Preparing a Customer Profile for Your Internet Marketing Plan

If yours is an existing company, then you probably have a pretty good idea of what your best customers look like. But when you move your business online, the profile of your customers may change. Likely you are moving from a local or regional business to a national business. Now you're attracting customers in a different way than you have in the past. If you're planning a new online start-up, it is especially important to define your customers.

You're beginning to get the picture. 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!

If you're to be successful offline or online you need to have an excellent understanding of your customers. Here's the kind of information you ought to be looking at to build your profile. For techniques see "8 Ways to Learn About Your Site Visitors." http://www.wilsonweb.com/wmt5/learn-techniques.htm

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.

Let's begin to define your customers with some of these parameters:

• Geographic. Are they grouped regionally, nationally, globally?
• Cultural and Ethnic. What languages do they prefer to do business in? Does ethnicity affect their tastes or buying behaviors?
• 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? As an industry?
• Power. What is the level of decision-making level and title of your typical B2B customer?
• Size of company. What company size are you best able to serve? Do you determine this best by annual revenue or number of employees?
• 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?
• Values, attitudes, beliefs. What are the predominant values that your customers have in common? What is their attitude toward your kind of product or service?
• 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?
• Lifestyle. How many lifestyle characteristics can you name about your purchasers? CACI (http://www.caci.com/Products/MSG/Databases.html) has developed the fascinating ACORN system of 43 closely targeted lifestyle profiles that can be tied to specific ZIP codes. http://www.premierinsights.com/acorn.html 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.
• 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.
• Media Used. How do your targeted customers learn? What do they read? What magazines do they subscribe to? What are their favorite websites? 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. Distill 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, all repeat together: "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.