What is ICP Marketing With Examples

The concept of ICP marketing is not new. But, marketers are putting more and more emphasis on using it to enhance their marketing tactics. With marketing growing to be more competitive than ever before, it’s essential to understand your customers. Additionally, you want to understand how you can solve their problems better than your competition. Fortunately, ICP marketing can be a great asset to help you do exactly that.

What is ICP?

ICP, or ideal customer profile, is how your company describes your perfect customer. You are probably familiar with your target audience, but the concept of ICP marketing takes it one step further. Firmographics, demographics, and geographics are all a vital part of understanding your ideal customer profile. Identifying your ICP will help you create and deliver marketing initiatives that are more likely to entice prospects to convert.  

The graphic below is a great visual of what is included in building a customer profile. Information like their age, location, job title, purchase habits, and more will all influence their decision making. And, how you target them with your marketing. 

Why is ICP Important?

By understanding your ideal customer profile, you gain a 360-degree view of what makes people want to purchase your product or service. As a B2B marketing manager, this insight is extremely valuable and will help you optimize your current and future marketing efforts. By identifying your ICP, you are able to tailor your marketing initiatives based on what will resonate the most with them. The more information that you have about your customers, the better. Now, you’re probably asking yourself, “How do I build my ideal customer profile?”. Keep reading to find out.

How to Start ICP Marketing

Figuring out how to start your ICP marketing journey is the most difficult part. But, it will pay off in the long run as you will increase your knowledge about your prospective customers. In turn, you can optimize your marketing efforts, which we will talk more about later on. Next, we are going to go over 5 steps that will help you start ICP marketing.

Brainstorming

When you start building your ICP, you’ll want to brainstorm the typical prospects and customers that you currently target. This will help you organize your thoughts and prevent overlap between your customer profiles. Write down the industries that you most commonly work with, company size, geographic location, social media channels, software they use and other firmographic information. Then, write out the pros and cons of each. If you work with a lot of universities, a pro could be that they have a large budget. But, a con may be that they have a long sales cycle so it takes them a long time to actually convert. 

Identify Your Website Visitors

It can be difficult to gather this information based on your previous experiences. Additionally, you may be limiting yourself to certain industries. With a website visitor identification software, like Visitor Queue, you are able to see the companies that visit your website. Including firmographic information like their company history, employee count, social media links, and more. You can see how they were acquired, the pages they viewed, and the time spent on each page. Additionally, we also provide employee contact information like email addresses, phone numbers, and LinkedIn channels to help you reach out to potential customers. This level of insight will help you build your ICP. And, see if you have any untapped potential targeting other markets. Start your 14-day free trial of Visitor Queue today.

Understand Your Sales Funnel

Your sales funnel is a vital part of understanding your ideal customer profile. In short, a sales funnel refers to how many leads you generate, and how you guide them towards converting. If you visualize a funnel, the top of the funnel is the widest part, and it gradually gets smaller in size. By understanding your ideal customers, you can target them better with marketing and sales initiatives. As a result, you can increase conversion rates. 

Understand Their Pain Points

One of the most important parts of understanding your ideal customer profile is to identify their pain points. Pain points refer to the struggles that your lead is currently facing. Common pain points are a lack of budget, lack of organization, little to no automation, and no time to optimize their current tasks. By understanding your prospect’s pain points, you can target them with specific ads that solve them or make them easier to manage. Your product may solve multiple different pain points, which is why it’s important to understand your ICP, so you can deliver the best marketing based on their needs.

Forward Thinking

To best serve your ideal customers, you’ll want to have an idea of what they want for their company in the future. If you only focus on what they want today, your company may not provide the long-term solution that they’re looking for. By forward thinking, you will be able to use both of your marketing and sales tactics to encourage them to convert now. And, how it will grow their company in the future. When your customer knows how your company will help them, you are more likely to retain them in the long-run.

ICP Marketing

Now that you are familiar with how to start ICP marketing, we are going to go through a few examples of how you can integrate this concept into your marketing plan.

Social Media

Whether you post organically, run paid ads, or a combination of the two, social media ICP marketing can be a great asset. Let’s say that you target two different ideal customer profiles. One customer likes to see educational blog articles and one may enjoy memes, GIFs, and other funny posts. It’s a good idea to share a mix of both, to ensure both kinds of your followers are happy. If you only share the educational blog articles, then your other customers will not engage and may even unfollow your company.

Website Personalization

Personalizing your website for your ideal customer profile can greatly increase your website conversion rate. Website personalization is relatively new for B2B companies, and is already taking the industry by storm. By using a website personalization software, like Visitor Queue, you can customize the view of your website based on the visitor’s firmographics, geographic location, or even a company name.

As an example, if a marketing agency visits your website, you can show them relevant use cases explaining how they would benefit from your product, and successful case studies from other marketing agencies that currently use your product. Include a relevant call to action that will encourage them to contact you or book a demo. Start your 14-day free trial of Visitor Queue and generate 10-20% more revenue.

Interactive Demos

Interactive demos are a great way for your sales and marketing teams to give your prospects a one-of-a-kind experience. With a demo software , you can build and customize interactive demos that will walk users through how to use your software with pop ups, audio clips, and the ability to ask questions within the demo experience. Your marketing team can embed the demo on your website and review demo analytics. And, your sales team can use a demo personalized with your prospect’s logo, employees as users, and other data points to deliver a live demo or follow up. If you’re wanting to learn more about interactive demos, check out this article.

Competitive Advantage

Companies continuously struggle to differentiate themselves from their competitors. And, it’s getting harder and harder to do so. But, by creating an ICP plan, you are able to target a very specific audience. While your competitors are probably targeting broad audiences. Additionally, with tactics like website personalization and interactive demos, because these are relatively new concepts for B2B companies, there is a good chance that your competitors are not currently using them. If you’re the first to use these new technologies, you will easily stand out from the crowd.

Align Marketing and Sales Teams

Oftentimes it can be difficult to align your marketing and sales teams. ICP marketing is a great opportunity for your marketing and sales teams to come together and collaborate. Whether you are brainstorming, coming up with the best way to target your customers, or trying to come up with new content, team collaboration is essential. Additionally, sales teams typically have more communication with consumers. This means they may have more knowledge about pain points, common questions, and other hesitations that your prospects may have.

Marketing Metrics

Just like any other new marketing strategy, you will want to keep track of your marketing metrics. Marketing metrics will help you judge how successful your ICP marketing efforts are. As well as where there is room for improvement. The metrics that you track will greatly vary based on your company, your target companies, as well as what marketing initiatives that you’re running. Check out this list of marketing metrics if you’re interested in learning about some essential metrics to track.

Final Words

As you can see, ICP marketing is a great addition to any marketing plan. By understanding exactly what your customer’s wants and needs are, you can optimize your marketing efforts and build new and exciting initiatives. If you have any questions about how Visitor Queue can help you better understand your website visitors while increasing your conversions, don’t hesitate to reach out.