Starting a marketing campaign or a sales strategy without knowing who your customer is is a waste of your time and effort. It is like shooting in the dark, wandering aimlessly through a dark corridor, hoping you'll hit something along the way.
As with everything in Marketing, there needs to be an end goal guiding your actions and an executable strategy to accompany that goal. Knowing your ideal customer profile (or ICP) is the first step to getting your marketing strategy right.
So, what is an ideal customer profile or ICP? The concept is pretty straightforward. An ICP is a description of a fictional account that gets significant value from your product or service and provides considerable value to your company in return.
To put it bluntly, an ICP is a profile of the customer that's on the back of your mind whenever the question "who's your target audience?" comes up.
Having an ideal customer profile is extremely important because it will help your business maximize its marketing efforts, save time and money, and build more meaningful connections with your audience.
If you do not have your ICP built out yet, we would like to give you the template we use at Base Miami to create the ideal customer profile of the clients we work with.
What Is an ICP and Why It's Crucial For Your Company
An ideal customer profile (ICP) is a fictitious client (or company) that perfectly gathers all the qualities and pain points your company solves.
Knowing your ICP gives your company a clear idea of your target audience's problem and what it needs to solve. This will help you align your marketing efforts towards solving those needs while maximizing your resources' potential.
*To build your ICP you will need to conduct thorough research on your clients and competition.
The more detailed you build your ICP profile, the better you will be able to target them. If your organization uses account-based marketing (ABM), having your ICPs clearly identified will help your sales reps' target qualified leads better. That way, their efforts will be more focused on the customers that are more likely to convert.
Let's see the full scope of the benefits that your organization will profit from by creating an ideal customer profile:
- Make More Money: Having a clear understanding of who you're targeting gives you the power to focus your campaigns towards the customers that are more likely to convert.
- Extended Customer Lifetime Value: Directing your marketing efforts to hot leads increases the chance of first-time conversions and repurchasing.
- Create Brand Ambassadors: There's nothing better than a marketing campaign done right and having happy customers as a result of that. On top of the conversions, you will probably get some referrals and new brand ambassadors.
An ICP Is Not the Same as a Buyer Persona. Here's Why:
A buyer persona is a semi-fictional representation of your target customers. Buyer personas are built out of demographic data, pain points, goals, and real market research about your customers. Every organization has between 2 and 5 buyer persona profiles.
Even though ICPs and Buyer Personas may seem like the same thing at first, they are not, and it's important to understand the difference between them to avoid making mistakes.
ICPs are more sales-oriented, and having them mapped out will help your sales team determine which leads are worth targeting. Buyer Personas, on the other hand, are built to understand how to communicate with the individuals and the type of content that works best for them.
Follow These Steps To Create Your Ideal Customer Profile
Now that you have a better idea of what an ICP is and why your organization must have one let's take a look at a step-by-step guide on how to create one.
Step 1 – Research Won Opportunities
Analyze your current and former customers in accordance with the following criteria:
- Revenue
- Number of employees
- Industry
- Region
- Product
- CLV
This will help you form a list of your best customers.
Step 2 - Look at United States Lost Opportunities
Step 3 – Perform Sales Intelligence into Competition
Look at the customers of your competitors and analyze them by industries, size, and geography. Obviously, you won't get a full scope of their clientele. However, a simple look at the client section of their websites might get you a valuable hint at where to look for clients.
Step 4: Conduct Client Interviews
In order to pick a client sample, here are some questions that you can ask yourself about them.
- Who are your top 3-5 most profitable clients?
- Which clients have been with you the longest?
- What problem do they solve when using your product?
- Do you like working with the current client? Who are your favorite clients?
- Who are your best current clients in the US?
Below are some sample questions you can ask your current client base. You could do this via video conference, face to face, or simply use a survey tool and send it out to your database.
- In which industry or industries does your company work?
- Who do you report to? Who reports to you?
- What skills are required to do your job?
- What is your marketing budget per year?
- What is the primary problem you needed to solve?
- What solution does your product provide?
DOWNLOAD OUR SAMPLE QUESTIONNAIRE
Step 5: Compile the Information & Create Your Profiles
When you're done, you will take this information and create a profile that follows the outline in this ideal client profile template:
- Background
- Firmographics (industry, verticals, annual revenue, employees, location)
- Tech Stack
- Your Product / Service: Many companies omit. However, it's best to create ICPs for different types of products or services in certain cases.
- Decision Makers
- Pain Points and how your company can address these challenges
- Business Objectives
- Similarities between companies & decision-makers
- Potential keywords they are looking for
- Example of Target Companies
You Have a Clear Understanding of What an ICP is. So, Now What?
Now, it's all hands on deck in order to build your ICP. The guidelines we have provided you with will steer you in the right direction to get you started and, what is more, we would like to give you the template we use at Base Miami to define our ICPs and those of our own clients.
