Customer Profile
Building a customer profile is a way to clearly understand who is your optimal customer. Understanding your customer is one of the most central concepts in building a successful business. In order to effectively develop a product or service and then effectively reach the correct customers through marketing you must fully understand who is your optimal customer. Once you have the profile you can better understand more precisely what bundle of features are best and what message you need to deliver to best attract customers.
The customer profile begins with your product or service concept. What is it that you are setting about selling? As you go through the process of developing your idea you will want to keep your potential customer explicitly in mind. This leads to the development of the customer profile and the attributes of which can become more concrete if you understand the specifics about them? As a very simple example of the demographic, do you expect your customer to be male or female? If both, would you expect 50% men and 50% women or something different. Keep in mind also that the person who ultimately uses your product or service may not be the typically person who makes the purchase.
On Towncharts.com there is much important information available that can be used to develop a fact based profile of your customer. For every location in the U.S. you can identify the unique demographic, economic and other key data that can help understand your customer or pinpoint where your target customers are located.
Creating a Customer Profile
To understand who your customer is start with the type of product or service that you are developing. Is it a restaurant concept? Is it a clothing store? These basic questions will help you to better define your customers. What do you expect will be the customers that would be most interested? What is the percentage breakdown between various demographic groups such as:
Customer Profile - Census Oriented Data
- Men to Women - What is the breakdown of men versus women who are most interested? Will a different gender buy versus use your product?
- Age Groups - There are probably particular age groups who would most be in market for what you are offering.
- Married versus Single - Does this make a difference to who your customer might be? Are you customers primarily single or are they generally married?
- With Children or without - Does your customer generally have children? Is the product for children and bought by parents? How old are the children in the house?
- Heritage, language, racial preference - Do people from different backgrounds have a particularly greater interest in your product or service?
Customer Profile: Financial Data
The following data will help you understand what is your ideal customer's financial situation. All this data is available on Towncharts.com for virtually every location in the United States.
- Earnings/Household Income - How much money does your typical customer make?
- Income broken down by your ideal demographic categories - This would include for example male versus female median annual earnings but also many other break outs. (e.g. by age category, race, etc.)
- Employment - Do your customers tend to work in certain industries or professions? What is the most recent unemployment rate in the area where your business will be located?
- Self Employment - do people work at home, how much money do they make in their own businesses, what business do they own?
- Home Ownership or Rental Expenses - Do your customers tend to rent or own their homes? What percentage of their annual earnings go towards home maintenance and other expenses (versus what's available as disposable income?)
- Journey to Work - How do your customers get to work? Do they drive or use public transportation? What time do they leave to go to work or when they leave to go home? How long is their commute? Do they tend to work and live in the same city? This can be very good information if you hope to sell something to these people before or after work (e.g. restaurant, coffee shop, some type of retail that you hope to capture customers on the way home? )
Understanding your customer across of wide variety of demographic, financial and other fact based dimensions will help you to better design your product or service. Additionally, wherever you plan to operate your business, you will be able to access this data easily from Towncharts.com.
Do you have any questions about using Towncharts.com for developing a customer profile? Let us know!
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