Marketing is all about targeting; you want to understand your customer, and find ways to reach out to them. Everything from the method by which you reach out to the messaging you put in your advertising can be targeted to a particular customer profile. The first step to this targeting is to create the customer profile; assess who exactly you want to target, and how they live their life. Let’s look into how a customer profile might be established by using a hypothetical company that sells dog toys online.

The first thing you want to look at is demographics; so far, who is actually buying the dog toys? You can look at age groups; you might find that the folks buying the toys are generally between the ages of 20 and 30 or between the ages of 55 and 70. Now you know the age groups of the folks you’re targeting. You can delve a bit deeper; you might find that your customers who are 20-30 generally live in Ontario, while the 55-70 customers live in BC. Should you have access to the data, you might look into how much money each customer within those age groups takes home each year.

You’ve got a lot of data now, but you can delve a bit deeper into psychographics. You might learn that neither of the groups has many children living in the home with them; it might be safe to assume that for most of the 20-30s, they’re not at the child-rearing stage of their lives, but with the 55-70s, they’re probably empty nesters. With both of these profiles, it might be fair to assume they see their dog as “part of the family”, which is why they’re willing to go online to find premium dog toys to purchase.

Now you can create your customer profiles; you have a lot of information to run on! You can talk to other people in their age range with dogs and see how they talk about their furry friends; you might find that the Millenials you talk to call their dog their “best friend” and that those in their Golden Years call their dog their “fur baby”. You can incorporate that kind of language into your advertising, so that the people you’re reaching out to feel like the ad was written specifically for them. You’ll also tailor your medium to the groups; for the Golden Years clients, direct mailing is probably best, while advertising on social media through influencer marketing is probably going to work well for Millenials.

Once your customer profiles are complete, you’ll be able to target your customers much more effectively! Remember, these profiles can be used for customer bases that you’ve already reached and want to maintain, or to find potential clients that haven’t started using your services yet! Marketing expenses, especially in the research and development phase, can be hard to track; it can be harder still to know what might be tax deductible. At  Compass Accounting, we will be able to help you parse out what’s considered tax deductible, and what isn’t!