Customer profiling is a way to create a portrait of your customers to help you make marketing decisions. It sounds straightforward enough, but businesses in the construction sector often have trouble distilling their customers into a single profile.
After all, in the built environment, decision making units can be fairly complex, with many different roles and influencers having a say in the final specification. Poorly developed customer profiling is usually borne out of good intentions: construction marketers don't want to miss anything, or upset any group of customers, and very quickly they end up with too many profiles for the process to be a worthwhile endeavour.
However, if customer profiling is to prove genuinely useful in shaping your marketing messages, you need to make sure you are only drawing up a small of customer profiles or 'personas'. Our advice in the past has been to focus on your best customer, and this applies to construction companies, too.
So, who is your best customer?
It isn't necessarily the person or company that spends the most, but at the same time, it may well be if they are prompt payers and easy to work with. If you've got a long list of clients who you do regular business with, it might take you a little while to come up with the name of the person or company who is most like to prompt the comment, "If only a few more clients were like them".
If it is a company who gets the title of 'best customer', which, as a construction supplier, is fairly likely, identify the decision maker who acts as the go-to person when discussing your services.
Here are the sort of things you need to get down on paper to start to build a customer profile:
- Their name
- Their role
- What motivates them in their job
- What frustrates them about their work
- What makes them get up in the morning to go to work
- What led them into their current role
- What ambitions they have for the future
- What are their proudest achievements
- What are their targets
- What are their goals
- What are their challenges
- What are their opinions of you
- Do they harbour any doubts about you
- What do believe are the strengths of your service
- What do they see as the weaknesses in your service
- How do you help them achieve their goals
- What more can you do to help them overcome challenges
- Who do they respect and admire
While these questions might prove difficult to answer, they're certainly worth the effort of trying. For example, if you're a boiler supplier and your best customer struggles with timing issues when working on projects, your marketing message can be along the lines of "we offer a quick and efficient service, helping ensure your project doesn't run into delays".
Once you have all these questions answered, you can create your description of your ideal customer – the ones that you'd like more of. If you're struggling to answer some of the questions, get yourself over to social media, which might help you fill in the some of the gaps.
Want to learn more about how you can build quality sales leads through inbound marketing for the built environment or the construction sector? Download your free E-book here
