An ideal referral profile describes the customer you would most like to work with as if it was an individual. This individual is the absolute best match for your products or services.

Large businesses and brands dedicate a significant part of their marketing resources and budget to creating and refining their customer profiles and, no matter how big or small your business is, developing yours is a valuable and essential exercise. 

Focus Your Marketing and Sales

Creating an ideal referral profile helps you to focus your referral marketing activities to get more sales. Otherwise, you’ll find yourself wasting time and energy on people who have no intention of purchasing your product or service. The word “ideal” is key. Referral marketing works best when it’s highly focused.

Determining who your ideal referral is allows you to powerfully connect with your target and provide solutions to their specific problems. 

Clarify Your Position

Clearly identifying who your target referral is helps you to teach your referral sources and customers who they are. Your focus on a specific segment of the market who will most benefit from your products and services allows those referral sources to really understand who they are.

For example, if your target audience is young mothers who work from home, you can address their unique issues and provide customized solutions and everyone that you've shared the profile with will know exactly who to send you.  

Get to Know Your Audience Based on Facts

An ideal referral profile sweeps away the assumptions and allows you to really get to know your best customers. It incorporates objective data, gathered directly from your target audience. This profile allows you to develop a more factual and data-informed picture of your customers, which you can then use to educate your connections and customers about.

Better Referrals and More Profits 

Creating an ideal referral profile will lead to increased referrals and more profits. You’ll better understand their pain points and needs, allowing you to create messaging that engages and builds a lasting relationship. You’ll know what products to offer and what messaging to use in your referral marketing. 

Getting Started

Each business has its own ideal referral. The first step is to look at your products and figure out who most benefits from them. You may have a good idea of this already through feedback from past customers, but to create a detailed profile, you’ll need to approach it more scientifically. 

Small businesses like you create these profiles by conducting market research, which is pretty easy to do today. There is a wealth of resources available to you that will help you learn about your target.

On social media alone, you can uncover an abundance of relevant information. Some market analysis and competitor analysis will help you fill out your profile and provide it with more depth. 

Using Your Ideal Customer Profile

You can put your ideal referral profile to use in a variety of ways, from content creation to perfecting your elevator pitches. Don’t forget to refine it regularly as you get more feedback from your customers, connections and friends and family. Your market will continnually change.

Have you identified your ideal referral? Have you shared it with your referral sources?