Define your best customer profile for a perfect web marketing plan

The core of your Internet Marketing Plan is understanding your customers

Get this right and you can carve out a successful business on the web. Be careless in defining your customers, and you'll doom your online marketing, no matter how much money you throw at it. Here are 3 simple rules and 8 parameters to define your best customer profile.

Contents:

The Best Customer Profile

	1. Focus on a Specific Target
	2. Eight Parameters to Define Customers
	3. Determination of Lifestyle Patterns:

	A. 43 Lifestyle Profiles
	B. Buying Patterns
	C. Media Used by Customers

The Best Customer Profile

1. Focus on a Specific Target:

This is a fundamental rule. Don't look at "everyone": you might miss your best customers.

When you're looking at "everyone" as potential customers you miss your best customers. Sure, you'll get a scattering of people who don't fit your profile, but you need to aim your marketing at a carefully defined group of people. Or maybe you'll find that there are two or perhaps three separate kinds of people you can define who are "best customers".

As part of developing your Internet Marketing Plan, you need to carefully define these people. Everything flows from who your customers are: your website design, your product or service offerings, your modes of advertising. Everything!

Here's the kind of information you ought to be looking at to build your customers profile.

Here are some elements of a customer profile to consider. For business-to-consumer businesses these customers are individuals. Of course, business-to-business customers are companies; they usually have a human face that may well have some specific characteristics as owner, purchasing agent, engineer, webmaster, VP of marketing, etc.

2. Eight Parameters to Define your Best Customers

Let's begin to define who your customers are by answering to eight queries. Just bring paper and pen and write a word o two for each answer.

1 - Geographic.

Are they grouped regionally, nationally, globally?

2 - Cultural and Ethnic

What languages do they prefer to do business in?

Does ethnicity affect their tastes or buying behaviours?

3 - Economic conditions, income and/or purchasing power.

What is the average household income or purchasing power of your customers?

What are the economic conditions they face as individuals?

What are the economic conditions they face as an industry?

6 - Age

What is the age of the companies you do business with?

Dot-com start-ups or several decades old.

What is the predominant age group of your target buyers?

How many children and of what age are in the family?

7 - Values and Attitudes.

What are the predominant values that your customers have in common?

What is their attitude toward your kind of product or service?

8 - Knowledge and Awareness

How much knowledge do your customers have about your product or service, about your industry?

How much education is needed?

How much brand building advertising do you need to make your pool of customers aware of what you offer?

And now let's put the finishing touches to the perfect definition of your best customers.

3. Determination of Lifestyle Patterns

A. 43 Closely Targeted Lifestyle Profiles

How many lifestyle characteristics can you name about your purchasers? CACI has developed the fascinating ACORN system of 43 closely targeted lifestyle profiles that can be tied to specific ZIP codes.

If you were to geocode your existing customer database using their ACORN system, you would be able to determine patterns for your best customers that would guide future marketing.

B. Buying Patterns

There is a growing body of information on how consumers of different ages and demographic groups shop on the Web. This is vital information for your marketing plan, even if you have to pay to get it.

C. Media Used by Costumers

How do your targeted customers learn?

What do they read?

What magazines do they subscribe to?

What are their favourite websites?

That's it!

These are all pretty obvious to developing a marketing campaign. I've just touched the surface here, but I hope it gives you an idea of the process. After you've collected this kind of information from a wide variety of sources, you're ready to write a description of your best customers.

Distil all you've learned into a maximum of three or four paragraphs, even though you may have spent days or weeks researching.

Once for good measure, let me repeat that "The core of our Internet Marketing Plan is understanding our customers." Get this right and you can carve out a successful business on the Web. Be careless in defining your customers, and you'll doom your online marketing, no matter how much money you throw at it

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