Have you ever heard of ICP (Ideal Customer Profile) in a business? The acronym, in free translation, means Ideal Customer Profile, and it is exactly that, the profile of people that most represents your ideal customer.
Knowing who you are dealing with in a business is very important to understand the best way to approach, how to present advantages, how to improve on your disadvantages to get your audience’s attention and manage to increase your perfect number of customers.
However, first of all, it is important to leave a warning here. Although the ICP is a great tool and when used the right way it brings many results, it is not a magic formula.
There is no solution that will transform your business into a success without work or effort, but there are tools that, when applied and worked in the right way, bring real results.
What is ICP (Ideal Customer Profile)?
When we talk about customers and the public of a business, there are several terms and suggestions on how to filter and categorize each one. Some are more comprehensive, others are more focused, but each has a purpose and purpose.
The ICP (Ideal Customer Profile) or Ideal Customer Profile, in a simple way, can be explained as a list, in which all the attributes, qualities and characteristics of the customer are placed.
What is the ICP (Ideal Customer Profile) for?
The greatest importance of the ICP is linked to its sales. Want to understand how? Don’t worry, we’ll explain. A good salesperson knows how to use this information to talk to the customer.
When you know more about the person, about what they like and what they don’t, you can point out the benefits of purchasing your product or service within that person’s reality.
The ICP will provide important insights to be used as forms of persuasion, so that the person can really see the advantages of closing the purchase and becoming a customer.
content marketing
When you think about creating content to attract new customers to your business, it’s called content marketing . However, content creation cannot be disorganized, unfocused and in any way.
Well-done content marketing is nothing more than a good salesperson talking to his client and helping to identify opportunities.
Within content marketing there is a tool called Sales Funnel . This tool helps you understand where the person is in the purchase decision-making process.
When you have a well done ICP (Ideal Customer Profile), you can identify by the person’s attitude if he is discovering your company now and is at the top of the funnel; if they are already interested in your product, which is the middle of the funnel; or if you are already a customer at the bottom of the funnel.
When you know which stage of the funnel the person is in, you create material to help lead them deeper, until the end, which is the purchase.
Differences between ICP, buyer, persona and target audience
Although all terms refer to your potential customers and ways to organize them, each one has a function and each one works in a different way.
So, now that you understand what ICP is, let’s explain and differentiate persona and target audience.
Target Audience
The target audience is the most open tool we have when it comes to classifying potential customers, as it is considered more generalist. It is not yet a deep or specific selection. It’s simple information like gender or size and location.
It can be considered as a first sieve that will only filter more general information.
Persona
The persona is the ideal customer of the business , it is thinking about a person, or a group of people with similar characteristics, but in a much more detailed way. It is a very fine sieve, in which all the characteristics that make up the person are marked.
If the target audience is broader, the persona is more specific. However, you have the disadvantage that it takes a long time to create personas and qualify them. It is an important tool, but one that cannot be applied so quickly.
Elements that must be included in a PCI
As we present, the target audience is extremely broad and the persona is extremely specific. The ICP (Ideal Customer Profile) is something of a middle ground between the two.
In order to understand what you need to consider when creating your ICP, it is first necessary to define whether the company is B2B or B2C.
B2B
Companies that work selling directly to other companies are from the B2B segment. If your customer is another company, it is important to consider the following elements for your ICP:
- segmentation;
- average ticket;
- marketing performance;
- market maturity;
- decision maker;
- digital maturity;
- sales cycle;
- team organization.
B2C
On the other hand, when the company sells directly to the final consumer, it is called B2C. In this case, your ICP items will be different, as they will consider a person and not a business.
Some of these elements are:
- frequency of purchases;
- average ticket;
- most purchased product;
- gender;
- location;
- most used means of communication;
- who has more influence on the customer in the purchase decision;
- lifetime value (LTV).
