The 4 essential types of consumer profiling

When you’re growing your business, finding the right customers is crucial. But how do you make sure you reach the right people to help your business thrive?

This is where consumer profiling comes in!

What is consumer profiling?

Consumer profiling is when you literally create a data-led profile of your organisation’s ideal customers. The profile will present details about certain demographics, customers’ likes, dislikes, plus their purchasing habits.

Why should you use consumer profiling to understand your customers?

It’s really important to be able to back up, or even debunk, any assumptions you may have about your target customers. While you might think you know how your customers think, having the data behind this makes sure you target the right people, at the right time, and in the right ways- there are a lot of benefits to consumer profiling. 

Looking for a tool to enrich your insights team, inform your customer insights strategy and learn more about your ideal customers? Here’s our rundown of the top 5 consumer insight platforms.

What types of consumer profiling are there?

There are a few ways to approach customer profiling. Here are some of the main types:

First, demographic profiling

This is what a lot of people imagine when they think about consumer profiling. It’s where you’ll find some of the standard profiling categories, like age, gender, income, marital status, education level and so on. 

The great thing is that there’s so much more you can overlay on top of this to deepen your understanding. After all, you don’t act or think in the same way as everyone who shares your birthday, for example. 

Geographic profiling

This is another pretty straightforward type of customer profiling. Gaining an understanding of your customers’ location, right down to detailed city and town analysis, can help you target different regional groups effectively. 

Psychographic profiling

When painting a picture of your target audience, it helps to understand things like their habits, hobbies, interests and life goals. 

Psychographic profiling can be super helpful for finding out the types of content and communication that resonate with your audience.

Behavioural profiling

Understanding your customers’ behaviour throughout their buyer journeys is crucial to giving them what they really need. You can analyse things like purchasing and engagement patterns. 

It’s particularly useful for informing you about customers’ likelihood to churn, or even to spend more on your product or service.

Want to learn how your target customers act and buy? Check out our top consumer behavior survey questions or our guide on who to send customer profiling surveys to.

So what can you do with your consumer profiling insights?

A common next step is to create customer personas that present your profiling research in neat characters, which your business can use as typical customers. 

You and your colleagues can then bear these profiles in mind when developing everything from products to messaging.

With consumer profiles like these you can add some context to your customer journeys and provide an even more tailored product or service.