Creating a good product always starts with the same question: Who will buy it?
That’s what this post is about—how to create the perfect buyer.
Regardless of whether you’re creating an innovation or a solution that has been on the market for years—you need to know who will be able to buy it. And in the next step, how to reach such a person—what tools and methods of reaching out to use.
So, what is the ideal customer profile in digital marketing?
This post will help you find the right answer.
Let’s begin.
What Is an Ideal Customer Profile (ICP)?
The Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) is your dream buyer.
It’s someone for whom your product is perfectly matched through the prism of their values.
A well-executed ICP will maximize the likelihood of selling your product. In the next step, it will fully realize its objectives by solving your customers’ problems.
This is the main reason for creating an ICP.
Building an ICP: Old School vs. the New School
The old school takes into account questions like:
>> What’s your audience income level?
>> What’s their geographical location?
>> What your audience does for a living?
>> How old is your target demographic?
>> Can you define your target audience?
>>What position do they hold in their company?
>>Do they have a spouse or children, and if so, how many?
The new school divides building ICP into 5 key groups:
- Psychographics
- Purchasing Habits
- Media Preferences
- Aims and Obstacles
- Consumer Journey
And skillfully ask questions for each category. Examples:
1/ Psychographics:
- What type of lifestyle do they prefer?
- What are their hobbies and areas of interest?
- Which values and beliefs matter most to them?
2/ Purchasing Habits:
- What factors sway their purchasing decisions?
- What common hesitations do they have before making a purchase?
- What is their preferred method of buying products or services (online, brick-and-mortar, etc.)?
3/ Media Preferences:
- Which social media channels do they frequent?
- What kinds of blogs, magazines, or news outlets do they follow?
- What kind of media do they engage with and share, such as videos, articles, or podcasts?
4/ Goals and Obstacles:
- What obstacles do they encounter in reaching their goals?
- What are their key aspirations (both in the personal and professional spheres)?
- How can your product or service assist them in surmounting these obstacles or achieving their objectives?
5/ Consumer Journey:
- At what points do they interact with your brand?
- What are their anticipations and experiences at each stage of their buying journey?
- How does their path look from recognizing a need to complete a purchase?
8 Key Factors to Consider Building an ICP
1/ Organization Budget
Let’s get straight to the point. You can have the perfect product, but if it’s too expensive or too cheap, it won’t be purchased.
When creating a product, you need to perform an adequate environmental analysis (SWOT) and, keeping key values in mind, tailor the budget to your audience.
Knowing how much your potential customer can spend gives you a straightforward path to selling to them.
2/ Company Size
This refers to the size of your potential customer. Is it a small business, a freelancer, or perhaps a corporation? Of course, if you’re creating a SaaS solution, it could be any of these. However, specify who your company primarily targets. This allows you to reach your potential buyers faster.
3/ Verticals — Industries
What are the specific verticals? Are there any verticals that you don’t work with? Different industries have unique challenges and needs. Tailoring your ICP to specific industries makes your marketing and sales efforts more relevant and effective.
4/ Geography
What is the target area where you conduct your business? Are there countries where you don’t want to or can’t conduct business?
5/ Prospect’s Job Title
Identify the job titles or roles within a company that are most likely to engage with your product or service. This could be decision-makers, influencers, or end-users.
6/ Pain Points and Challenges
Identify the specific problems and challenges your ideal customers face that your product can solve.
7/ Buying Behavior
Understand how your ideal customers make purchasing decisions. Consider their buying cycle, the channels they use, and the factors that influence their decisions.
8/ Social Media Activity
If you base your work on LinkedIn, you know how important this is. Starting with social selling (engaging in interactions by liking and commenting on your prospects’ posts) shows how often your prospect is active on LinkedIn.
If they last posted on LinkedIn 6 months ago, there’s not much you can do. If they post regularly, at least once a week, you have a great opportunity to use LinkedIn as your main tool for generating leads.
6 Tools for Building an Ideal Customer Profile
- Google Analytics: Offers comprehensive insights into website visitors’ demographics, interests, and online behavior, helping to understand who is engaging with your online presence.
- Senuto: This SEO & market research tool will help you understand what kind of content your target audience is searching for and how they interact with competitors.
- HubSpot: A powerful inbound marketing and sales software that provides tools for customer relationship management (CRM), which help in creating detailed customer profiles.
- LinkedIn Sales Navigator: Specifically designed for sales professionals, this tool offers advanced search capabilities to target the right industry, company size, and decision-makers within organizations.
- Crystal Knows: A tool that uses personality AI to predict the behavior of your prospects, providing insights into how to communicate and sell to them effectively.
- Persona.io: This is a digital tool designed for creating user personas, helping marketers and UX designers to better understand and target their audience.
How to Find High-Quality Leads?
Sounds like another great challenge—and it is!
Before you start looking for leads, make sure that your sales reps and SDRs are well acquainted with the company’s ICP.
Reaching out to irrelevant prospects burns both their time and the company’s. There’s no need to do so.
For finding the right leads, I recommend 3 tools that can be easily integrated with LinkedIn.
I use this tool daily. It allows you to easily find your lead by retrieving their email address and phone number and creating an email sequence. It’s efficient and proven. In my opinion, it’s the number one tool on the market.
2. Zoominfo
ZoomInfo is a data-driven platform offering detailed information on businesses and specialists. It’ll help you efficiently identify potential leads. It’s free (to some degree) and reliable. Good alternative to Apollo.io.
3. GetProspect
The last, but absolutely not least. GetProspect is a legitimate tool for generating leads. Upon registering an account, you receive as many as 50 credits; you can get access to 50 leads free of charge. I’ve used it and I recommend it.
Good ICP Improves Conversion Rate and Retention
A well-matched ICP is the first step towards your company selling more.
And, as you well know, it never ends with the sale. I once heard that the most important thing for a new company is to sell twice. And this is why ICP applies here.
A high standard of ICP equates to appropriately targeted advertising. You target exactly those people who can buy your product because it solves their problems. It’s the ideal scenario, isn’t it?
But that’s not all. The next step is to retain the customer.
If you have experience in sales, you know that customers sometimes make a decision (especially in the service-based industry) at the salesman’s urging.
If the customer chose between your company and the competition, and you convinced them to choose your company—good job. If the customer didn’t want to buy at all, but did it because you insisted—it means that the ICP wasn’t the best (of course, other elements could also be behind this).
An adequate ICP leads to more accurate and less costly customer acquisition. An adequate ICP also means longer customer retention—you work with a client who needs your solution. Now what remains is the high quality of service delivery and equally high-quality customer service.
Ideal Customer Profile vs. Buyer Persona
In a nutshell, ICP stands for Ideal Customer Profile, which takes into account all the characteristics of our ideal buyer. We fill this out by creating an image of someone who will ultimately purchase our products, and we target these individuals when selling (or creating) our products.
On the other hand, a buyer persona is specifically the person who will be buying our product. For example: Joe, a Sales Manager at XYZ company. His responsibilities include this and that, and that’s why he might buy our solution.
When creating an ICP, we need to select all the necessary characteristics. Once we have these characteristics defined, it becomes much easier to identify the appropriate person.
Then, when performing outreach, we have a direct image of the person for whom our product is the ideal solution.
For this purpose, you can use the tool: LinkedIn Sales Navigator. It’s a very simple tool to use, but very detail-oriented and suitable for executing outbound sales. In fact, I’ve been using it for the last few years in sales (and still find myself using it today!).
Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs) for Ideal Customer Profile
Is building an ICP time-consuming?
Yes and no. As always; it depends on what product you’re creating and who your niche is. Nonetheless, meticulously building a robust ICP shouldn’t take you more than 3 days.
In what ways can an ICP reduce the cost of customer acquisition?
An ICP will significantly reduce the cost of customer acquisition by improving targeting precision. By knowing exactly who your ideal customers are, you can tailor your marketing efforts to be relevant to those specific prospects, and lead to higher conversion rates. It also improves the sales process by identifying the most promising leads, thus reducing time and resources spent on less profitable deals.
How does an ICP contribute to post-sale customer retention and satisfaction?
By targeting the right person, you greatly increase the likelihood of a sale and subsequent satisfaction with the service performed or product offered. Choose wisely whom you sell to because your retention rate depends on it. Even if you “push” your product onto a customer, there’s little chance that your cooperation will be carried out and maintained at a high level. Target wisely, collaborate longer.
And what is your ideal customer profile in digital marketing, or any niche?
Tell me in the comment!
And if you’d like me to write something similar in this field—hit me up, I’m on it.
P.S. Did you like my post? Help me thrive in my blogging venture—let’s have a coffee! 😉
Thanks for reading,
Simon
Author Profile
- Simon Gorlak is a Digital Marketing Expert with over 8 years of experience. He specializes in 3 areas: SEO, Copywriting, and Email Marketing. Simon's blog gathers knowledge that helps Marketers & C-level to increase profits from their online businesses. Also, his content helps to reach the most difficult customers, make others' content to be read & purchased. Besides digital marketing, Simon speaks 4 languages: English, Spanish, Portuguese, and Polish & works as a Head of Business at an Indian Start-up.
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what is the only one, email-finding tool that you would recommend?
Hey Rajesh,
Quick answer—Apollo.io & ZoomInfo. My two fav outreach tools that I use most often.
Best,
Simon
Hey Rajesh,
Just for finding prospects’ email addresses? Try Apollo.io (alternatively, GetPreprospect). My absolute number 1.
Best,
Simon