When we figure out how to run a business, we often forget who we are running it for – our customers.

This can be seriously detrimental, considering that your customers are the ones funding your company – without them, how else will you run it?

Before we dive into this article, we need to realise why large companies seemingly “run over” their customers, despite investing so much in marketing strategies – it is because they fail to understand that the people they cater to are human.

The only way that can be solved is by understanding what exactly are your customer types, and hence characterising them. The “ideal customer” is not just “someone who buys your product” – you may have loyal customers that love every product of yours, business customers who care about low-cost, or even one-time customers who come only once in a blue moon.

This is where customer profiling comes into play: characterisation of customers done by features like demographics, buying patterns and purchase history. Companies nowadays carry out this kind of segmentation with the help of a customer profile software.

These kinds of software save a considerable amount of time and effort by doing all the hard work for you – customer data collection, segmentation in terms of similarities like geographical location, job title, a genre of business etc., and the analysis of said data are just to name a few. This ultimately helps business projects kick off rapidly, with rich functionality.

It’s a win-win solution for everybody: the organisation, that ends up generating more funds – and the customer, who gets his or her needs promptly fulfilled.

The benefits are endless:

 

A pool of Information for your Company

Profiling customers give a company detailed information it can use to maintain business with both existing and new customers.

This plethora of knowledge a simple customer profile software can give generates a thorough understanding of what kind of customers one really has. The more a business knows about its target audience, the easier it can give them exactly what they need.

Furthermore, this helps companies take personalised business projects to the next level; without this reservoir of information, things like drip campaign emails, messages, product updates etc. cannot be done.

 

Understand untapped potential

With the help of an accurate profile of your customers, based on their engagement with you and your products, you can analyse different market areas that need your influence. Understanding your penetration rates will successfully lead you to opportunities where your marketing strategies will flourish.

This gives your business wings to explore more of the marketing world and helps you make better executive decisions. By knowing what your customers want, you can focus on niche marketing, where you predominantly target customers’ interests.

Furthermore, exposure to a wider audience will give your company the chance to not only sell more products, but to also create new ones, and increase sales in existing channels.

 

Improved Targeted Marketing

By identifying your most active customers, you can target your business activities to those who will most likely respond positively. Response rates will excel rapidly when you start marketing with offers that will appeal specifically to the most dynamic customers.

Customer profiles that software makes allow firms to see what makes them stand out within the competition; simultaneously, businesses may also learn where are they lacking in terms of marketing, what product is performing poorly, and other useful points. With the help of these profiles, your company can configure the best marketing strategies, catering to the right type of consumer at the best possible time.

Vertical Insite sums up the entire story in a simple phrase: “Make the customer the hero of your story.”

Quite frankly, that is the entire concept behind customer profiling – to offer the customer what they deserve. Engagement of customers ultimately decides how successful a business is going to run. Therefore, by proper segmentation in terms of purchasing, interactions, and creditworthiness, you can truly turn even the smallest business into a gigantic presence in the competition – one that puts the customers’ needs before anything else.