Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) & Targeting; how to work out who to target and the importance of understanding your Ideal Customer Profile in driving engagement with your communication efforts.

The success of any sales and marketing effort relies on fundamentally understanding who you are trying to reach and connect with/entice into action. This is specific to each business and often a single business does need to speak to multiple different groups and types of people; which in turn means different messaging, different content etc.... For example, tertiary education institutions market their services and courses to new high school graduates but also to mature age students. Within both these overarching groups, there are a variety of personas that the tertiary education institution needs to cater for and make sure they resonate with; which is an activity that requires different messaging and different content for each persona type. Without investing in really understanding each user persona and figuring out how to communicate with and entice them, the tertiary education institution will risk being less successful at attracting new students/having a lower conversion rate.

So the question then becomes how do you work out who your ideal customer profile(s) is/are? Sure you may be a well established business who has done a lot of work on understanding who your buyers are and the answer to this question may be super clear for you - which is great! However for many businesses, especially smaller, early stage businesses, there is still work to be done in order to optimise who the business targets with its sales and marketing efforts. It could also be that you are experimenting with different groups in order to really nail down and define who your communication/product/service is most relevant to and who it resonates with most.

To define your ideal customer profile(s), you need to think about your product or service, the type of businesses or people it benefits, what the benefit is and who at an organisation (for b2b sales) is the best person to speak to/is the decision maker and will be able to approve the use of your product or service.

Let's use Hypadrive.ai as an example to illustrate this. Hypadrive.ai is a tool that benefits direct end users who choose our platform to help them manage, automate and scale their 1 to 1 communication activities. Ultimately the users of our application are going to be the individuals who spend their time on these types of activities on their businesses behalf. Typically for Hypadrive.ai this will be business founders, or sales/marketing leaders/managers in smaller teams, or sales development representatives in slightly larger teams. In smaller teams, it is often the individuals who will be using the tool most, that make the decision to purchase it; and at our (fairly modest) price point the team members who will use it will most likely have permission to make the purchasing decision without large committees or decisions from above. This means that Hypadrive.ai immediately has 2 groups to market and sell to;

1. The business owner/function leader at the business e.g. sales/marketing manager,
2. The individual representative who will spend most of their time using our tool to benefit the business.

To the business owner/function manager, we can talk about how Hypadrive.ai is an application created to improve team productivity, unify data to make performance insights easy across a team, gives insights to management and makes the lives of team members so much better by equipping them with the tools they need to better organise, manage, automate and optimise their work. For owners of smaller businesses, we can talk specifically about the ability to use Hypadrive.ai for a range of outreach automation activities e.g. generating new sales, forming new partnerships, recruitment of new talent, media exposure and PR, raising capital etc... highlighting the broad function of the single platform.

To the individual representative we focus more on communicating to them how the Hypadrive.ai platform will help them achieve their sales objectives and hit their performance quotas; highlighting the specific functions and illustrating how they contribute to helping the individual do their job.

When we reach out to either group, we have 2 ways we could approach them;

1. Go straight in for the pitch, assuming they know about, and have experience with, direct outreach as a growth tactic.
2. Focus first on confirming whether or not they have any experience with or are even aware of direct outreach activities.

Beyond communicating directly with the businesses and team members who may find value using a platform like Hypadrive.ai, we also have many other groups to communicate with, for instance:

1. Small business influencers such as online subject matter experts, trusted advisors and community group managers. Lets look at the trusted advisor group; we are talking here about sales and marketing advisors/coaches, accountants, business coaches, digital experts - all of whom have deep established relationships with the businesses they support and a vested interest in their clients ongoing financial performance. They therefore have an ability to, and interest in promoting growth tools like Hypadrive.ai to them; and in doing so will look good and proactive to the clients they support. So trusted advisors is another group of people that Hypadrive.ai can begin communicating with; it is in fact a fairly broad group with again multiple segments in it who we need to specify our messaging towards - even if the broad message is similar.

This article could go on into a lot more depth but hopefully the above has helped to illustrate for you how to go about thinking through who you want to be contacting about your business, product or service if you are yet to have nailed this down. As with most sales and marketing efforts, try a range of approaches and you will ultimately find the group(s) of people your offering and messaging resonates most with; which in turn will make growing your business much easier to manage.

If you need further help with really defining your ideal customer profile(s) and the groups of people you need to be communicating with in order to reach them, then we highly recommend you speak with a Certified Hypadrive.ai Expert Partner or a marketing/sales/growth consultant of your choice because understanding your Ideal Customer and how how to reach and entice them makes a huge difference to the results you will be able to achieve.

To your success, good luck!