
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, which they might just disregard.
This is why creating the right prospect profile matters. If you want to optimize your marketing efforts, you should see to it that you know who you are contacting and how you are targeting your marketing strategies to get through and sell to 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 identify where the majority of them belong to. 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? Single, with kids, married, or living with a partner? From what neighborhood do they usually come from and what is the characteristic of their area? Also, what is their primary source of income? Do they run a business, employed or self-employed? What industry do they work in and what is their tenure? Does your brand attract more college graduates or does it fit people across various educational backgrounds?
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, their purchasing decision and worries and fears. How do they react to things online? What do they want to gain or achieve? How do they make the decision to buy? What do they value? What gets them worried? By understanding these data, you can refine your marketing approach to be able to attract more interactions and click-throughs, which 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 now follow these steps towards creating prospect profiles that are perfect for your online 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 through the internet. You can then use these data to study your customers’ behavior and be able to come up with a good marketing approach that will help you 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 actually target with your marketing.
2. Rate your clients
Once you have looked into your numbers and the data about your customers, you should now proceed to scoring your clients. This helps identify who among your customers your brand better resonates to. By using the data you have gathered and after identifying your customers based on demographic, socioeconomic and psychographic elements, you can now segment them based on your rating.
3. Conduct a survey
Once you have segmented your clients, you can take the next step by conducting a survey to understand how they feel towards your brand, your marketing approach, their interests and preferences, as well as other information that help them arrive at a positive purchasing decision. To entice them to participate, you can provide them with rewards such as freebies or discount coupons that they can use to purchase from your business. The data that you collect here can also help you build a stronger prospect profile for your business, making it easier to design a marketing strategy that can derive better results.
4. Compare data with relevant businesses
Another step that you can take is to compare your customer profile data with businesses within your industry. If you have business associates from the same trade, you can set up a meeting, virtual or otherwise wherein you can compare notes and learn more from each other on how you can better target the right customers for each of your businesses. Once you have enough insights about your ideal customers, you can now build a prospect profile, use it to optimize your marketing approach and start boosting your sale.
Maximize the Use of Your Prospect Profile
Once you have your prospect profile ready, how can you make the most use of it? Here are some ways.
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 towards email messages and advertisements that are more 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 as you segment your customer list. By segmenting your customers, you can build 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 for those that you can, you can use your prospect profile to help them, in one way or another, make a decision, which may help you close a sale.
Outsource Your Prospect Profile Creation
Considering the amount of work it will take to gather hundreds, or even thousands, of customer data, it’s not always cost efficient to do this in-house. This is why most companies decide to outsource this task, so that they can focus on more important business matters at hand. 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.