The PR Adviser: Describe Your Customer

Hello again, my beloved readers! We’re continuing today with lessons I learned from the Glossy Future of Fashion and Luxury conference in June. More specifically, what conference speaker Neda Whitney, senior vice president and head of marketing for Christie’s America, told me.

Two columns ago, I bombarded you with questions that challenged you to not give me the same old, same old. Some of you responded by demanding to know what you ever did to me to cause you such brain pain.

Brain pain is good! It means your synapses are getting stronger as your mind begins to investigate a new way of thinking. And that’s where the magic happens, baby! Creativity and inspiration are the brainchildren of Herculean-strength synapses.

We addressed one of those tough questions in the last column. If you still can’t answer why customers buy from you, revisit it or call me!

Today, we tackle your ideal customer. In the golden steps of the customer journey, we call these bricks “developing the customer persona.” 

When I posed this question to you, I asked you to describe them. Who are they? What are they like?

When I go through this exercise with clients, we usually come up with more than one persona because your customers are not all the same. Their common trait, however, is that they enjoy spending their money with you. 

Neda Whitney from Christie’s got my synapses running laps when she told me she’s given up on traditional means for developing customer personas.  

“Oh, my dear Lilian,” she said in my imagined re-enactment of our conversation. “It’s no longer just about sitting with your team, brainstorming how Jack and Jill and Jordan find your brand. No, no, no sweetheart. Social media has made understanding your customers so much easier!”

And then she jumped on her Pegasus unicorn with a rainbow horn and flew away, leaving me with the powerful insight I share with you today. 

Pick your poison. Facebook. Instagram. LinkedIn. Pinterest. TikTok. Twitter. SnapChat. YouTube. 

Spend enough time on any of these channels, and you’ll discover your customers are happily telling you who they are, what they like, who they follow, and what they did last summer. 

My customer persona exercise used to begin with brainstorming before going to social media to identify customers with specific traits, then tracking their behavior. 

Now, thanks to Neda’s genius, we’re starting on the platforms and working backward. 

Let’s fire up your CRM, or customer relationship management, system!

If you just asked, “what’s a CRM?” please pardon the wave of expletives I unleashed. 

Let’s take a side journey into the sexy scene of CRMs and why you need one. 

A warning—what I’m about to describe sounds like stalking. And it kind of is; kinda creepy, kinda intrusive, but 100 percent guaranteed to be appreciated by your customers, as long as they don’t know how you appear to read their minds.

A strong CRM will shelter your customers’ intimate secrets, including everything they’ve purchased from you, when they last purchased, and how much they spent, and that’s just the basics. 

If you’re fully maximizing your strong, sexy CRM, you will also know their birthday, anniversary, and other important dates in their life, allowing you to conveniently show up at the right moments to say, “Hey you, you’ve got an important event coming up. What are you going to wear?”

But wait, there’s more!

With the right CRM integration, you will also know where on your website your customer has spent the most time, how often they come back and admire that one piece that really should be theirs, and if they’ve ever been tempted to put that piece in the shopping cart but then changed their minds.  

What can you do with this information? A helluva lot! But I’m getting ahead of myself. We’ll return to this in a future column. 

Facebook has a nifty tool called Audience Insights that will tell you immediately who your customers are on both a demographic and psychographic level. Demographics gives you facts like age, gender, education, etc. Psychographics tell you hobbies and interests. 

Demographics will let you know if someone can afford to be your customer; psychographics will show you how to seduce them into becoming your customer. 

The pursuit of luxury is a passionate endeavor. I’ll never stop saying this. In fact, I demand my family put it on my tombstone when the time comes.

As with all passion, seduction is the key to getting customers to buy from you. Knowing what they like and how they like to spend their time brings you one step closer into luring them into your, ahem, CRM. 

With Audience Insights, you can upload email addresses of your customers from your CRM, and Facebook will give you their core demographics based on its ability to match the email addresses with existing Facebook and Instagram users. 

All of this becomes anonymized in the process, so don’t worry about exposing your customers’ personal information. If you’re without a CRM (shame!), you can also do the same using your existing Facebook and Instagram followers. 

To get to the truly juicy stuff, the information you need to determine how you’re going to get your customers’ temperature rising, you’ll want to look at the Page Likes feature, which give you psychographics. This bit of info serves as the ingredients to make that special love potion guaranteed to get your customers throwing their credit cards at you.

And here is where I leave you until next month. I know, we’re just getting to the good stuff. But if I give it to you all now, how will I keep you coming back for more?

If you can’t wait, hop on over to my calendar and schedule a complimentary one-on-one with me. Otherwise, see you next month!

On another note, I’m now back on Instagram after a long hiatus!

I’m looking for brands to profile on my page since I didn’t make it to Vegas this year. If you’re interested, follow and DM me on Instagram, @lilianraji, and we can go from there. This is entirely complimentary because, as you know, I love to help!