The Importance of Understanding Your Customer's Ideal Customer Profile
A generic customer profile doesn't cut it anymore, you need to know who your customers are in detail and what they want.
The most profitable customers are the ones that you need to focus on, and to do this, you need to have an Ideal Customer Profile (ICP).
An ICP is a detailed description of your ideal customer, their characteristics, and their preferences and a bit about where they play and what makes them tick. When creating content for our customers, the content that works best is when the customer knows who they're trying to attract - who their own ideal customer is. So, we're putting together out tips to help you identify yours as well as considerations that inform your content structure to help improve your marketing efforts when attracting event organizers to your business.
Why is an ICP so important?
An ICP helps you to understand what your customers are looking for in your product or service.
By building a precise description of your ideal customer, you can create a more relevant and effective marketing strategy. Understanding the specific needs and preferences of your most profitable customers enables you to align your approach with their expectations, ultimately leading to an increase in sales.
For example, if you’re an exhibition supplier, having an ICP for potential event organizers will help you to create content that resonates with their needs and preferences. More specifically, if you sell shell scheme, which persona is specifically responsible within an organization that purchases your services? There may be others that help influence the decision of course and you typically may need an FD to sign off on your RFP, so it's important to create those persona's too - know who you're talking to, know your audience.
Once you know who you're talking to, you can craft messages that speaks directly to them, making the process of attracting those customers easier.
How do you create an Ideal Customer Profile?
The first step in building an ICP is to analyze your existing customer base.
Identify the characteristics and attributes that make your most profitable customers ideal and document them. Consider demographic information, such as age and location, as well as behavioral information, like purchasing habits, decision-making processes, and communication preferences. I also identify where the customer "sits." Where do they play? If they only get out to one exhibition a year, make sure you are there. If they read only two event news titles, get a press release circulated and campaign focused on those titles.
Once you have identified your most ideal customers, you can begin to craft your ICP.
Identify Key Characteristics: Look at your best customers, and identify commonalities. These may include industry, job title, revenue, geographic location and business needs.
Analyze Customer Behavior: Understanding how your customers engage with your product or service is crucial, such as how they use your product, their purchasing frequency, their buying cycle, their interaction with your brand, and their communication style. Knowing this helps you know when and how to approach your prospects.
Understand their Pain Points: Identify the challenges and pain points that your ideal customers are facing. By knowing their problems, you can tailor your product or service or marketing message to provide solutions to their pains.
Look at the Customer’s Environment: Understand the environment your ideal customer operates in. This includes trends in their industry, the market they operate in, and any external factors that might affect their buying decision such as economic conditions or regulation.
Refine and Review: Creating an ICP is not a one-time process. As your business and market evolve, so should your ICP. Regularly review and update it to ensure it remains relevant and effective.
As our customer Hew Leith from Grip said, it's not just the pain points you want to identify, but the gain points too!
How to structure content tailored to your ICP
Using your ICP, you can create tailored content that speaks directly to your most profitable customers.
For example:
Segmentation: Start by segmenting your prospects according to their job titles or industry sector, thus making it easier for you to tailor the content that is most relevant to them.
Customization: You can then customize each message and offer to meet the specific needs of each customer type in a way that highlights your value proposition - finance will have very different needs to that of say a marketing decision maker when securing your event services.
Test and Refine: Make sure to test all of your content ideas with your prospects in order to refine as needed. Remember you don't need 1,000 comments for a piece of content to be a success - if that one target customer you're trying to attract get's in touch - your content has done it's job.
Breaking out each audience type, will help you design your content with your customer in mind, maximizing your engagement.
Tone of Voice
The tone of voice you use throughout your marketing content can significantly impact your customers' perception of your brand. Your ICP should guide the tone of your messaging but, IMHO, not dictate it.
Establishing a tone of voice that resonates with your ideal customer can help you to establish better relationships, trust, and customer loyalty - consistency is key. Some examples of tone of voice are:
Emotive: Using language that creates an emotional connection with your customer.
Conversational: Writing as if you are talking to the person directly.
Educational: Sharing knowledge and expertise in a friendly, conversational tone.
Professional: A formal yet authoritative voice to demonstrate trustworthiness.
By using language, storytelling, and visuals that resonate with your ideal customer, you will be able to more effectively engage them.
Experimentation and Continual Improvement
Building an ICP is not a one-time task, but an ongoing and continually improving process.
For example, analyzing customer feedback and online reviews can help you refine your ICP to better serve your customers' needs. Continual refinement is key in ensuring that you are targeting the right customers with the right messaging.
Have their needs changed? Has the industry evolved? Have they solved their pains already? How can you help them Gain? These are just some of the questions that you should be asking as part of your ICP review process.
Getting in touch with customers regularly and gathering feedback on their experiences can help ensure that you are targeting the right people with the right message. Using this data, revise your ICP to reflect what makes your ideal customer tick and continue honing your messages until they truly resonate.
One way that we've found works really well in understanding your customers and prospects is to interview them.
By interviewing your customers you have the opportunity to truly understand their needs, wants and pain points. Interviews also give you an opportunity to build relationships with your customers so that they feel valued - something which will pay dividends in the long run.
Ultimately, by understanding who you are targeting and tailoring your messages accordingly, you can ensure maximum response rates and ROI.
It pays to invest the time and effort in understanding your customers - it will pay dividends in the long run.
Put yourself in their shoes, step outside of your comfort zone and stay ahead of customer trends. Doing this will help you refine your ICP and tailor content that resonates with them.