Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) vs. Buyer Persona - Differences and Use Cases
Ideal customer profiles (ICP) and buyer personas are both excellent tools for defining and understanding your target customer better. However, they are not exactly the same. In this post I dig into the main differences, how each should be built, and how to use them together to create killer content for your target audience.
Differences Between Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) And Persona
While the terms are sometimes used interchangeably, the main difference is that an Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) is a representation of the ideal company your product is a fit for. A buyer persona is a fictitious person, who represents the characteristics of a key person you deal with during the sales process.
So, you can think of an ICP as a generalized representation of the companies your product suits best, and personas as the people inside those companies you need to convince.
You can have both multiple ICPs and buyer personas. Personas can be different for different ICPs. They can also be the same if the motivations, pain points and needs of those buyers are generally similar – even if the industries etc. are different.
All these people work at the same company, but targeting the company alone won’t be enough. You want to reach the head of marketing, Monica (on the left), so you need to understand her pain points and goals for your offering to resonate. Photo credit: fauxels on Pexels.com.
Ideal Customer Profile (ICP)
An important thing to understand is that an ICP is a generalized representation, not a qualification checklist. It can help guide your marketing efforts and for example target ads though. You can also have more than one ICP, but I definitely recommend keeping the number limited (max. 3).
A company doesn’t need to check all the boxes of the ICP in order to be a valuable customer for you, and you certainly should not disqualify a lead simply because it doesn’t exactly fit the ICP.
It is strongly recommended that sales has a different set of qualification/disqualification criteria that is fed by your ICP, but not determined by it. I also strongly recommend reviewing leads that sales ends up losing or disqualifying later on and use this information to update your ICPs.
Factors of an ICP generally include the following:
Company size
Industry
Product
Position in the market
Marketing budgets
Technologies used
However, do not be afraid to remove or add criteria based on how relevant they are for your business.
Practical example of an ICP
To give you a practical example, let’s look at potential ICPs for my consulting business.
The companies that use my services the most are small and medium-sized technology companies (typically somewhere around 20-200 employees). This includes both earlier-stage startups as well as companies in the scale-up stage. Their typical business is SaaS or other software. They might operate in major industries, but are usually building a category of their own, and/or are focusing on a specific narrow niche in that major industry.
Other companies might find my offering helpful, and could certainly benefit from them. I might offer them my services if they approach me and I determine my offering would be a good fit. However, as they are not in my ICP, I won’t spend my time actively pursuing those opportunities, as it would lead me to lose focus on the sectors where I see most business potential.
However, it’s good to remember that ICPs do not need to remain static. If I gradually start getting more business from a particular type of companies, I could evaluate my ICPs again.
Based on these inputs, I can construct an ICP (or several).
Company size: ~20-200 employees.
Industry: Software and technology.
Product: SaaS and other technology products, and related services, often with a B2B focus.
Position in the market: Small or midsize player, focused on a specific narrow niche.
Marketing budgets: Not massive, but large enough so they can hire consultants. Annual budgets somewhere in the high five figures and up to a few hundred thousand dollars/euros.
Other characteristics: Typically a relatively small in-house marketing team
Technologies used: This is not so relevant in my case, but a client could be someone who is already using a marketing automation solution like Hubspot or Marketo, or is thinking of onboarding one.
Now that we’ve established an ICP, it provides an indication who to focus on. If I ran ads for my business for example, some of this could already be used as targeting parameters.
While some guides claim this is enough, I’ve never found ICPs particularly useful on their own. A company is not a person – a company consists of many people with different motivations and pain points. To make ICP information truly useful, we also need to look at people inside these companies that we should be targeting.
Buyer Personas
This leads us to buyer personas. Shopify defines them in a great way as “a semi-fictional representation of a company’s ideal customer. It is based on research and data about existing and potential customers and paints a vivid picture of who the customer is, what they do, what their motivations are, and what their goals are.”
Buyer personas help you guide marketing and sales efforts, and you will probably have several of them. When used together with ICPs, the personas for each ICP can be the same or different, but I strongly recommend that you avoid making things overly complex if you have a small marketing team.
Personas help you create far more effective marketing campaigns when done right, validated with data, and periodically updated.
Buyer personas include characteristics such as:
The person’s role at the company (example job titles, are they an individual contributor or do they manage a team, etc.)
The job responsibilities they have and the way they are measured
The pain points they have that make their job harder
Their goals and objectives (for example the KPIs they need to meet, personal targets such as career progression or impressing a boss, or making their team happier and more effective).
The tools they currently use.
The typical questions they have from service providers.
Where do they look for information
According to the common definitions, a buyer persona also includes demographic characteristics such as age, education level, income level, and where the person lives. However, you should think carefully before including demographic info in your personas!
Based on personal experience, demographics is where a lot of buyer personas go wrong, because these traits can easily lead you to make irrelevant, overly specific assumptions about personas, which will lead you to miss potential buyers.
For example, a head of marketing or head of sales can be of a very different age and have a very different salary from company to company, even if both companies are a great fit for your product.
Demographics should only be used as part of a persona if they are useful for targeting your marketing campaigns, and they should have fairly broad ranges. For example, if you sell high-end cars that cost more than 100,000 dollars, it definitely makes a lot of sense to include income level as part of your persona to help guide things like ad buying decisions.
Tip: A great resource for easily building buyer persona templates is Hubspot’s Make My Persona tool. It lets you construct personas and export them easily, so I definitely recommend checking it out.
A practical example of buyer personas
Again, let’s look at my business as an example. I’ve identified a few different personas that are potentially relevant for me:
Owner or executive of a small to midsize software company.
Head of marketing or leader of a specific marketing department.
Marketing manager of a particular function (e.g. Content marketing manager).
A marketing agency in need of subcontractors in my areas of expertise.
Out of these four, I’m mainly focusing on personas 1-3 for now. While subcontracting could be relevant for me, I’m not actively spending time on this persona as their needs and pain points are quite different from the others. Let’s look at persona 2 as a practical example:
Persona name: Vinnie the VP
Role at the company: Head of marketing
Job responsibilities and how are they measured: Measured by leads and new business from those leads.
Pain points: Improving the efficiency and output of the team, insufficient product marketing resources, not enough time to spend on product messaging.
Goals and objectives: Showing success to C-level, increasing the number and conversion rate of quality leads.
Tools they use: Online dashboards to follow results.
Typical questions for service providers: Can you show results from a similar customer, how did things improve? Do you have some example work you could share?
Where do they look for information: Peers, industry websites, Slack communities, LinkedIn, industry events, podcasts.
The example above is a fairly simple one, but it already provides a way to structure my own messaging and sales materials when discussing with a potential customer. Furthermore, if I were to advertise my services, some of this information would be extremely useful for building ad copy and targeting.
Now that you are familiar with simple templates to build ICPs and personas, how do you actually go about doing that?
Leverage data for building AND updating ICPs and personas
You should use both qualitative and quantitative data for building ICPs and personas. Here are a few examples of data sources you can use to build them:
Customer interviews
CRM data
Sales team interviews
Sales calls, recordings, and transcripts
People who engage with your content on social media
Website analytics data
All of the above provide a better picture of who your best customers are, the characteristics they and their companies have in common, and so on. If you look at all of the above, you’ll have a mountain of valuable data to use as a basis for building your ICPs and personas.
Building them is just the start though! One of the most common mistakes with ICPs and personas is assuming they are static, but this is wrong. Just as your business changes over time as your products evolve, you get more experience from selling to prospects, start selling to new industries or different size companies and so on, your ICPs and personas must change as well.
ICPs and personas must update and change to match these new conditions. Otherwise you run the risk of marketing and messaging being misaligned with what the sales team is selling, which is always a dangerous situation. By ensuring you have up-to-date ICPs and personas, everything from content to ads to sales materials accurately matches the needs of customers you are currently selling to, increasing results.
In conclusion
This is a simple overview of ideal customer profiles and personas consist of – I hope you found it useful!
The most important thing about ICPs and personas is to start building them if you haven’t already, and keeping them updated as time goes on.
By having thoughtfully constructed profiles that reflect typical customers that are valuable for you, you’ll be able to guide your marketing efforts much better, ultimately leading to higher conversion rates and revenue.
If you have any questions or thoughts about this post, would like some help constructing ICPs and personas, or are wondering how this could help you create better content in the future, I’d love to help. Get in touch here and let’s discuss how we can work together.
