• Customer Profiles

The Power of Customer Profiling

by: Allen Graves
5 min read

Customer profiling is a great way to get a detailed portrait of your current customer base to help you make smarter, more effective marketing decisions as you engage your customers on a more personal level.

Why Customer Profiles?

Without the advantage of using actual data to know customers on this detailed level, marketers are left to base campaigns and messages more on personal opinion. In this situation, effective marketing becomes extremely difficult to manage, measure, and keep profitable, resulting in less-than-stellar business results.

That’s why you need to begin building your own customer profiles as soon as possible. Because if your competition gets there first, they will fly right past you.

What You’ll Find in Customer Profiles

personalized email marketing in less timeFirst let’s discuss the various elements of a comprehensive customer profile. It will be important for you to collect as many of these elements as possible to achieve the best possible marketing ideas and results.

Demographics

Merriam-Webster defines demographics as, “The statistical characteristics of human populations (such as age or income) used specially to identify markets.” These characteristics commonly include data such as:

  • Age
  • Gender
  • Income
  • Children
  • Marital Status
  • Education Level
  • Employment Status
  • Physical location, such as zip code

Psychographics

Psychographics describe consumers on psychological attributes such as personality, values, opinions, attitudes, interests, and lifestyles. They are meant to uncover the deeper motivations and interests of your customers. Psychographics may include things like:

  • Hobbies
  • Musical Taste
  • Lifestyle Choices
  • Food and Drink Preferences
  • Personality Traits

Geographic Data

Geographic information can be very valuable, especially to businesses with multiple locations. By learning in which city, state or zip code a person resides, you can send different messaging and offers by region. Some companies even bring it down to the neighborhood or street level. Geographic data can be a great way to help ensure an optimal marketing campaign.

For instance, in the winter months, you wouldn’t want to promote your line of snow shovels to those living in South Florida, nor would you want to promote your line of shorts and tank tops to those living in Minnesota.

On a more local level, you could promote a new store opening or only send a particular marketing message to those living within a certain distance from your store.

Behavior Data

In terms of marketing, behavior data is some of the most powerful information you can obtain. By understanding your customer behavior patterns, you can create powerful marketing campaigns based on that behavior.

This data includes things like:

  • Loyalty
  • Purchase Patterns
  • Online Behavior
  • Presence Analytics — Offline Behavior

With the additional use of WiFi technology, you can gather more location-based data, such as:

  • Entry and Exit Times
  • Favorite Visit Times/Days
  • Dwell Times
  • Return Rates
  • Per Person Average and
  • Customer Lifetime Value

With this kind of data and the right tools, you’ll have the ability to set up automated, triggered marketing campaigns that will send marketing messages to specified customer groups when certain behavioral criteria are met.

Together with the other elements of a comprehensive customer profile, the marketing campaigns you can create will become limitless and extremely targeted to specific audiences, allowing you to increase customer value, customer frequency, customer spend, and your overall bottom line.

Collecting customer profile information can help you identify your ideal audiences and boost your marketing efforts tremendously by giving you detailed information about the purchasing and lifestyle habits of the audiences you’re trying to reach.

4 Surprisingly Simple Ways to Get More Reviews for Your Business

Using Customer Profiles For Marketing

Customer profiles are ideally used to increase customer frequency, customer spend, customer satisfaction, and the overall quantity of your customer base. Always remember, you’re creating customer profiles to be able to engage with and better market to your customer segments.

Start by spending some time reviewing individual customer profiles. Before long, you’ll begin to see similar profiles that you can start grouping together. These may be close to the ideal customer or specific segments you already had in mind, or you may be completely surprised as to what you discover.

Eventually, you’ll have a much clearer view of the various segments of demographics, psychographics, and behavior patterns within your current customer base. This is when you can begin creating your list of general customer segments, or personas.

These are the personas you will use when brainstorming, creating, implementing and measuring your marketing campaigns.

Customer Segmentation Tips

Question_PlateAs you’re going through this process, ask yourself these questions and note your answers:

  1. What kind of action do I want this customer to take?
  2. What is the best way to reach this customer?
  3. What kind of deals or promotions would interest this customer?
  4. What kind of deals and promotions would this customer NOT be interested in?
  5. What new products or services might engage this customer?
  6. What are this customer’s pain points? Why do they need what I offer?
  7. How can I attract and engage more customers like this?
  8. What type of imagery would engage this customer?

Now that you have your customer segments properly defined, and you have an idea of the marketing messages and promotions you want to send to them, it’s time to get started.

Don’t forget that you’re not just targeting current customers. You should also be seeking out new lookalike prospects online and targeting them in an effective manner using the data you’ve collected.

These prospects should have a higher probability of becoming a new customer, providing a much more cost-effective means of acquiring new customers.

Why You Need To Get Started Now

If you’re not taking advantage of customer data, you should begin collecting customer profile information as soon as possible. Otherwise, you are leaving money on the table as your competitors invest in these tool sets and pass you by.

These practices can vastly improve your marketing efforts, lower customer acquisition costs, and give you detailed insight into who your customers really are. You’ll be able to make much smarter decisions as to what areas of your current marketing strategies can be tested for improvement, and how you can create new, more effective and engaging campaigns.

Basing marketing decisions on a hunch or an opinion can have devastating effects on the profitability of your business. By using correctly obtained customer profiles, you’ll get accurate data on your customer demographics and behavior, allowing you to make data-driven decisions, drive company growth and build a much larger base of loyal, more frequent customers.

To learn about the monetary value of customer profiles and how they can be applied to restaurant and retail business, download the whitepaper below, “The Value of Customer Profiles.”

Restaurant Marketing FAQs

What is Restaurant Marketing?

Restaurant marketing is the process of getting people to visit your restaurants. Restaurant marketing creates loyalty, provides data to research, analytics, and allows restaurants to gain a better understanding of their ideal customer profile. It utilizes all customer channels: guest WiFi, website, social, rating sites, mobile apps, email, text, and advertising.

Learn More About Restaurant Marketing Here

What is WiFi Marketing?

WiFi marketing is a marketing technique that uses guest WiFi to collect & clean customer data such as names, emails, phone numbers, customer behavior, and demographics. This data is used to personalize marketing campaigns to increase customer loyalty, build online reviews, and save at-risk customers. The performance of every campaign can be tracked down to the tangible ROI of a customer walking back in your door.

Learn More About WiFi Marketing Here

What is Restaurant Reputation Management?

Restaurant reputation management is the process for restaurants to manage customer feedback and creating systems to improve customer experiences, passively build positive online reviews, and save at-risk customers. It is a very important aspect of running a successful restaurant business.

Learn More About Restaurant Reputation Management Here

How Does Bloom Identify and Bring Back Lost Customers?

Bloom Intelligence uses machine learning to identify at-risk customers. When one is recognized, the system will send them a message with an incentive to get them to return and re-establish their visit pattern. Bloom users are seeing up to 37% of churning customers return.

Learn More About Saving At-Risk Customers Here

SAVE TIME, INCREASE CUSTOMER LIFETIME VALUES, CREATE NEW CUSTOMERS

What our happy customers
are saying

“SaaS that covered so many bases for us instead of having to use multiple software products. Bloom Intelligence has simplified our responses to reviews, customer feedback, and more. I highly recommend Bloom Intelligence.”

Robert Sanderson

“Bloom Intelligence really is a step ahead in terms of marketing software and metrics. Their product is reliable, fast and innovative and has helped the company I work for really grow.”

John Marchetti

“Working with Bloom Intelligence has been amazing. They assist you every step of the way and work with you hand in hand to make sure you are optimizing your advertising potential. We are excited to use this tool to help learn more about our customers so that we can personally engage with them and understand our strengths/weaknesses.”

Ariel Ramirez

“In these challenging times, it has been a pleasure working with Bloom Intelligence to help facilitate our service offering to our clients. They were extremely responsive and provided support to mitigate risk and minimize revenue loss. Great partner!”

Stefan Kim

“We’re extremely pleased with the wealth of customer data that we’re able to gather, at a very attractive price.  In addition, we’re able to communicate our new product promotions by using  the landing page as a digital billboard.  A “no-brainer” for anyone working with limited Marketing $$.”

Bob Cross, Vice President of Operations

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