Your target audience is one of the crucial decisions you can make when running a business. In fact, before you start to develop concepts for your business, it’s a necessity to know your potential customers. Such an understanding will guide your future decisions ahead, which can make it much easier for you to connect with your customers.
Unfortunately, despite this fact, some businesses fail to create an ideal customer profile or ICP which results in missing out the chance to foster growth and build a business with a sturdy foundation from the very beginning.
An Overview Of Ideal Customer Profile.
Also known as an ideal buyer profile, ICP or ideal customer profile defines the perfect customers for what your business solves for. It lends itself useful if your business uses account-based marketing, which allows you to focus on selling to the targeted accounts that perfectly fit your business.
Once done properly, an ICP will help you define the different problems you are solving for, assist in laying out the future road map for service or product changes and updates, and align your product capabilities with customer’s needs.
ICP is more like a non-exhaustive list, but a good starting point when you’re trying to determine what your ideal customers look like. Basically, the accounts on ICP are made up of people who hold various titles, levels of experience, and product or service knowledge.
Importance Of Ideal Customer Profile.
Whether you are familiar with Ideal Customer Profile or not, make sure to prioritize it when running any kind of business. It can make a difference in helping you reach success in the market. If you’re still in doubt, here are some of the reasons why it’s important in a business:
- Helps You Determine The Ways To Allocate Resources.
The development of Ideal Customer Profile is the first step in the resource allocation process. After creating the target account list, a business may determine extra investment of resources and time on such accounts. The target account list will guide resource allocation to support your go-to-market strategy. With ICP, it serves as your foundation for sales development, sales, marketing, and customer success teams, allowing them to fund the right programs at the right accounts appropriately.
- Allows You To Identify Your Best Customers.
The creation of ICP starts through examining the characteristics of customers and prospects to determine the criteria that define that accounts best fit and offer a high value for the business. Defining which customers are a good fit starts by looking at the prospects, whether grouping them by industry or size, to determine which customers have high win rates. It’s an indicator and frequently, the most accessible. Account expansion, renewal rate, customer satisfaction, and more are the indicators of a good fit.
When a good fit is determined, it is essential to look at the customers that spend the most. Such customers offer high value to your business. However, there are ways businesses can offer value. One of these is that you can track data points using your CRM to determine the ideal customers.
- Beneficial For Account-Based Marketing.
Account-based marketing and ICP go hand in hand while designing a good marketing strategy. Account-based marketing starts with a target account list and ideal customer profiling. You must understand that ICP isn’t the only list of customers for your business. But, ICP can give you the most specific set of prospects, which can help you identify your target audience.
- Helps You Get More Referrals.
Your ideal customers are the ones who have obtained real-time value from your products and services. They are your loyal customers and the ones who are happy to recommend you to people they know, who can also be your prospects. The best thing about this is that leads acquired via referrals are often high quality.
Take note that referred customers are better for brands or any businesses. They have a high lifetime value and ideal customer profiling focuses on quality leads. It would help you distinguish your key customers from other prospects.
- Creates Alignment Across Organization.
A key advantage of ICP is creating alignment across your business, which is a strategic way in all aspects of your company. This is especially beneficial for your marketing, customer success, sales development, and sales to align on important customers. It is also how they come together to make a cohesive, aligned plan to prioritize the go-to-market resources.
The process of ICP also brings organizational leaders together to describe the best account’s characteristics of a business. Instead of relying on prospect and customer data gathered using CRM, your business should combine that with some qualitative results from the cross-functional teams.
- Retargets Your Audience.
A good way to encourage your audience to trust your business is through retargeting. You have to bear in mind that most prospects aren’t ready to make any purchase right away. Ideal customer profile allows you to reach your potential customers based on your business needs.
With a defined ideal customer profile, tracking crucial marketing signals can be done easily. Through the insights from your existing customers, you may proceed to a more effective success story. Take note, it’s essential to go with today’s industry trends though you want to break it sometimes. Retargeting your audience would surely play the game for you. Just make sure that your ICP is well-evaluated and updated.
- Works As A Good Marketing Tool.
Marketing is the basic reason why an ideal customer profile is necessary for your business. Generally, you may use ICP for understanding and recognizing your customers. The reason why it’s essential is because most marketing strategies fail due to lack of focus on the most attracting potential customers.
With customer profiling, identifying typical customers and segregating customers can help in positioning your service or product to appeal to your ideal customers.
Bottom Line.
An ICP or Ideal Customer Profile helps every organization build cross-functional alignment and dedicate more resources to the right prospects and customers. With the additional advantages of creating ICP, every business must create its own ICP to develop marketing strategy, which can make a difference in achieving your business goals.
