Demand generation strategy: How and why you need to build Ideal Customer Profiles (ICP)

B2B customers expect companies that market to them to know them intimately in terms of needs, motivations, and preferences. 

In fact, it’s crucial that today’s B2B marketers deliver relevant content that addresses their pain points, talks in their language, and adds value to their buyer journey.

One way to ensure your content aligns to your customer needs is by building ICPs and personas. 

What is an ICP? A quick definition

An ideal customer profile (ICP) - or buyer persona - is the type of customer that’s the perfect fit for your products and services.

Your ICP should be made up of clear characteristics like company size, location, industry, and decision maker job role, job responsibilities, content preferences, and pain points.

This can be crucial for growing your business as it acts as a guide informing which products or features to build/enhance, what channels to use in marketing - plus, the topics and content formats that your ICP really wants to engage with.

In short, you can get crystal clear who you are targeting and how to best deliver your sales and marketing efforts. This is fundamental to highly lucrative marketing activities like demand generation and Account Based Marketing (ABM).

Let’s take a look at why ICPs work so well for demand gen and how you can get started… 

Why are ICPs key for demand generation?

It gets cut-through. We’re all strapped for time. So, to capture interest, you need to be saying the *exact* right thing. With an ICP, the pain points are so drilled-down that you can grab attention by promising to resolve these challenges within seconds of them scanning a headline.

Reduces customer churn. If you offer a product or service that best fits the ICP, you are more likely to attract and retain those customers. 

Identify lucrative prospects. It’s also crucial for both sales and marketing. You can identity better-fit prospects to focus marketing spend while also enabling you to filter high value leads as part of the lead qualification process.  

In fact, using personas can improve efficiencies across the marketing mix. 

It’s been proven to make websites 2-5 times more effective, improve email click-through rates by 14% and conversion rates by 10%... as well as doubling the effectiveness of paid ads (check out this infographic by Hubspot to find out more).

Why do ICPs fail to support demand generation?

ICPs should always improve demand generation because you’re targeting the exact customer you need with the right messaging to secure a strong sales pipeline.

If your ICP doesn’t or hasn’t done this, we find it’s typically because of these few common reasons:

• The pain points are too broad and don’t relate directly to your products/services

• They’re created as a tick box but not actually used across sales and marketing

• They aren’t updated - environments change, products change. And ICPs need refreshing.

The biggest reason of all? Your ICP is built on assumptions. Ideally, thorough qualitative and quantitative research should be conducted to fully understand your ICPs.

How to create an ideal customer profile

Here’s a simple 3-step process to build an ICP:

Step 1: Analyse your account data 🔎

Let’s start by looking at who already buys your products and services. In particular those that repeat purchasing, renew, cross-purchase or have high-order values. This is a big indicator of who you should be targeting.

Looking at active buyers and purchasing over the last two years max. Here you could delve into your CRM data and analyse purchasing data. You want to look for trends and identify and prioritise target accounts like those that yield high-value purchases and shorter sales cycles. 

Once you’ve highlighted these, take note of key characteristics like:

• Company info: Industry, employee size, location/geographical focus

• Contact info: job roles, responsibilities, needs, pain points… and how your product features benefit them

You’re likely to find that there are 3-5 personas that emerge from this research. This is perfect for building personalised messaging to appeal to those stakeholders.

If you can capture any engagement insights such as key publications they visit, channels they use or types of content they read, this can really shape your marketing (this information may be documented on the “where did you hear about us” section of CRM systems or it may be anecdotal from sales teams when they receive inbounds.

💡Top tip: You can also do desk research on this to see what they look at on social media platforms like LinkedIn, what kinds of publications they follow - and see what they are blogging about.

Step 2: Interview prospects and customers 🔉

One you’ve identified your ideal customer types, you may want to run some more extensive qualitative research to test out hypothesis for a true understanding of their needs and purchasing drivers. 

If you can’t get access to contacts for interviewing, your sales team will probably have a wealth of insight to help answer the sorts of questions we’ve highlighted below: 

Pre-purchase questions

• What are your typical responsibilities when it comes to *pain point*? 

• What are your top goals when it comes to *pain point*?

• What search phrase would you type to learn more about a media buying solution? 

• Which materials, or sites, and communities do you look at to learn more about *pain point*? 

Post-purchase questions

• What pain points were you looking to solve when you first purchased our solution? 

  • How has our product helped you solve those pain points?

• What would you say is our most valuable feature or functionality?

• Why have you continued to use our product?

• What red flags do you look for before purchasing a solution?

💡Top tip: Things change all the time, so we recommend revisiting these interviews after a major event or product/service update - or at least annually, to keep them fresh and relevant.

Step 3: Build persona profiles 👧🧑🧓

Once you’ve uncovered an abundance of qualitative and quantitative insight, you want to bring this all together in one place. 

We often use slides such as PowerPoint so that it's easy for others to digest. This also forces you to really narrow down the crucial pain points.

To help you get started, HubSpot gives away several free buyer persona templates here.

When you document your personas, make sure you leverage the language that the ICP would use (this will be crucial for your comms) and focus on the “so what” - features of products are excellent but what really satisfies them? I recently saw this post on LinkedIn and this is exactly what I mean:

💡Top tip: Once you’ve built your persona profiles, you want to validate them. As a minimum, run these by your product and sales teams. And ideally a friendly customer.

Wrap up

Building an ICP can help with sales, marketing, customer service, product teams and more because it provides the level of granular understanding that customers have come to expect. 

As well as satisfying customers, for sales and marketing, it allows you to target better customers to help reduce customer churn, create MQLs with higher conversion rates, and maximise ROI.

But for this to happen, make sure you take the time needed to develop an accurate and in-depth ICP to start with.

For help building your ICP and using it to build marketing strategies and campaigns, get in touch.