How Do Great Brands Develop Their Ideal Customer Profile? — Part 3
The Advanced Guide
In my previous article, I took you through the basic steps to successful ICP development. If you missed this article, please take a look through it by clicking on this link: “How Do Great Brands Develop Their Ideal Customer Profile? — Part 2 (The Intermediate Guide)”.
If you’ve already read that article, you will remember that I covered a number of key processes that your brand needs to go through in order to begin creating your Ideal Customer Profile. But how do you know if what you’re doing is going to work? How do you know if the information you’ve gathered is going to accurately describe your ICP?
Well, this article will take you through mistakes most commonly made by brands when developing an Ideal Customer Profile, as well as buyer personas, as many brands see the two as the same thing, but in fact, they are very different — and these common mistakes will help you see that, while advising you on what you should avoid doing.
What Should You Watch Out For While Developing Your Ideal Customer Profile?
In this article I will cover:
#1 Mistakes You Should Avoid Making To Develop A Successful ICP
#2 Mistakes Brands Make When Creating Buyer Personas
Let’s dive in…
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#1 Mistakes You Should Avoid Making To Develop A Successful ICP
As I’ve said in my previous articles, most brands try to be all things to all clients, and accept customers wherever and whenever they can get them. By having a well-defined Ideal Customer Profile in place, your brand can say no to the wrong kinds of clients for your business.
But how do you know if you are actually creating an ICP that will help your brand? Well, as with any marketing and sales effort, take advice from the brands who have come before you, and heed their mistakes to avoid making them yourself.
The 6 Biggest Mistakes Brands Make When Creating An Ideal Customer Profile:
Mistake 1: Wishlisting
Wishlisting happens when you define your ideal client based on your wish list, or all the characteristics and qualities you would just love for them to have. This is the ideal client you would love to have because they present no issues, are high-value, and will ultimately lead your brand to success.
But the truth is that if you only focus on the good qualities of the customers or companies in order to develop your Ideal Customer Profile, you will never be able to find those clients, as no person or brand is perfect. Wishlisting damages your ICP efforts, as you are creating our ideal client in your ideal world, any many brands have made the mistake of romanticising their ideal customers — which has lead to ineffective efforts.
Mistake 2: Limiting Your Ideal Customer
It is simple to want your ideal customer to represent an actual customer in the physical world, down to the latte that person has for lunch. But that is not the point of developing an ICP. An Ideal Customer Profile should be detailed yes, but it should also leave room for expansion and growth. Think of your ICP as a drawing in a childrens colouring book, you can colour inside the lines, but sometimes you need to remember that there is still room on the page to colour outside them as well.
Your ICP should be a broad description of your ideal client base while also limiting the world from anyone who needs any type of marketing. The client profile should more accurately reflect the attitudes, behaviors, motivators, and preferences of a collection of individuals or companies, rather than be a true-to-life snapshot of the one person you would like to work with. And remember, as your brand grows, so will your ICP.
Mistake 3: Superhero Syndrome
The Green Arrow or Superman will be able to save everyone from every situation, and your product will do the same for your ideal customers right? Wrong! You’ve taken the steps to develop your ICP, but even if you have nailed down the pain points that your potential customers will be experiencing, and know exactly how your product or service can solve these, it does not mean that every person who has this product will ultimately end up becoming your client. As mentioned previously, your Ideal Customer Profile is a broad generalization of the perfect-fit customers for your brand, but you should avoid thinking that you are the superhero sent to save the world, as this is where many brands have fallen short. Remember that you are only human, and that your ideal customers are too!
Despite what some ‘turn up the heat’ marketers will tell you, people don’t seek solutions from the depths of their despair. Usually, people buy products and services from integrity-based businesses when they are in a more resourceful, emotionally integrated place. In fact, some values-based coaches and consultants have a policy where they refuse to start work with a client who’s in crisis mode. A healthy, resourceful buyer is still aware of his pain points (as awareness of pain points is a critical piece of the buying process), but he’s standing on his own two feet again, looking to the future, and ready to do something about his problem. He doesn’t need (or want) you to save him.
Mistake 4: Jumping On The Bandwagon
Jumping on the bandwagon happens when you adopt and adapt your brand to whatever trend is most popular at the moment. Many brands are guilty of this in one way or another. While developing your ICP, you may notice that there are pain points that your solution does not solve, and think to yourself “If i just adjust my offer, or develop a quick solution to this, I can be the one-stop-shop for all of these pain points”. Too often, brands decide to change or alter their course of action in order to appeal to their customers or to be apart of the latest craze, without necessarily doing their homework — ultimately resulting in them offering a half-cooked solution to these customers, or going completely off of the rails that their business is currently on.
While it may seem obvious that you should grow and develop your offerings to cater to the solutions clients are most seeking, by jumping on the bandwagon and simply offering that solution because it has become popular, you will hurt your brand more than help it from fear of missing out on potential opportunities. Rather do your homework, and decide if adapting your business or offer is the best way forward for your brand.
Mistake 5: Too Many Is Never Too Many
Your clients are more alike than you think. They have similar problems, they are measured on the same core metrics, they makes decisions in a similar way, and they have the same objections. You want to be specific and detailed, but some differentiators are simply trivial. If you can’t easily name your personas and outline key details for each one, you might have invited to many people to the persona party.
Some brands develop multiple Ideal Customer Profiles based on them having a number of different offerings or services, which may lead them to overcomplicate their ICP, and damaging their efforts. In truth, having one clearly defined ICP that is broad enough to include all the potential clients you are looking to target with each service is enough, as you are able to develop buying personas within your ICP that will account for each segment you create from your audiences later on within your marketing and sales strategy brainstorming efforts. By having multiple ICP’s instead of multiple buyer personas, you may just be throwing spaghetti at the wall once again, and come full circle to create so many ICP’s that you wind up targeting everyone, for everything, once again — accomplishing nothing from this exercise.
Mistake 6: Delegating
You have created a brand, product or service to meet a specific need and ultimately know who your offers will best serve. However, a common mistake made by brands is leaving the ICP creation up to their teams. In truth, yes, you and those you work for will understand what you do and what you offer, and may even have an idea who your best-fit customers will be. But is this idea accurate?
While you can sit with your teams and gather insights to develop a basic idea of who your ICP is, I’ve said it before, and I will say it again — It’s all about the data. Just because you think you know who your ideal customer is, does not mean that that is the person who is looking for your brand as a solution. People can become biased over time, and by simply asking your team for information, you are including perceptions formed during a relationship in your profile, but may be ignoring the hard evidence at your disposal.
Analytics tools, such as Google Analytics, or social platform analytics, and other third-party tools will be able to play one of the key roles in your ICP development, as you will be able to align your ideas with the hard evidence to create your Ideal Customer Profile based on not only who you feel is the ideal client for your brand — but on who is actively searching for your solution. So use the data available to you to aid in this process, as there is one thing I love most about data — it does not lie!
See how brands like Oliver Apparel have been able to achieve success on Facebook by knowing who their ideal customers are, and creating targeted campaigns to reach them. Click here.
#2 Mistakes Brands Make When Creating Buyer Personas
So you have created your Ideal Customer Profile — your broad generalization of your perfect customer, and now you need to begin developing your sales and marketing strategies. But you’ve noticed that your prospects lists match your ICP, but include prospects with a multitude of different characteristics and attributes. Enter the buyer persona.
A buyer persona should not be confused with an ICP, as a buyer persona is created when you create audience segments based on demographics, location, funnel stages or more in order to personalize and focus your marketing and sales efforts. But just as with an Ideal Customer Profile, brands make mistakes when developing these too.
While every business is different and there’s no one-size-fits-all approach to buyer personas, there are some wrong approaches you might be tempted to take. Below are some of the most common mistakes marketers make — and how to avoid making them yourself.
Mistake 1: Having Too Many Personas
Creating a bunch of buyer personas is appealing — especially when you have a ton of data at your fingertips. And while it may make sense to create a buyer persona for every individual customer you want to target, having too many personas can be harmful. With too many personas, your marketing ends up being all over the place and often lacks any real focus. Plus, you’ll likely find that several of your personas are quite similar to each other and that there aren’t very many distinguishing factors.
To avoid this mistake, start by creating a single persona that represents a majority of your customers. As you analyze the data about your most successful customers, you’ll begin to see where one persona ends and another begins.
Mistake 2: Only Using Buyer Personas In Marketing
We often see buyer personas as a “marketing thing.” But buyer personas should be used by your entire organization — including your sales and customer support teams. Whereas the marketing team uses personas to help attract the right people, your sales team uses them to engage with prospects. By having a strong knowledge of your buyer personas, your sales team will be able to deliver value more quickly and not waste a prospect’s time with irrelevant information.
Your customer support team also greatly benefits from buyer personas as it helps them confirm a prospect’s values and communication preferences. And by understanding your personas, your support team will be able to provide better service to your customers.
Mistake 3: Thinking Of Your Personas As An Individual Person
Buyer personas are generalizations of your ideal buyers, but it’s easy to forget that personas are not individual people (especially when you have specific people in mind when creating your personas). Rather than identifying the challenges, pain points, goals and needs of one person — as you would have focussed on in your ICP development — focus on gathering a collection of characteristics about your ideal customers.
For example, it might make sense for you to group multiple titles or job roles into one persona, such as Marketing Directors and Sales Directors, but in the real world, a person can’t hold both job titles — but since your buyer persona is fictional, you could say that your buyer persona in this sense is a person that is a high-level executive and as such and comprise of any top-level role, not department specific.
Mistake 4: Relying Too Heavily On Demographics
Demographic information — including age, gender, salary, industry and company size — can be helpful for quickly identifying leads that match the profiles of your existing personas. But demographics shouldn’t be your main focus.When you rely too heavily on demographic information, you’ll miss the real insights that help you improve your marketing: the challenges, pain points and questions your personas have that drive them to make a purchase decision.
With that being said, you can (and should) include demographics in your buyer persona profiles. Just be sure to consider a wide range of inputs to paint a more comprehensive picture.
Mistake 5: Making Assumptions About Your Buyer Personas
When you create buyer personas for the first time, you’ll probably uncover anecdotal information about these personas from other members of your team. While it’s important to talk to your sales and customer support teams to learn more about your personas, your research shouldn’t stop there. Rely on the data you have available about your prospects instead of assuming facts.
Mistake 6: Not Creating Negative Personas
Negative buyer personas — also known as exclusionary personas — allow you to identify anyone that’s not a good fit for your company. They help you weed out the bad apples by proactively identifying the types of prospects that could potentially drain resources or cause huge headaches for your team. It may seem counterintuitive to spend time getting to know people who will never be your customers and generate revenue. But it will save your team time and money in the long run since you won’t waste your time marketing and selling to people who aren’t a good fit.
Mistake 7: Not Updating Your Personas
Many marketers think of personas as a once-off setup. But people — and the challenges they face, the goals they’re trying to accomplish and where they seek out information — change, and as your business grows, your brand will also develop. Reevaluate your personas at least a couple times a year to see if they’re still accurate and up-to-date.
“Have fun. I always say, if it isn’t fun, it isn’t selling!. Have fun with each other because it builds teamwork. Have fun with prospects and clients — It builds relationships.” — Ken Thoreson ( Speaker, Consultant, Author, Sales Leadership) @KenThoreson
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Thank you for taking the time to read this article set on how great brands develop their ICP’s to increase their chances of marketing and sales success. I hope that this has helped you identify why your brand should be actively creating and developing your ICP. We are constantly working to help brands get the knowledge that they need to help them see success in their efforts, so visit our publication, Inside Revenue, regularly for the release of new article sets related to improving marketing and sales success.
General Business Resources
“How Do Great Brands Develop Their Ideal Customer Profile? — Part 1(The Beginner’s Guide)”
“How Do Great Brands Develop Their Ideal Customer Profile? — Part 2(The Intermediate Guide)”
“How Do Great Brands Develop Their Ideal Customer Profile? — Part 3 (The Advanced Guide)”
“Why Is A/B Split Testing Crucial To Success? — Part 1 (The Beginner’s Guide)”
“Why Is A/B Split Testing Crucial To Success? — Part 2 (The Intermediate Guide)”
“Why Is A/B Split Testing Crucial To Success? — Part 3 (The Advanced Guide)”
