Know Your Best Customer: 5 Critical Dimensions for Remodeling Customer Profiling

The Big Idea:

Who is your best customer? That is, what kind of customer makes you the most money with the least amount of headaches? A key step in baiting your marketing hook for the fish you want to catch is, of course, knowing what kind of fish you want to catch. Buried in your past sales is a wealth of data about who your best customers are, and this post talks about how you should profile them so you can target them out in the wild.

In my recent article on developing a marketing strategy, I spoke about the importance of market research as an essential first step in developing a killer strategy that will drive your home improvement business for years to come.

Being able to define your ideal customer is essential for success in almost any sales and marketing organization, but it is especially important for remodeling companies who really need to target specific kinds of people who both want and are able to afford their services. Not only do you need to be able to bait the hook for the fish you want to catch in your marketing, but you also want to be able to tune your sales process to close more of your ideal prospects. In both parts of the funnel, knowing who you are talking to, and what they need to hear to feel comfortable moving forward with you, is directly related to your success in generating more revenue.

Here are the five critical dimensions your team should be able to define about your best customers:

1. Age:

The age of your best customers, which is usually expressed as a range such as 30-45 years old, has all kinds of implications for both sales and marketing. Millennials have a notably different buying process than boomers, they respond to different kinds of messaging, and they are much more accessible online than in traditional media. If you want those folks, you would make significantly different tactical decisions in where you choose to spend your marketing dollars.

2. Household Income (HHI):

If you’re like most remodelers, you do best within a pretty narrow range of HHIs. That is to say that your close rate may tend to drop off with people who make significantly more or less than your target. If you’re doing high-end kitchen remodels, maybe you’re really targeting families who make $250K+ per year and/or have substantial assets. If you’re selling mass-market windows, you may not do very well at all with that $250K demographic.

Knowing what income range to target can both focus your marketing and reduce waste, as well as allow you to craft the messaging that will really speak to your target audience.

4. Length of Residence:

If you looked at a distribution of how often people choose to do projects by how long they have lived in the home, you often see a bump when they first buy the home and a bump some number of years later, but that number of years often depends on the vertical.

From a messaging standpoint, it makes sense to message differently to new homeowners than people who have lived in one place for quite some time. We think about this a lot in sales, (“So! How long you have you lived here?”) but it is just as applicable to marketing. People who have been in a home longer may have more equity to tap for larger projects, but people who are new to a home may be more motivated to do projects quickly so that they have a longer time to reap the benefits.

5. Gender:

Depending on what kinds of projects you do, you may find that some projects are driven more by women than by men, and vice versa. This has implications for how you message your value, what kind of imagery you may use in your marketing and sales presentations, and what the dynamics of the sale might be.

If you’d like to try this profiling for yourself, you can gather your customer list and send it to a “demographic append” service. I have not used them myself, but US Data – just as one example – has a fairly well-regarded service you can learn more about here: US DATA

When you put these five dimensions together you have a powerful profile that can be used to target your best customers in both traditional media, and online.

Let me know what dimensions you think describe your best customers!