age group do they belong in? Are they mostly male, female, or a mix of both?

2. Socioeconomic status

This refers to the characteristics of your customers that are related to their education, income, occupation, household makeup, and neighborhood. What is their annual income per person or per household? What is their household makeup? Analyzing common trends in your target customers across neighborhoods, common characteristics, income sources, and employment can tell you a lot about buying patterns and product or service needs. By looking at their industries, employment, and education, you can determine whether brand attracts more college graduates or fits with people across various educational backgrounds to create messaging that matches their background.

3. Psychographic information

The psychographic element is about looking into the personality, behavior, and mindset of your customers. This can include their attitude, opinions, dreams, wishes, purchasing decision, and concerns. How do they react to things online? What do they want to gain or achieve? How do they make the decision to buy and what do they value? By understanding this data, you can refine your marketing approach to attract more interactions and click throughs that can eventually lead to a sale.

Creating Your Prospect Profile

Now that you understand the elements that you need to collect to build the ideal customer profile, you can follow these steps to create prospect profiles that can guide your marketing strategies.

1. Review your analytics

The good thing about online marketing is that you can easily collect data about your brand’s followers and customers. You can then use this information to study behavior and develop a marketing approach that will boost your sales. Most web hosting and social media platforms have built-in analytic features that allow you to look into your numbers and use these to identify who you should target with your marketing.

2. Rate your clients

Once you have looked into your numbers and the data about your customers, you can score your clients. This will identify who among your customers your brand best resonates with. By segmenting customers based on demographic, socioeconomic, and psychographic elements, you can rate the clients or weight each metric with the value they bring to your company and your marketing.

3. Conduct a survey

Once you have segmented your clients, you can conduct targeted surveys to understand how they feel about your brand, refine your marketing approach, and gain more insight about their interests and preferences. To encourage participation, offer rewards such as free products or discount coupons that they can use to purchase from your business. The data that you collect from surveys can also help you build a stronger prospect profile for your business, making it easier to design a marketing strategy that can drive better results.

4. Compare data with relevant businesses

Another step that you can take is to compare your customer profile data with businesses in your industry. If you have business associates from the same trade, you can set up a meeting, virtual or otherwise, to compare notes and learn more from each other on how you can better target the right customers for each of your businesses. These collaborative mastermind groups can give you new insights about your ideal customer to build a prospect profile that can expand your marketing approach.

Maximize the Use of Your Prospect Profile

Once you have your prospect profile ready, you will need to put it to practical use. Here are some strategies for applying what you learn from your research to tangible business processes and results.

1. Personalize your messages

With your prospect profile as your guide, you can build a marketing strategy that is more personalized and more streamlined to suit your prospect’s demographics. Customers tend to react more positively toward email messages and advertisements that are in line with their wants and needs.

2. Segment your customers

Another way to make the most of your prospect profile is by using it as a guide to you segment your customer list in different ways. This can help you foster trust and loyalty, provide better customer support, design better products and services, and price your products properly.

3. Help clients make decisions

There are many factors to a buyer’s purchasing decision, some of which you can’t control. But with a better understanding of customer interests, you can provide messaging and resources to guide purchases.

Outsource Your Prospect Profile Creation

Considering the amount of work it can take to gather hundreds, or even thousands, of customer data points, it’s not always cost efficient to do develop prospect profiles with in-house teams. Most companies decide to outsource this task so that they can focus on applying strategies while other resources continue to build database content.

If you need help building a strong profile prospect for your business, contact us here on Assivo. We are ready to answer your questions and provide you professional customer data collection services that are suited for your business.