Who Are Your Customers?

Who are your customers? A customer is someone who buys or uses your products. Before you can sell or market to them effectively you need to understand them. Do you know who your customers are? Do you know how old they are, what problems they are facing etc. There are different types of surveys demographic, psychographic, new customer and ongoing surveys.

Here are some things I have asked in previous customer profile surveys to help me get to know them better. Here is the list:

• Age*
• Gender
• Income*
• Job Title
• Education
• Company size
• Dept/Company Budget*
• Industry
• Favorite job-related magazine
• Favorite job-related websites
• Biggest challenges
• Preference to receive email
• Biggest challenges

* Please note that some of these are sensitive but I don't make those questions required and I tell them in email invite and survey welcome they should only complete what feels right.

I will talk more about customer surveys in later blogs but one good thing to know is that there are a ton of resources to help you survey your customers. You can go all out and get a survey company like NFO who I have used in the past and I was very pleased with or do your surveys yourself with some amazing tools out there. I have used Zoomerang for years and I have been very pleased with it. It's also affordable for smaller companies and has great reporting abilities.

Great resources for customer surveying include:
- Zoomerang Survey Tool
- Quantitative marketing research
- Demographics and Psychographics customer research
- Psychographic segmentation: how to increase communication ROI by examining values, beliefs...