How to Create Your Ideal Customer Profile | ICP Marketing

Imagine you’re playing a game of darts,  but you can’t see where the dartboard  
is. You throw the dart and it lands  about five feet away from the target.  
Hope you didn’t bet any money  on your skills this time. 
Now change up that game. Let’s say you CAN see  the board clearly, and instead of a complete miss,  
you land on the board…maybe right near the  center if you’re especially coordinated.  
Knowing where the dart is supposed to go  makes hitting your target a lot easier. 
The point of that example is to illustrate the  importance of knowing where to aim your B2B  
marketing. If you don’t know who your target  audience is and where they spend time online,  
you’ll waste money and energy trying to  reach the wrong people and businesses. 
That’s where an ideal customer profile, or ICP,  comes in. Keep watching to learn what an ICP is  
and how you can use one! What is an ICP? 
Let’s start by defining what an ICP is. Again,  the term stands for “ideal customer profile,”  
and it refers to a group of traits that define the  businesses you want to reach with your products  
or services. It’s sort of an outline of what the  ideal business client looks like for your company. 
Establishing what your ICP looks like allows you  to steer your marketing in the right direction to  
reach your best prospects. ICP vs. buyer persona 
You might be thinking, “Hang on, this sounds  familiar. Aren’t we just talking about buyer  
personas?” And, while the two do sound similar,  the answer is no — buyer personas and ICPs are two  
different things. But they are connected. When you create a buyer persona, you’re  
creating a fleshed-out, fictional, individual  person. While your clients are businesses,  
your buyer personas focus on specific  decision-makers at those businesses. So,  
one buyer persona might be “Sally, a 54-year-old  marketing manager who works at a medium-sized  
consulting firm. She’s concerned with X, Y, and  Z, and is responsible for A,B, and C strategies.” 
But with an ICP, you’re not focused on creating a  fictionalized character that represents specific  
people at certain companies — you’re focused  on the companies themselves. You’re looking  
at qualities like industry, size, and  location. Maybe even the actions people  
from that business take on your website. Basically, ICPs help you figure out which  
businesses are your ideal clients, so you can  target those businesses with your marketing.  
Buyer personas, meanwhile, help you figure  out which people at those companies will  
see your marketing, what they need most from  your business, and how you can optimize your  
marketing so that it’s persuasive to them. You may be wondering how ICP marketing can  
benefit you. Maybe you’re thinking, “I already  know which kinds of businesses to market to!” And  
maybe that’s true. You probably do have a good  idea of which sorts of companies buy from you. 
But here’s the thing — the more specific that  knowledge is, the better. It’s one thing to know  
that you should market to, let’s say, small  pest control businesses in Kansas. But an  
ICP can help you outline even more detailed info. Maybe your ideal clients aren’t just from Kansas,  
but from a specific set of counties in  northern Kansas. And maybe they’re not  
just small businesses, but they’re specifically  companies that have between 20 and 90 employees. 
And those are just two examples — even if  you already know both of those things, there  
are plenty of other details your ICP can reveal.  The result is that you can much more effectively  
target your ideal audience — because you have a  much more precise idea of who that audience is. 
All this talking about ICPs, and I still  haven’t told you how to create one. Don’t worry,  
though — that’s just what we’re getting to now. The process looks different for every business,  
but there are four main steps you’ll  want to follow when you develop an ICP. 
1. Gather and analyze your customer data 
Hopefully, you already have all this data in one  place — bonus points if it’s super well-organized.  
If not, though, there are several  tools out there that can help. 
Maybe the best tool to use for organizing  your customer data is a CRM, or customer  
relationship management tool. With a good CRM,  like our partner company Nutshell’s software,  
you can quickly and effectively import all your  customer data, sync it up with your website data,  
and get everything organized. Then you can sit down to analyze  
that data for patterns to see what  traits your clients have in common. 
2. Check out your best customers With all your customer data in one place,  
take the time to examine the characteristics  of your clients. But not just any clients.  
Look specifically at your best clients to  get a feel for which traits they share. 
There are different ways you could define  your “best clients,” so it’s kind of up to  
you which traits you prioritize. That  said, it’s good to look at things like  
how long they’ve been with your company and  how much revenue you’ve earned from them,  
even the revenue that they bring year over year. It’s also helpful to use metrics like customer  
lifetime value, or CLV, to figure out which  clients are the most valuable to your company.  
However you do it, identify the clients  you think are your best customers.  
Once you’ve done that, figure out which traits  they all share — the more specific, the better. 
3. Build your ideal customer profile Now that you’ve examined your clients,  
you have a pretty good idea of which  features they all have in common.  
You can use that knowledge to develop an ICP. Make an outline of a hypothetical business  
using the traits you found in all your  best clients. Factor in the sorts of  
traits we mentioned earlier, like size, budget,  industry, and location. When you’re finished,  
you’ll have a complete ideal customer profile. 4. Apply your ICP to future prospects 
That brings us to our final step, which is to  begin your ICP marketing. How do you do that?  
Well, you use your ICP to help you identify  the best prospects to market to, and craft  
your strategy with all of these details in mind. As you’re looking around at different businesses,  
trying to figure out which ones would make the  best customers, you don’t have to make a shot  
in the dark. You can compare each company to your  ICP. When you find one that closely matches it,  
you know that the business is likely a good  client, and you can start marketing to them. 
If you use a lead scoring tool, or your current  marketing software has lead scoring capabilities,  
you can use this ICP information to automate  your lead qualification process and identify  
the best prospects without a ton of manual work. On a related note, there are lots of AI tools  
out there that can apply ICP data to your  campaigns to improve your targeting. They  
can help you reach the right people, and  they can also help you score your leads  
based on which ones are the most valuable to you. In the meantime, if you want to learn more about  
how to market yourself online, just subscribe  to our YouTube channel or our email newsletter,  
Revenue Weekly. And to learn more about  playing darts… I don’t know, actually, I don’t  
think we have more content about that. Sorry. Thanks for watching, and we’ll see ya next time!