Your B2B marketing success hinges on understanding your customers. It allows you to attract and nurture potential customers in a market where buyers now have the power. In B2B marketing, this customer knowledge can be structured by creating an Ideal Customer Profile, or ICP.
Without an ICP, your marketing is more or less based on assumptions. It leads to inefficient and costly activities. Leaving you, sales and management frustrated over low marketing contribution to revenue and brand awareness.
If you don’t have the resources to do a full ICP profile there are effective strategies you can use to refine your customer knowledge and improve your marketing.
In this article, I will explain four cost-effective alternatives to creating a full-fledged ICP profile.
Why is it important to have an Ideal Customer Profile
An ICP is a detailed description of your ideal customer. It is based on those customers that are the best fit for your products or services.
The data in an ICP can be things like industry, company size, budget, location, and specific pain points and challenges of your ideal customers. It can also contain data on how they buy your solutions and about common objections.
The ICP profile serves as a guiding star for your marketing efforts, ensuring that your branding, messaging, content and channels are all aligned with the needs of your target audience.
In short, having an ICP will allow you to:
1) Understand your customers’ needs, challenges and goals
2) What information they need to understand your solutions
3) Where they want to consume that information
4) Learn how they buy from you
What are the consequences of not having an Ideal Customer Profile?
I have worked with companies over the years that haven’t had an ICP. When asked about their customer knowledge, they would rely on anecdotal evidence and gut feeling about their customers. That is not a good foundation for a comprehensive marketing strategy.
In my experience there are five clear downsides when you don’t have an ICP:
1. You’re wasting money
Without a clear ICP, you’re likely to spend money on a broad and unknown audience. Most likely, the majority are not interested in your offer.
2. You get crappy leads
Without a message tailored to a specific target group with a specific intent you’re bound to get leads with low interest and low conversion rate. I guess you already know what sales will think of that.
3. Your customers may fall out of love with you
When your messaging doesn’t resonate with your audience, the few customers you do acquire are less likely to stay with you long-term. This leads to higher churn rates and lower customer lifetime value (CLTV).
4. You’re not spending wisely
Marketing without an ICP often leads to duplicated efforts and/or misaligned strategies. You or your team may be working hard, but not smart. Without direction you can’t create high-impact activities.
5. Nobody knows your name
Marketing isn’t just about demand or lead generation. it’s also branding – making people understand who you are, what you do and why you do what you do and what sets you apart from your competitors.
Given these challenges, it’s clear that developing an ICP is crucial for any B2B marketing strategy. But what if you don’t have the resources for a full ICP analysis?
Four cost-effective alternatives to creating a full ICP
One of the most straightforward and cost-effective ways to create a basic ICP is by analyzing your existing customers.
Leverage existing data
Use your CRM to identify your top-performing clients. It should be those who bring the most value to your business. What do they have in common? Look for patterns in their industry, company size, budget, and pain points.
How to leverage your data:
- Use your sales data to find the customers who have the highest lifetime value, lowest churn rate, or most consistent purchasing history. Who are the top spenders and most loyal customers?
- Specify the data you want to look for and identify common characteristics among customers. I would recommend industry, company size and specific challenges they face.
- Create a basic ICP document that outlines these common traits. A spreadsheet can take you a long way.
Conduct targeted customer surveys
Consider sending out targeted surveys to a smaller, select group of your most valuable customers using tools like Mailchimp. With this approach you shouldn’t include too many questions. In my experience no more than ten questions. Your survey should give you the following answers:
- What are my customers’ main challenges
- How do my customers use our product
- What benefits do they see using our product
Online tools like SurveyMonkey or Google Forms can help you create and distribute surveys efficiently. Once you have 20+ responses you can start looking for common themes. These insights can help you create a first, simple ICP.
Utilize firmographics and secondary data
Firmographics refer to the characteristics of organizations, such as industry, company size, revenue, and geographic location. By leveraging firmographic data, you can segment your market and focus on the businesses that are most likely to benefit from your product.
How to use firmographics:
1) Filter out segments that have historically brought the most value to your business.
2) Use firmographic data to categorize your market into different segments. For example, target medium-sized businesses in a certain region.
3) Supplement your firmographic analysis with secondary data from industry reports, market research studies, or competitor analyses.
Review and analyze successful customer cases
Another effortless and valuable strategy is to analyze your most successful client interactions. This requires a tight cooperation with sales. By understanding what made these deals work, you can identify key factors that resonate with your ideal customers.
How to analyze cases:
1) Together with sales choose a handful of recent, high-value sales or partnerships to analyze.
2) Understand the buyer journey and the decision-making process, client pain points, and how your solution helped.
3) Use these insights to target similar companies and replicate the success.
What if I want to create an ICP from scratch?
If none of the above resonated with what you had in mind, then there’s the option of creating your ICP from scratch. We understand that creating an Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) in-house can be a challenging and resource-intensive process. It demands time, expertise, and access to advanced tools that may not always be readily available.
This is where outsourcing becomes a smart move. By partnering with DoublePlusContent, you gain access to our specialized knowledge, objective insights, and cutting-edge analytics, ensuring your ICP is both precise and actionable.
