Maximizing your inbound leads is essential to the long-term health of your company. Doing so will ensure your business has a steady stream of new clients to boost its revenue and fuel its growth. However, getting the most out of your inbound leads isn’t always easy. In fact, doing so can be quite complex. One strategy is to create an ideal customer profile for inbound leads so that you can be more effective in your targeting.
Keep reading to learn:
- How to build an ideal customer profile
- How to use your customer profiles to boost inbound sales
- Why LeadLander could be just what you need to start getting more out of your inbound leads
Unpacking The Customer Profile
A customer profile is a document that lists various information about the customers your company services. For example, a typical customer profile will include information about an ideal client’s:
- Pain points
- Interests
- Buying patterns
- Demographics
- Company information
Customer profiles are a great way to improve your understanding of your average customer and can also be used to improve the efficacy of your inbound sales and marketing efforts.
How Does Building An Ideal Customer Profile For Inbound Leads Work?
You need to understand who your customers are before you can speak to them effectively. That’s the idea behind using customer profiles to boost your inbound leads.
Essentially, your customer profile will help you understand who your targets are and what they care about. Once you have this information, it becomes much easier to target leads with customized ads and sales pitches.
In other words, building out an ideal customer profile will help both your marketing and sales departments become more efficient.
So how does one go about building a customer profile? What should it even look like? Let’s review.
Create A Powerful Customer Profile With These Steps
1. Understand the problem your company is trying to resolve
Consider what your company does and which problems your services or products address. You should be able to define this clearly and concisely. If you can’t, take a look at some of your existing customers and what you do for them to figure out. Here’s what you should know:
- Who your customers are
- How they use your product or service
- And why they’re using it
2. Think about your customers’ journey
Next, take a moment to think about how your customers go from being an inbound lead to working with your company. Where do they discover you? Social media? Email? Word of mouth?
After that, consider what it takes for the lead to become a paying client. What does your business offer them that makes them want to pay you? Think about this on a client-by-client basis. Doing so will give a good sense of what your clients care about the most.
3. Figure out who you’re targetting
Now you’re ready to do some demographic research. This data will be key to creating your ideal customer profile. Here’s what you should consider:
- What market do you address?
- What’s the budget or annual revenue of your average client?
- How many employees work for the average firm that hires you?
- Where are most of the companies that you work with located?
4. Listen to what your customers have to say
It’s also essential that you take the time to speak to your customers while putting together an ideal customer profile. Speak to them directly, if you can, to determine what they think about your business and its offerings.
The best way to get your hands on this information is to conduct client interviews. Or distribute surveys. You’ll gain a deeper understanding of your audience with primary source research and learn about what makes your company worth partnering with.
5. Take a deeper look at your customers’ needs
At this point, you should already have a sense of who your average customer is and what they care about. Now it’s time to take that a step further by looking at your customers’ in more detail. Here are a few things to consider:
- What’s the biggest challenge your customers face?
- What are your customers’ goals?
- What technology do they use?
- How do they assess and resolve problems?
- Can you solve these problems?
- What value do you provide to these customers?
- How does your solution fit into the clients’ long and short-term goals?
6. Spend time researching your industry
Now you’ll want to assess your industry as a whole. Note how your company stacks up to the competition. What’s unique about your offerings compared to everybody else’s?
By answering these questions, you’ll develop a better understanding of your unique value proposition. A value proposition is a clear, simple statement that describes what you offer, how you solve a customer’s needs, and what sets you apart from other companies offering similar services.
7. Create buyer personas
Regard the specific individuals within those companies that you’ll be building your marketing strategy around. The best way to do that is by creating a buyer persona.
Buyer personas are a semi-fictional representation of your ideal customer. Businesses like Xtensio and Figma’s Community board offer customizable templates to work with also. When creating yours, you’ll want to consider the following characteristics:
- Age
- Income level
- Education level
- Where you can reach them
- How they influence the decision-making process
- How they will use your product or service
Three Types Of Profiles To Consider
Okay. You know who your customers are, why they care about your company, and how you stand out from the competition in your industry. You’re ready to put together your ideal customer profiles.
There’s more than one way to do this. But here are three easy methods that you can’t go wrong with.
The Scorecard
This method involves a scoring system that assesses whether an inbound lead is a good fit for your business or not.
The concept is pretty simple. You assign a point value for each attribute you’re looking for in a customer. For example, you might use categories like need, time, success, and budget. If a new inbound lead meets your expectations in one of these areas, they earn the point.
Once you go through all of your categories and add up all of your points, you’ll know exactly how valuable a new lead is to you. You can use this system to easily compare the expected value of each new prospect that you encounter. With this information, your sales and marketing teams can optimize their usage of time and resources.
Customer Segmentation
It’s also a good idea to segment your audience into multiple categories. With this method, you can create a few distinct ideal customer profiles then compare those profiles to your incoming leads. This method is a good option for businesses that serve multiple industries or several types of customers within the same industry.
The Basic
You can also just keep things simple with this customer profile strategy. List out all of the factors you’re looking for in an ideal customer and then compare new inbound leads to that template. It’s simple, but it’s often enough to get the job done.
Use LeadLander To Inform Your Customer Profile For Inbound Leads
Creating customer profiles is a great way to get more out of your inbound leads. However, to do this effectively, you need data access. But harvesting all of that data on your own and making sense of it can be quite difficult.
That’s why you should try LeadLander. Our tool makes it super easy to maximize the data that you’re already getting on your website. With LeadLander, you can see who’s visiting your site, how they’re interacting with it, and which company they belong to. With this information in hand, you’ll make fast work of creating an ideal customer profile for inbound leads.
You can try LeadLander today to experience the difference we provide for yourself. We’re currently offering a 14-day trial free to sign up for when you visit our website. It could be just what you need to improve your company’s outcomes with its inbound leads.