Also known as personas, customer profiles are customer types created from an understanding of the typical audience generated from customer research. It involves focusing on the different goals and scenarios the customers may relate to when interacting with a specific touch-point, such as websites catalogs or shop floors.
Customer profiles are generated to represent the typical users of a product or service and to help the project team make customer-centered decisions. Unlike demographics, customer profiles do not divide people into groups. Instead, they create a hypothetical description of a perfect-fit customer to inform a marketer’s entire sales and marketing strategies.
Ideal Customer Profile vs. Buyer Persona
An ideal customer profile is not equal to a buyer persona—but both can be opposite sides of the same coin. The perfect customer profile reveals the challenges, goals, and other characteristics of an account.
It can be produced by conducting proper research, including historical data analysis, competitor analysis, interviews and surveys, looking into different data points, and multiple tests. Meanwhile, the buyer persona is a detailed analysis of the people who buy from you.
How to Use Ideal Customer Profiles?
The main benefit of using ideal customer profiles (ICP) is to help companies sharpen their focus in developing strategies to attract the most valuable customer to your business. In short, it’s a tool meant to bring in more customers to support your business.
1. Lead Scoring
By discovering the shared company characteristics, your company might have a better chance at a good lead scoring mechanism. Lead scoring is when you provide a number (or score) to the leads in your sales or marketing funnels; which is composed of prospects or potential buyers. With this information, companies can implement their lead enrichment tactics to verify and enhance lead or target account data.
2. Ads Targeting
It helps to know the specific type of people you’re pushing your ads to. Although advertisements are usually targeted to many different people with various personality types, creating a particular one helps a marketing team easily lock on a target audience for a more secure sale. As companies know exactly what their customers want, it will be easier to produce an ad that fits the audience’s needs and goals.
3. Account-Based Marketing
Account-Based Marketing and ICP are a match made in heaven. The first focuses on highly targeted, personalized campaigns, gaining the specific information needed to fuel those campaigns come from the ICP.
Using ABM means striving for effectiveness—it’s an approach that focuses on getting companies to acquire your service or product, working a hundred percent every time.
4. Pricing
Deciding on a service or product’s price depends on many factors, one of which is ICP. An ICP may be comfortable with long-term pricing if they have a background where they like to close a contract and keep using the service. The ICP can also be a small business owner that wants to pay monthly based on their ROI (return on investment).
5. Partnerships
Last, identifying the ICP is beneficial for partnership among companies that aren’t necessarily your competitors. Through webinars, events, or content, both companies can target multiple audiences at the same time. They may even earn a new audience by partnering with a company similar to their ICP.
Conclusion
The use of an Ideal Customer Profile will become evident in all areas of marketing. Learning about your target audience makes it easier to find ways to get in touch with them. It also influences a company’s next step to maximize marketing effectiveness in the long run. However, keep in mind that creating an ICP is not a one-time deal; it’s an ongoing process where companies may change targets depending on what they’re trying to achieve.
Ideal Customer Profiles can be tricky and overwhelming. But hiring a marketing agency might help you and your business achieve better goals. Elly and Nora Creative pushes the boundaries of marketing in various industries. Give us a call today, and we’ll walk you through how we do business, one step at a time.
