The 7 Lenses to Look Through When Creating Your Customer Profile

The 7 Lenses to Look Through When Creating Your Customer Profile

Regardless of what type of business you’re in, having a customer profile identified early on is the single most important element you need to properly market your product or service. A marketing campaign without a customer profile is arbitrary in nature. It’s essentially taking a giant (and expensive) wild guess. In order to effectively advertise, you need to know exactly who your audience is. 

When you have a clear and definitive understanding of just who your audience is, it will make a world of difference. You will be able to effectively target the right people to see your ads so that more sales are made and your business can grow. 

In order to determine who your audience is, we’re going to discuss the 7 lenses to look through when creating your customer profile. We are breaking these down into two groups:

A.) The Customers

B.) The Product or Offering

The Customers: Demographics and Psychographics 

1. Who They Are

The first step to creating your customer profile is to figure out the demographics of your audience. This is one of the easiest ways to hone in on what your audience looks like. You can start by asking yourself questions like “Where does my target customer live?” “How old are my customers?” “Are they primarily male or female?” “Do they own their home or rent?” “What is their annual household income?” 

By asking these questions and narrowing in on what your target customer looks like, you will be able to easily refine your customer profile. 

2. What They Love/What They Hate

When determining who your audience is, it’s important to ask yourself “What does my ideal customer love?” Along with figuring out what they love, you’ll also want to ask “What does my ideal customer hate?” 

For example: Let’s say a tattoo removal company is looking to advertise on Facebook. They need to consider what their audience loves and hates.

They most likely love:

  1. To show off new tattoos
  2. When people say “what is that tattoo?”
  3. Being a part of a normalized subculture
  4. Creativity and self-expression

They most likely hate: 

  1. Ugly tattoos from 1979
  2. Their ex’s name on their arm
  3. Faded, cheap looking tattoos

By getting inside the mind of your audience and figuring out what they love versus what they hate, you will be able to come up with brilliant and effective ad copy for future advertising campaigns. 

3. Before State/After State

The next thing you’ll want to think about in terms of your audience is what their state of being is before using your product and what their state of being is after using your product. This helps you hone in on why your product or service will benefit them and help solve their problems. You can think of this in terms of pain versus pleasure or anxiety versus ease. 

Let’s use a lead generation client as an example for this one. 

So, their before state would look something like this: 

  • They’re in a constant anxiety, wondering where your next sale is coming from
  • They don’t have enough money at the end of the month to pay the bills
  • Their wife is supportive, but she’s starting to resent the late nights and cheap dates

And their after state would look something like this: 

  • They don’t worry, they just get up in the morning and do what they want to do
  • They don’t have to check their bank account balance anymore
  • They take their wife on the vacations that she deserves 

Can you see the distinction? By digging deep and understanding what the before and after state of your customers will be both before and after they use your product can help you become a better advertiser. 

4. The 5 Whys

The next lens we’re going to look through to determine your customer profile is the lens of 5 Whys. It starts by you asking yourself “Why do they want (or need) your product? Then it is followed by asking “Why do they need that?” 

This step is basically giving yourself permission to act like an annoying 4-year-old who asks the “Why” question for literally everything. If you can answer the question of why someone needs your product, then you can continue going down the rabbit hole of asking “Why?” 4 more times to get to the good stuff. 

Not sure what I mean? Here’s an example: 

Let’s say you own a lawn care service. You start by asking the initial question of “What do they want (or need)?” Well, that’s easy. They want their lawn mowed. The follow-up question to ask is “WHY do they want their lawn mowed?” Then you can answer that with a little extra thought. They want their lawn mowed because they don’t want to do it themselves.

“Why?” Because they want the spare time.

“Why?” Because they want to feel like they earn enough money to have people do things for them. 

“Why?” Because paying people to do things for them makes them feel good about themselves. 

And finally, the fifth question… 

“Why?” Because they want to see themselves as successful and having “arrived.” 

The Product or Offering

We’ve covered the lenses about your audience. To continue to determine your customer profile, now we’re going to look through the lenses that are about the product or the offering. 

5. Features

So now that we know more about what our audience looks like from asking important questions about who they are, what they love/hate, what their before and after state is, and the 5 whys, we can dive into the product itself. First and foremost, let’s discuss the product features. 

The features are about describing what it is you are selling. You have to ask yourself “What is the product?” This is literally all about what the product is and what it does. 

Your product could be a coffee maker. Going a little deeper, the features of your product could be that it’s a coffee maker with a stainless steel carafe and 3 different settings for making coffee. 

Again, this is just talking about the physical features of your product (or service). This is different from what comes next.

6. Benefits

A very important thing to understand is that determining the benefits is different from describing the features of a product or service. Features are describing the “thing”, while benefits describe what makes the “thing” great and useful. What does the “thing” do for you? The benefits are all about what the product or service does to make the users lives better. 

Let’s use the same examples given in the previous section. If what you’re selling is a stainless steel coffee maker with 3 different settings for making coffee, then the benefits could be: 

  • Time and energy efficient 
  • Gives you the boost you need to get through the day 
  • Affordability
  • Sustainability/Eco-friendly 

7. Unique Points of Differentiation

Finally, the last lens to look through when defining your customer profile is the the unique points of differentiation. These points are determined by asking yourself “How is this product or service notably different from other things that are like it?” 

To figure this out, you’ll want to pinpoint your core strengths and capitalize on them. Figure out what makes you different from everyone else in your industry and use it to your advantage. Perhaps your business is better at storytelling. Or maybe you appeal to peoples’ benevolence because you’re a nonprofit that is solving the poverty problem in developing countries. Whatever your unique points of differentiation are, be sure to highlight them.  

So now it’s time to get into the mind of your customer. Once you are able to answer all of the questions from these 7 lenses, you will have some really great material for creating highly effective ad copy and creative that will convert into sales. 

Why Does My Business Need a Sales Funnel?

Why Does My Business Need a Sales Funnel?

Sales funnels are one of the most important things your can build for your business. 

If you aren’t sure whether or not your business needs a funnel, you’ve come to the right place. Let me first start off by answering the question of whether or not you need one. YES. If you are a business, you need a funnel. 

Who needs a sales funnel? Everyone. 

Why does your business need a sales funnel? That’s easy: to make sales. If you are not collecting leads online, you need to be doing so. If you are collecting leads online but don’t know what to do with them, you need a funnel in place to engage with those leads, and essentially, make sales. 

Here are the top reasons you need a sales funnel for your business:

1. Sales funnels exist to help people move through the customer awareness timeline.

The customer awareness journey goes like this: 

Customer Awareness Journey

This customer awareness timeline is applied to the sales funnel with a corresponding stage for each step. 

So let’s start with the basics. If you don’t know what a sales funnel is, it’s a lot like the traditional kitchen gadget you’re familiar with. It starts off with a wide mouth at the top of the cylinder that collects whatever substance you are pouring into it. From there, it continually gets more and more narrow until the substance drips through a skinny point at the bottom. 

If you apply that visual to the sales process, it goes like this: 

At the top of the funnel, numerous visitors can enter in. This part of the sales funnel is referred to as the Awareness Stage. Potential customers will start to become aware of your product, whether they came from an enticing promotional offer, free download, or something else that caught their attention and brought them into your funnel. However, they are still unaware that they have a problem and that you could potentially solve that problem. 

In the upper-middle section of the funnel is the Interest Stage. The people who progressed on from the Awareness Stage that become interested in your product or service are now here. The potential customer is now problem aware, meaning that they now understand they have a problem and that your product or service offers a viable solution. 

In the lower-middle section of the funnel is the Decision Stage. The people who’ve moved on from the Interest Stage have now dropped into this section after becoming solution aware. These people are the ones who found your product and realized that they have a problem that you can solve and are now making a decision of whether or not they will purchase it. 

If those prospects have moved into the bottom of the funnel, they’ve made it to the Action Stage. This is where they have become product aware and they actually purchase your product in order to solve their problem. If you have successfully brought people all the way through to the bottom of your funnel, you have achieved the goal of the sales process. 

If you’re really, you’ll have customers who are considered most aware. These are the ones who know about your product or service, have purchased before, and are likely to keep coming back for more. They are your brand advocates. 

A sales funnel incubates people through this entire customer awareness journey. It also gives you the ability to create multiple touch points that are relevant to the place people in.

For example: if a prospect is in the Interest Stage and they are problem aware, that means they have realized they have a problem and that your product could be a solution. So, your messaging should include things that twist the knife on their pain points. 

2. Having a sales funnel means building an asset that your business owns.

In this case, the asset is the attention of the people on your list. Whether it is through email, chatbots, social media, SMS, or something else. All of these people on your lists have given you permission to market to them, and there is a lot of power in that. You audience is your company’s most valuable asset, and owning that asset is priceless. 

By having an audience of people who have opted into learning more about your business, you’ve been given permission to communicate and engage with them as they navigate through the customer awareness timeline. Throughout this process, you will be able to convince them that your product is the best solution to their problem. 

For example: 

Let’s say that you have someone that downloads a lead magnet from your website. Ideally, you want that person to eventually lead into your coaching program. So, they go through the lead magnet, and then later on you make an offering and they don’t purchase. With an online funnel, you can continue to communicate with them. So, the fact that they didn’t buy your product means they’re not at that stage of the customer journey yet. On the bright side, you can now continue to nurture them for as long as you need to, until they either decide, “Hey, this offering is not for me and I don’t want to engage with this brand anymore.” Or, eventually they will purchase your product. 

Having the ability to engage and communicate with your subscribers at all stages of the customer awareness timeline had several advantages. 

According to a Salesforce and LinkedIn study, the average B2B company has a database of 50,000 individuals and spends an average of $150 to acquire a single email address. This means the email database (the owned audience) alone is worth $7.5 million, likely making it the largest asset under a marketer’s control, and possibly the company’s largest asset.

The cost of building this audience shouldn’t be looked at as an expense, but rather an investment. Nurturing that audience is important for building brand your credibility and authority. By having an online sales funnel, you will build an asset that will continue to help your business grow. 

3. Sales funnels make it easier to stop chasing bad leads, and to go after quality leads.

Having a sales funnel setup means that you’ll be able to score your leads in terms of quality. Lead scoring is the method of assigning value to leads based on their engagement behavior and demographics. You can score your leads based on various attributes like the information they’ve submitted in a survey, if they are a recent website viewer, or if they’ve made a purchase in the past. 

By having a sales funnel set up, you are giving yourself the ability to focus on higher quality leads that are more likely to purchase from you. You will have the opportunity to ask the customer to commit to a higher level of interaction if you include steps that offer things like phone consultations or product demos.

For example: 

If you’re a software company and a prospect is willing to set up a 30-minute demo walkthrough with your business, they are more likely to buy from you than someone who downloaded a PDF about the features and benefits of your software. 

There are numerous reasons why your business should have an online sales funnel. Having one in place is important for success in both the B2B and B2C spaces.