Three steps to profile your B2B customers

Knowing your customers implies that you know your business. If you understand exactly who your customers are, you can target your marketing activities and personalize each message to get better results.

Here’s how you can accurately profile and create marketing niches within your target audiences.

Step one: Get the facts right

Collate complete information about your existing b2b customers. This should include all of the following:

• Name
• Gender
• Job title
• Address
• Country
• Company name
• Company revenue
• Number of employees
• Industry
• SIC code

When your database is updated and complete, you will get the real version of the truth.

Step two: Segregation

The most obvious segregation could be based on any of the following:

• Male/female ratio (not very important for b2b customers)
• Key decision maker
• Geo wise
• Company revenue-wise
• Company size based
• Industry-wise

Although, these are common niches, but you never know where your market insight lies. Some records may appear in multiple groups, you need to analyze each group to look for any lurking similarities. You can add more groups based on you business necessities.

Step three: Interesting insights

Try to collect interesting insights about your customers, such as:

• What triggers their buying behavior?
• What features of your product/service do they use/like the most?
• How are they benefited through your product or service?
• What do they do in their free time?
• What is their education status?
• Which sport are they interested in?

There could be millions of possible demographic questions; choose the ones that suit your business needs. This is a critical task – you can even take help of professional media managers or marketing experts.

Once your profiling is done, you can identify which groups have performed better and which groups are inactive. 20% of your customers make for 80% of your business – customer profiling is the only sure-shot way to find out what type of people comprise that 20%, so that you can target similar profiles in future and generate greater returns out of your marketing campaign by reaching the right people.