Customer Profiling, Segmentation
and Mapping
Solving almost any sales and marketing challenge starts with knowing who your customer is. Mapping Analytics can help you find out who your best customers are and apply geographic analysis techniques to discover where to find more of them.
Gain an Accurate Description of Your Customer
Customer profiling services from Mapping Analytics create descriptive segments or groups of your customers. Each segment has specific defining characteristics. A customer segment is not as simple as applying a demographic label, such as "women age 45-54" or "businesses with revenue >$500 million."
Those descriptions alone won't tell you enough about your customer. For example, not all women age 45-54 have the same tendency to purchase your products. So a profile like this may not help you much, and you may waste resources marketing and selling to the wrong people.
That's why Mapping Analytics takes a more comprehensive and disciplined approach to customer profiling. We use your own customer data, lifestyle cluster data, and analytical techniques. The result is a more accurate description of your customer that can be used to identify areas where you can find more of your best customers.
What Goes Into a Customer Profile
What makes up a customer profile? It depends on whether your customers are businesses or consumers. In either case, you typically start with your own customer data (such as location, purchases, spending volume), append additional consumer or business data, then group into segments that share similar characteristics.
Consumer Customer Profiles
- Demographics - age, income, gender, ethnicity, education level, etc.
- GeoDemographic Clusters - there are many clustering databases available, and we will help you choose the right one for your specific profiling needs. Some are industry specific. Others are general. They often include data on interests, lifestyles, purchasing behavior, attitudes and more.
- Survey Data - based on data available for purchase or gathered through primary research.
Businesses
- SICs or NAICs - Standard Industry Classification (SIC) and North American Industry Classification (NAIC) codes are added to your customer data to determine type of business.
- Firmographics - this invented word is used by marketers to refer to a company's characteristics, including number of employees, revenue, growth rate and even specialty data such as the number of computers or spending on telecommunications.
Standard Customer Profiles
Customer profiles can be based on commercially available clustering systems, such as PRIZM®, MOSAIC® or TAPESTRY®. These systems build lifestyle clusters around households and adult populations based on the concept of "birds of a feather flock together." Lifestyle clustering means characteristics are common enough that entire neighborhoods are likely respond to marketing in similar ways.
By grouping households with similar purchase and behavior patterns together, “clusters” or “segments” are formed. When we compare your customers to standardized, statistically stable clusters from commercial systems, we can identify the clusters more likely to buy or not buy your products.
Custom Customer Profiles
What if your target customer is a sub-segment of the adult population, such as Hispanics or women ages 35-44, or even children? In these cases, marketers often overlook the fact that profiles developed with these demographics alone are not optimized to deliver the strongest or most accurate results.
Mapping Analytics has the solution. We combine geodemographic clustering systems with a custom index based on an analysis of your customer database. This custom index will account for your target population and customers in each cluster.
The custom index delivers a more accurate and usable foundation for making direct marketing decisions. You will know in which clusters you will find your specific target audience, and which clusters have greater penetration and potential.
Next Steps
- Discover the benefits of customer profiling services from Mapping Analytics
- Download the Consumer Perspectives brochure to learn about our packaged analytic service to profile and segment your customers
