You must know who your customers are, what to offer them, and how to keep them glued to your brand. The process involves defining your ICP (Ideal Customer Profile).

What is an Ideal Customer Profile?

An Ideal Customer Profile or ICP is an outline of an ideal customer, which is used to adjust and plan marketing and lead generation tactics.

Did you think it is just a fancy word for a buyer persona?

While a buyer persona is a fictional character marketer created to target people and they get jobs, names, and sometimes even pets, ICP is more about figuring out who would benefit from your products or services. Here, marketers approach customers from different angles.

Why is it important to define your ideal customer?

Where the marketing efforts are wasted – ICP comes to the rescue. When marketers understand the unique characteristics of their ideal customers, they can easily cut the noise and laser-focus the marketing efforts, campaigns, and budget on prospects who are more likely to convert.

Understanding your customers is also critical for creating personalized content and campaigns.

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Creating an Ideal Customer Profile

While defining your ICP, you cannot go for the pray and spray approach. You must take a methodical approach to gather data and information about your target audience. You can accomplish this by studying factors like a customers’ needs, buying habits, and more.

The next step is creating an ICP, the steps are:

1. Determine why do you need customer profiling?

If you are a new business, you need to know why do you need customer profiling. The first answer would be trying to solve a problem. So, you need to identify the problem and the set of people who are struggling with the problem.

If you already have a set of customers, you need to understand what they want, why they want a specific product, how they are reusing such products, and why.

Once you answer these questions, you are a step closer to fine-tuning your ICP.

2. Review customer journey map and dig into demographics

For marketers, a customer journey map is a go-to tool to identify the touchpoints a customer passes through to fulfil his requirements. While a customer journey map takes time to build, once you have it, it will paint a perfect picture of who is buying your product, from which store, and how the customer likes to interact with your brand.

To fine-tune your ICP, you need to review this journey map. Go through the needs, challenges, and goals of your customers to develop a stronger sense of what your customers want from the business. Once it is done, you can directly dig into the demographics. Some of the external attributes to define a customer profile are:

• Which market does your brand operate in? For instance, Martech.
• What is the specific vertical you operate into?
• Where does the customer belong to?
• Why are the customers interested in your products? And so on.

3. Collect Customer Feedback

Whatever you do to enhance the user experience, collecting feedback is the most important. Instead of relying completely on the data given by your team, you must take efforts to know your customers and spend time with them. These interactions with the customers can be a game-changer in fine-tuning your ICPs.

4. Refine the Buyer Persona

Remember that you deal with real people, personalities, feelings, and needs. Once you have identified your customer profile, the next step is to identify the customers that you want to reach out to.

• Who is the customer? (name)
• What is his / her age?
• How educated is he/she?
• How is your product helps them?

5. Analyze your data

A customer profile is key to growing your business. As you are building your ideal customer profile, ensure that you gather external factors, qualify details at the micro-level, and develop a deep understanding of how your business is adding value to each customer type.

Keep repeating the sequence. Fine-tuning ICPs is an ongoing process, and it should be a regular exercise for your company.

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Final Word

Customer profiles are unquestionably important to any sales or marketing team. The more information you have about your customer, the better are the chances of tailoring customer facing services. An ICP will only help you boost your marketing efforts in the right direction.