By Brittany Lieu, Marketing Consultant at Heinz Marketing
Like many elements of your marketing strategy, your ideal customer profile (ICP) is only effective if dynamic. As buyer behaviors evolve and your business grows, who you sell to never remains static.
As you develop or refine your organization’s current target audience, here are 3 common mistakes to avoid.
1. Confusing ICP and Buyer Personas
When it comes to defining your target audience, identifying your ICP and buyer personas serve two different purposes. Unlike your personas, your ideal customer profile is not an individual but a description of the type of company that is best-fit for your solution. Once you determine the organizations that you want to target, only then can you take a deeper look at the employees within those accounts that influence or make the buying decision.
To understand who you sell to on an organizational level, consider:
How to Avoid This Mistake:
- Define your ICP first by analyzing firmographics such as company size (e.g., 200-1,000 employees), revenue (e.g., $10M-$100M), and industry (e.g., SaaS, manufacturing, healthcare).
- Identify key technographics such as CRM usage (e.g., Salesforce, HubSpot), collaboration tools (e.g., Slack, Microsoft Teams), and other critical tools in their techstack.
- Understand psychographics like digital maturity (e.g., early adopters vs. laggards), common business pain points (e.g., inefficiencies in data management), and buying triggers (e.g., compliance changes, funding rounds).
- Map buyer personas separately by listing job titles, decision-making power, and specific pain points per role.
- Example: If your ICP is mid-market SaaS companies with 200-1,000 employees using Salesforce, one of your buyer personas might be a VP of Product Operations struggling with disconnected workflows and data silos.
2. Staying Within the Marketing Bubble
Although your marketing team is responsible for creating and maintaining your definition of your target audience, don’t forget to loop in teams outside of your department. Lean on your customer facing teams, like sales and customer success, to incorporate valuable insights and feedback on what you’ve developed. This ensures that your ICP gets the stamp of approval but is an accurate reflection of your ideal customer.
How to Avoid This Mistake:
- Conduct quarterly cross-functional ICP workshops with sales, customer success, and product teams to validate and refine your ICP with real-world insights.
- Use CRM and sales data to analyze closed-won deals and identify commonalities among high-value customers (e.g., deal size, sales cycle length, common objections).
- Leverage customer feedback by reviewing NPS scores, support tickets, and feature requests to refine your ICP based on actual customer needs.
- Example: If customer success reports that high-retention accounts prioritize integrations with tools like Zapier, update your ICP criteria to include companies that heavily rely on automation.
3. Not Using Your ICP
It may sound silly, but an unused ICP is no ICP. After putting in the work to develop an ICP, don’t let your efforts go to waste. Find a regular cadence to refresh what your team has developed and use your ICP as the foundation for all your content development, messaging and sales outreach efforts.
How to Avoid This Mistake:
- Integrate your ICP into marketing automation platforms like HubSpot or Marketo to segment email campaigns and personalize messaging based on ICP characteristics.
- Use your ICP for account prioritization by tagging ICP-aligned companies in your CRM and aligning sales efforts accordingly.
- Refresh your ICP quarterly by reviewing sales conversion rates, customer retention metrics, and industry trends.
- Example: If a new vertical, like FinTech startups, starts converting at a higher rate with shorter sales cycles, update your ICP to target similar high-growth companies.
The Bottom Line
Your ICP is only one piece of your audience strategy. Once you’ve nailed down your ICP use it to inform the development of your buying committee, personas and beyond.
Curious about how we support our clients in achieving their marketing goals? Connect with one of our experts today!
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