I know you will be thinking what has customer profiling has to do with digital marketing. Well it has everything to do with it. Before you start a Google or Facebook advertising campaign, you have to ask yourself many questions. For e.g. who am I trying to reach out to? Where is their location? What is their interests? What is their age bracket? What am saying might help you whether your business is offline or online.
THE NEED FOR CUSTOMER PROFILING
Customers are the blood of every business. No business can thrive without patronage. Before you acquire and retain a specific segment of customers, please care to find out: what they do, how they feel and what they think. How will they respond to my pricing, my promotion, where they purchase? A whole lot of questions need to be asked. Also, no matter how good your product and services are, you can’t reach out to every potential customer. If you don’t, you may assume there are no customer for your product and services.
This is where customer segmentation comes into play.
In customer segmentation, we consider demographics (age, gender, race, income, education, location), behavior (doesn’t like going to the market, prefers to buy at home, internet savvy) and interests (mobile phones, sneakers).
If you sell mobile phones for example, using the above details, we can say: Henry is 30 years old, working, internet savvy. He likes using the latest phones, he likes shopping online. This is called creating a customer persona. Create an image of who you want to reach to.
His will spur you to ask questions, how can I target as many Henry as possible? If there are many Henry offline, how can I target them? In target advertising, there is no one-size-fits-all approach. What worked today may not work tomorrow. Strategize and always re-strategize.
Position yourself on various platforms like search engines, blogs, social media, emails, YouTube, Linkedin. Let your presence be felt online. Remember there is more than 3.5 billion on the internet, 2 billion Facebook users and 1.3 billion people on YouTube. The digital economy is here to stay.