Written by: Megan McDowell
The pressure for marketers to have amazing quantitative skills is rapidly increasing. This increase comes as organizations are moving towards greater analysis, in an attempt to expand to new markets, test their performance, attract new customers and retain existing customers.
Understanding your Customer
The key to meeting the growing demands in businesses is to learn who your customer is. Understanding why your customers go to you rather than the myriad of other options out there is crucial. One way of understanding your customer is by creating customer profiles, also known as market segmentation. Market segmentation is the art of breaking down your potential customer base and looking at various demographic similarities compared to your existing clients. Creating segments allows for a more precise way to reach existing and potential customers with marketing, sales, and product innovation ideas.
Our online community software creates some of the most accurate profiling information possible. When a member signs up to be a part of the community they are required to fill out a profile survey which asks them questions that allows for the most fine tuned segmentation possible. The profiling survey looks at age, location, gender, employment, interests, and assortment of other possible options. Profiles of your customers do not remain static and that is why we allow the respondents to update their profile survey at any time.
Real Customer Profiles
Having access to actual customer profiles allows you to test tactical strategies with your segments. You can test the effectiveness of your ads with your targeted segment before launching your campaign. You can test promotional ideas and purchasing incentives with your target group.
It is important that as you build your community that you have an assortment of members including current customers, previous customers, and potential customers. The goal of your community is to get as broad a cross-section of respondents as possible in order to maximize your impact.
A hypothetical example of this would be a nationwide online health products store. The marketing department is trying to understand how and when to advertise. They purchase an online community and include in their profile survey the following:
Gender
Marital Status
Household Income
The company uses three data points from the community database into hidden fields in the survey:
Status of Purchase
Date of Purchase
Amount Purchased
From the following data the marketing department is able to to do the following:
Understand who is most likely to purchase based on income, gender, and marital status.Decide when to advertise to each segment.Decide how much should be spent on advertising to each segment.For existing customers and potential customers, they can decide who to target whether it be married or single, male or female, high, mid, or low income levels.
Community Software To Help with Market Segmentation
By having each new member of your community fill out a profile survey allows you to begin market segmentation in the most accurate way possible. Instead of guessing, your customer fills them out themselves allowing for a greater degree of accuracy. By having access to the following information your marketing and sales team will be better able to target efforts and prepare for various sales cycles.
If you would like to learn more about our Online Community Software, and how we utilize Profile Surveys, we would love to talk to you. Please contact us!
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