Ideal Customer Profile: What It Is and How to Create One That Drives Growth

Want to know how to build an ideal customer profile for your business? You’ll learn about all the basics, strategies, and tips to create these and use them for marketing and growth. Find out about the benefits of using these with ideal customer profile scoring rubric examples, how they work with customer experience programs, and more.

What Is an Ideal Customer Profile?

First, let’s start with the basics.

Definition and Key Characteristics

An ideal customer profile (ICP) defines the type of organization that would most benefit from your services or products and is most likely to become a loyal customer.

What does a customer profile look like? Typically, it includes:

• Demographics
• Geographic
• Characteristics
• Motivations
• Attitudes
• Beliefs
• Interests
• Lifestyle choices
• Objections

What’s the Difference Between ICP and Regular Customer Profiles?

ICP and regular customer profiles are not the same. ICPs represent the perfect types of people or organizations. Typically, businesses use them for targeting and marketing strategies. They are “ideal” and may not be rooted in actuality.

What is a customer profile?

Customer profiles describe a broader group of existing and potential customers. You’ll leverage these for insights into customer behavior and needs.

Why ICP Matters for Marketing, Sales, and Retention

An ICP is your blueprint for the types of audiences you will target in marketing. When your campaigns align with these attributes, you can see improved lead quality and conversion rates.

If the best-fit folks are coming in as inbound leads, they are much more likely to be sales qualified. Sales teams will appreciate that once a prospect comes from marketing. They’ll avoid wasting time on those who aren’t going to convert.

Since marketing did the work to drive the right people to sales, who then buy, it’s also easier to retain these customers. They need your products or services and could also become loyal referrers to friends and family.

Benefits of Defining Your Ideal Customer Profile

In learning how to define an ideal customer profile, you’ll want to know why it matters. You can realize many advantages from performing this exercise.

Better Targeting and Personalized Messaging

Marketing works better when you have targeting dialed in. You’ll be focusing your efforts on those most likely to convert from your campaigns. It will help you reduce waste and increase ROI.

Understanding customer profiles is essential to personalizing your messaging. You can align your content to address their motivations, interests, beliefs, and other data. You could see a substantial lift since 73% of people expect better personalization from brands.

Higher Conversion and Retention Rates

When you target effectively, you convert more. It optimizes your sales funnel by concentrating on those that are the best for your business. Personalized messaging also helps you earn those higher conversion rates. It may also shorten your sales cycle, as more precise targeting that drives conversions happens faster.

When you convert a best-fit customer, they are more likely to remain one. You’ll be fostering more long-term relationships because the ISP enables you to provide more relevant experiences.

A loyal customer typically spends more with you. In fact, people spend 67% more on their favored brands compared to others.

More Efficient Allocation of Resources

When you build ICPs, you have a defined audience to market and sell to, versus getting leads from anybody anywhere, and chasing those usually leads to no gains. As a small business, you only have so many people and so much time.

You can manage those resources more effectively when your targeted marketing reaches the right people.

Alignment Between Marketing, Sales, and Customer Success

It’s easy for there to be siloes among the groups, but ICPs provide aligned goals for all stakeholders. You’ll all have a shared understanding of what is a customer profile. Objectives that cross departments ensure better collaboration and communication.

RELATED ARTICLE – Change Customer Experience for the Better

How to Build an Ideal Customer Profile

Let’s go through the steps of how to write a customer profile.

Gather Foundational Customer Data

Kick off the project by reviewing the data you have from current customers. Look at demographics, firmographics, and behaviors. You want to know who are your best customers, prioritizing those with long-term loyalty and high customer lifetime value.

Identify Common Traits of Your Best Customers

Once you have all your information, it’s time to look for trends. What do these profiles have in common? Look at the data related to spending, loyalty indicators, and other success metrics. You’re trying to capture whatever traits these customers have that make them your best ones.

Segment Your Customer Base to Isolate Top Performers

Next, you’ll begin dividing up your lists and pulling out those that are ideal. These top performers unlock the insight you need to replicate the success.

Some ways to segment based on ICP buckets:

• Shared demographics
• Values, motivations, and priorities similarities
• Behavior (how they have interacted with your brand)
• Geography

Map Pain Points, Needs, and Triggers of Ideal Customers

Finally, you need to document the main areas of customer relationship dynamics:

• Define the pain points that lead a customer to need your product or service. How do you solve their problem?
• Outline their needs. What influences their buying choices based on their fundamental requirements?
• Develop triggers. What buying behavior is the catalyst for their need for your product or service?

ICP Scoring Rubrics and Examples

Let’s review ideal customer profile scoring rubric examples. You can use this framework to score criteria for your ICP.

Quantitative Scoring Criteria

The first area of scoring is quantitative, which is based on facts and figures. Examples include revenue, engagement, and tenure.

Qualitative Scoring Criteria

This segment of scoring is more abstract. It looks at behaviors of the ICP that come from:

• Feedback sentiment: What are the feelings and attitudes expressed in any feedback they’ve provided?
• Referrals: Has the customer brought you other business?
• Net Promoter Score (NPS): While NPS is typically one question, it measures how likely someone is to endorse your brand to another person. High scores here indicate loyalty.

Example Scoring Rubric

When setting up your rubric, you’ll need to assign weights and thresholds. A weight is a plus or negative number from usually -3 to +3. Thresholds are the minimum number of points for the customer to qualify as an ICP.

Here are some examples:

• Industry or title match: +3
• Revenue fit: +2
• Within your service area or market: +1
• Referral proclivity: +2
• Ability to afford the product or service: +2
• Behavioral actions with your brand: You’ll score different interactions and define a high, moderate, or low for website visits, email opens and clicks, and social media engagements
• Website: High (+3), low (+1), and none (0)
• Email: Opens (+1), clicks (+3), and ignored (0)
• Social media: Likes and shares (+2), comments (+2), and none (0)

How to Use Your Rubric to Classify Prospects and Customers

Your ICP rubric will evolve as you gain more insights and intelligence from your data. Applying it to classify prospects and customers contributes to this.

You certainly don’t want to track every prospect or customer manually. You can set up lead scoring with marketing technology that does the math for you. You’ll need to set up your weights and thresholds.

For every existing customer, you can score them based on the data you have about them. Not all will be in your ICP. It doesn’t mean you should stop trying to engage them, but you may segment them out of certain campaigns.

When you add new prospects, scoring automation will measure their demographics and interactions. When someone hits the threshold, you’d qualify them as a strong lead. You can then market to them in a more personalized manner and activate sales for outreach.

Using ICP in Marketing and Growth Strategies

So, what is a customer profile in marketing? Let’s review how ICPs drive marketing and growth strategies.

Tailoring Campaigns and Creative Messaging

Your ICP precisely defines the behaviors and motivations of customers. The more specific this is in your profiles, the more you can integrate these into campaigns and messaging. Your content will be more relevant and engaging to audiences.

For example, if your ICP prioritizes affordability and value in the services they choose, those are the types of things to highlight in your campaigns, calls to action, and copy.

Improving Ad Spend ROI with Focused Audiences

Ad waste can add up, and much of it occurs because the wrong people are seeing these campaigns. You need a balance between being too broad and too narrow. Your ICP comes into play here to allow you to target based on the attributes you’ve defined.

Most advertising channels, from display to paid search to social media, offer the ability to design an audience. You can include geography, demographics, interests, and behaviors.

Dialed-in targeting, combined with creative that speaks to that segment, should provide a better return on ad spend.

Aligning Product Messaging with ICP Needs

Your analysis of data to formulate your ICP should yield a better understanding of why people need and want your product. It’s crucial to identify ideal customer profile pain points and preferences and relate those to product benefits and features.

A product marketing matrix should rely heavily on your ICP. For example, if you are a wellness brand that has a line of supplements, how you present these should model what your ideal customer expects to gain from taking these.

ICP and Customer Experience Programs

What’s the connection between ICP and customer experience programs? Find out.

Collecting Feedback from Ideal vs Non-Ideal Segments

In operationalizing how to create a customer profile, you know that feedback is essential. It helps you dig into opinions, motivations, and objections. Not every customer fits the ideal profile, but gathering responses from both segments can be useful.

For those that do fit your ICP, segment that day to influence your rubric. Everything else can go into a more general customer profile bucket. It’s still important because it can help you find problems in customer service, satisfaction criteria, and more.

Prioritizing Insights from High-Value Customers

Some feedback has greater weight than others. When you label someone as a high-value customer, you want to hear from them the most. Whether positive or negative, this information becomes intelligence for your business.

To get more of this, work on specific plays and strategies to solicit it. Make it easy for them to respond, whether that’s an NPS survey or other format. You may consider an incentive.

Reducing Churn Among Identified ICP Segments

Churn is a part of every business, but you should always be working on retention. Acquiring a customer requires effort and investment. When you lose them, that goes out the door, too.

As you collect more feedback from ICPs, you’re building a chest of intelligence. Should an ICP churn, you want to trace the customer journey to see where the friction was. If you find it, it’s time to develop plans to keep it from happening. Not all churn is avoidable, but much of it is.

RELATED ARTICLE – Best Times for Customer Feedback

FAQs About Ideal Customer Profiles

How is an ideal customer profile different from a buyer persona?

An ICP defines an ideal customer from the organizational level. Buyer personas are more specific and represent the actual person.

How often should you update ICPs?

You should update them annually — sooner if there are major changes in your business or industry.

Do all businesses need an ideal customer profile?

All businesses can benefit from an ideal customer profile. You don’t need one to operate, but they help with marketing, customer satisfaction, and retention.

How do I know if my ICP is accurate?

You’ll know your ICP is accurate if you see improvements in conversion rates, shorter sales cycles, greater CLV, and lower churn.

What does a customer profile look like?

A customer profile is a data-driven description of your ideal customer that includes demographics, behaviors, attitudes, motivations, and potential objections.

Are scoring rubrics necessary for ICP?

No, you don’t need a scoring rubric for an ICP, but they are useful in helping you work on the best leads.

Should ICP be aligned with revenue goals?

Yes, aligning your ICP with revenue goals supports them. It will help you focus on the highest value and highest fit prospects.

How to Create an Ideal Customer Profile: Closing Thoughts

Get started with these steps.

ICP Checklist

• Gather data.
• Identify commonalities.
• Segment based on groupings.
• Define pain points, needs, and motivations.

Integrating ICP into Feedback and Analytics

Feedback helps you build your ICP. Using a dedicated platform can constantly feed you new insights to reiterate your ICP. Your ICP can also impact the questions you ask and the analytics you gather.

Try Listen360

Now that you know how to create customer profiles and their connection to customer experience, why not test out our platform? You can gain deeper customer insights with an easy solution.

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