Use Social CRM Tags to Understand Customer Behavior Profiles and Sharpen Your Marketing Strategy

Wikipedia defines a persona as “a method for describing target users in marketing planning or business design, often in multiple combinations, which helps planners analyze and set strategies for different user types.”

In short, a persona is a method and tool for building a marketing strategy. With personas and Social CRM, marketing planners can sketch the profile of a product’s audience. With that profile, we can go further and picture what these target customers like, which issues they care about, and which marketing approaches will win them over, then build a marketing plan around it.

What is a customer behavior profile?

So what exactly is a customer behavior profile?

Conceptually, a customer behavior profile is very close to customer interests. It describes customers (their background, characteristics, personality tags, behavioral contexts, and so on) and connects customer needs with product design.

Put simply, the goal is to find valuable details in large volumes of customer behavior data. By actively or passively collecting the many data points users leave online, you extract as complete and detailed a picture of each customer as possible, which helps turn data into business value. For example: Is the customer male or female? Do they care about their appearance? Do they follow fashion trends? That kind of personal information.

In English, the terms User Portrait, User Persona, and User Profile are very similar and easy to mix up.

User Portrait (user role)

Distinguishes the different roles users play in a system. For example, in a brand’s Social CRM channel, dealers check shipping progress and request quantities, while customers book services and buy products. Dealers and customers are different user roles.

User Persona (user archetype)

Leans toward describing the same type of user across different dimensions. For example, when designing personas for buyers of the same brand, you can use various interactions to segment buyers further and make them concrete, such as impulse buyers, collectors, and price comparers.

User Profile (user attributes)

Leans toward describing attributes, mostly basic ones, including gender, age, location, contact details, and interests.

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Mapping user data with Social CRM

As the Chinese saying goes, you can draw a tiger’s skin but not its bones, and you can know a person’s face but not their heart. With user profiles, we can define not only surface-level traits such as gender and age, but also understand what lies deeper, building a complete picture of customers through data and tags.

This kind of profile has become possible as the internet has grown: user information and behavior records keep piling up, while big data processing and analytics have matured enough to compute each user’s characteristics. These characteristics are concrete tags abstracted from demographics, social attributes, lifestyle habits, purchasing behavior, interests, and preferences. A tag is simply a user characteristic turned into a symbol.

Tagging every customer with these symbolic characteristics brings you closer to the real world. Everyone is unique and can’t simply be represented by someone else, and tags help you understand what each customer really looks like.

A user persona is expressed as a set of tags, for example:

Mo-li Hsu, female, 35, from Taipei, works in Taipei, pharmaceutical industry, pharmacist, annual income NT$500,000, married, owns an apartment, has children, sociable, not into sports, strong spending power, likes to compare prices.

Basic information can come from “member registration,” but users won’t tell us whether they have children, enjoy socializing, dislike exercise, or what their spending power is. Those traits must be calculated with data models, or derived from behavior, spending amounts, order details, and other information, then turned into tags on customer records.

Of course, a tagging system needs to be designed for your industry. Banks and e-commerce companies, for example, will use different tag systems. You may even need to set up these tags at the very start of your account so you can segment customers quickly.

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How Social CRM uses data-driven customer profiles

1. Precision marketing

This is the use case marketers know best: moving from broad, scattershot outreach to fine-grained segmentation. You slice your customer base into narrower dimensions and use broadcasts, email, and interactive campaigns to run care, follow-up, and incentive strategies. This avoids the waste of blind mass targeting, and you can analyze the new users a campaign brings in to evaluate whether it performed as expected.

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2. Data applications

Customer profiles are the foundation of many data products, such as familiar ad recommendation systems and algorithms. Any marketer who has used ad platforms knows that targeting relies on a set of demographic tags: gender, age, education, interests, mobile device, and more.

For example, e-commerce sites recommend baby products to expectant mothers and lenses to photography enthusiasts. In personalized recommendations, calculating user tags is only one piece; you also need recommendation algorithms to suggest the right items.

Precision ads can target by age, region, weather, gaming interests, content preferences, shopping behavior, search behavior, and more. For example, you can upload a list to Facebook to find more lookalike audiences, and LINE Ads also supports precise audience targeting.

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3. Data analysis

This one goes without saying. A customer profile can be seen as a business-level database, with each tag serving as a dimension for multidimensional analysis. A customer data platform can connect seamlessly with Social CRM so that data flows into a single database, giving data analysts what they need to dig deeper.

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4. Product design

On the product side, profiles support product design and show whether a product is actually helping users. Group users into segments and design, test, and validate products based on each group’s traits. Just as Facebook tests new features with different user groups to collect real-time feedback and data before optimizing further, this keeps your product from drifting away from what core users need.

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5. Fit assessment

Review the customer profile from a marketing campaign afterward to see whether it matched expectations, and assess how well your promotion channels fit your product’s target audience.

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6. User analysis

Early on, PMs learn about users through surveys and interviews. As the user base grows, interviews become less effective, so user profiles are used alongside them: What do new users have in common? Have the attributes of core users changed?

Customer profiles seem to have plenty of uses! But is that really true?

In fact, most products don’t need a product recommendation system; recommendation systems are mostly used on e-commerce sites. Personalized recommendations have quickly become a guiding light for many products, although they still require large volumes of users and data. On the other hand, they are also better suited to driving the business on top of customer profiles.

Conclusion

Customer profiles have drawn growing attention over the past year or two because of the cookieless shift. Social CRM helps brands capture user information and collect it directly into a first-party database. This customer data not only helps brands find more lookalike audiences, but also reveals customer preferences, interests, and buying habits.

With Social CRM database analysis, the time, items, and habits of every customer purchase are recorded accurately and turned into tag-based profiles. Tag categories let you package audiences quickly and clearly, so whether you’re running lookalike ad campaigns or planning your next marketing moves, you can turn data into a marketing plan.

Consumers are becoming harder to see clearly. Only by using Social CRM to piece together missing data into a complete customer profile can you truly win customers’ hearts.

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