In Episode 2 of Hitchhikers, I delve deep into the art of targeted marketing, specifically focusing on the concept of Ideal Customer Profiles (ICP).
This episode is a treasure trove for small business owners and marketers who are looking to streamline their marketing efforts and boost sales by identifying and targeting their perfect customer.
Through engaging storytelling and expert insights, we explore:
Learn how to apply these strategies to your business, understand your ideal customer's needs, and tailor your marketing to speak directly to them.
Whether you're refining your current customer profile or building one from scratch, this episode provides the tools and inspiration to make your marketing efforts more effective and efficient.
Resources:
📔 ICP Template: https://powrio.notion.site/Ideal-Customer-Profile-Template-ae9527fdcd464993b0a5d7574238de32
🛠️ Buyer Persona Builder: https://miro.com/
🎁 Free Form Builder: https://www.powr.io/form-builder-website-app?ref=podcast
In Episode 2 of Hitchhikers, I delve deep into the art of targeted marketing, specifically focusing on the concept of Ideal Customer Profiles (ICP).
This episode is a treasure trove for small business owners and marketers who are looking to streamline their marketing efforts and boost sales by identifying and targeting their perfect customer.
Through engaging storytelling and expert insights, we explore:
Learn how to apply these strategies to your business, understand your ideal customer's needs, and tailor your marketing to speak directly to them.
Whether you're refining your current customer profile or building one from scratch, this episode provides the tools and inspiration to make your marketing efforts more effective and efficient.
Resources:
📔 ICP Template: https://powrio.notion.site/Ideal-Customer-Profile-Template-ae9527fdcd464993b0a5d7574238de32
🛠️ Buyer Persona Builder: https://miro.com/
🎁 Free Form Builder: https://www.powr.io/form-builder-website-app?ref=podcast
Hitchhikers - S1 E2 - Ideal Customer Profiles
[00:00:00] Okay, here's the scenario. You're a custom purse maker, and you just finished making 50 purses that you need to sell this weekend. You're standing in front of two buildings. In building A are 5, 000 people. In building B, there are 100 women who have no purses and 500 cash in their hand. Now, which of these two buildings would you prefer to go into, and which one do you think you're going to sell at faster?
It's called Targeted ICP Marketing. Let's get into it.
Thanks for joining the Hitchhiker's Guide to Growth Marketing Pod. We're back for another installment. If it's your first time here, make sure to hit the subscribe button and notification bell. Now, the biggest mistake that I see in marketing, especially for small businesses or businesses just starting out, is trying to sell to everyone.
All at once, it just doesn't work that way. In fact, it's really a recipe for disaster. So looking back to the opener, ask yourself a couple of questions you might've thought to yourself. Well, more than only women [00:01:00] buy purses and you're not wrong. And the second thing would be, I would much rather be in a room of 5, 000 people and again, not wrong.
So why are we here then? Because marketing and selling to your ideal customer first is both quicker and cheaper to do. So, how can you do the same thing? How, how can you apply this to your business? Maybe you already know who your ideal customer is or maybe you thought you did and now you're questioning everything or maybe this is the first time you've ever heard of an ideal customer profile.
That's why we're here. That's what this episode is for. In fact, I've linked a template in the description where you can work out exactly who your ideal customer is. Don't fill it out yet though. A little bit later, we're going to go through exactly how to fill it in and with what information to determine who yours is.
And then there may be others who think that they know exactly who their ideal customer is, but do you really? Let's ask a few questions off the top. Does your ideal customer live in the city or in the suburbs? Do they rent or own? Do they have children? What's their household [00:02:00] income? If you know all those answers, that's excellent, but that's not an ideal customer profile.
That is audience targeting. It's part of a profile, but that's only the surface part. We're talking geographics and demographics. Ideal customers go way deeper into firmographics. It goes into psychographics, which are very big words, but those are basically things like lifestyle, interests, values, purchase decisions, buying habits.
All of those things combined goes into an ideal customer profile. It gives you a very, very accurate representation. of who you want to target all of your marketing towards a buyer persona even goes deeper than that by creating an actual fictional character that you can use as inspiration. We've been using buyer personas at power for quite a while.
In fact, let's have a look at them. All right. So here are the two buyer personas for power. We actually have two because we have two very different use cases within our customer base. So Joan here on your left is a solopreneur. She has a Shopify [00:03:00] store. selling meditation supplies. So, Joan doesn't have employees.
Her bottom line is probably a lot lower than Steve's because Steve runs a management team of a chain of liquor stores. So, Steve is gonna have payroll, he's gonna have investors to answer to, the website's probably more technically sound. So, Joan's needs and Steve's needs and goals and pain points are going to be very different.
So, having these to look at gives me that fictional character that I can gain inspiration from and sympathize with. Whenever I'm putting together content for various purposes, it gives that extra layer of personalization that people are craving these days. So this is just a quick look at, uh, our buyer personas and how they can help really formulate the idea a little bit more clearly whenever you're producing marketing content.
So I'll be sure and add a link in the description for how you can build your own buyer persona with the same tool that we use. Maybe I'll even do a future episode on how to build a buyer persona. They're really fun and they do a lot of good, but [00:04:00] we have to start with the ICP. Your ideal customer profile has to be set because with it, you tailor your messaging, sales strategies, even steer your product development directly at the businesses and people who can benefit from what you offer.
I'll get into all three of those in just a bit, but right now, let's look at building your own customer profile. Now, there's nothing in this process that's going to be anything about making assumptions or guessing about anything. You have to know. And if you're an established business, the first step, data collection.
If you're a fan of Murder Podcast, you're going to love this part because we're going to do some really deep profiling. So you're going to gather all of the customer data you can find. Everything that you can find about people that love you and love what you do and love your business. Look for patterns and commonalities.
Once all this data is together, you're going to see some really interesting things as you look at this from a holistic point of view. Let's say that you really want to go after mid sized businesses, 50 employees or more, but 80 percent of your customer base are businesses less than 10 employees. Doesn't mean don't go after those mid sized [00:05:00] businesses, but spend your time, effort, and resources going after businesses that are 10 employees or less.
That's what's ringing the cash register, that's what's putting money in the bank, that's where you spend your time and your energy. If you don't have any customers yet, if you're just starting out, That's fine. Look at your competitors, see who they're targeting, look at their messaging, find out things from that point of view, and you can still build some sort of data collection from that information, and start to build out what that ideal customer is going to look like.
Next up, we're talking about the human element. And yes, I do mean have actual conversations with real people. Start in your personal life, your friends, your co workers, your neighbors. Family, maybe family, depends on the family, but start with people that you personally know and give them an idea of where you want your business to go and then move on to people that you don't know, maybe someone in the grocery store aisle.
Take meetings, conduct surveys, do interviews, people around town, people that you respect, people that have other businesses that are more successful than [00:06:00] you. There's a lot of different ways that you can kind of go into this, but you get your personal information out first. Then you talk to people that you don't know and what this will do is it's going to build an additional layer of depth to your ICP that a lot of people don't bother to do anymore.
So that could be a real differentiator for you at this second stage of building a profile is that human element. All right, so let's take off our detective hat and put on our analyst hat. We've got all this information that we put together. You have your customer data, you have your competitor data. And I should mention that even if you are an established business, obviously you're still going to want to collect competitor information as well.
You've got market trends, you've got the word on the street, all of the meetings that you've held. You're going to take all this information together and we're going to analyze all of it and then we're going to start building the ideal customer profile. As I'd mentioned, there is a link in the description for the customer profile template.
If you don't feel like doing that or you just don't want to go through that process, we're going to boil this down to four key things. Up first is [00:07:00] demographics and firmographics. For business to business, this is typically things like company size, location, industry. For B2C, business to consumer, you're looking more at age, location, and income.
It's not a bad idea to gather all this information together for whether you're looking at selling to businesses or to consumers, or vice versa. Some companies serve both. So it's a good idea to go ahead and compile all this together, which is, again, as we mentioned earlier, the basis of audience targeting.
So that's where we start. Number two is going to be challenges and pain points, and this is where your user interviews and meetings come in very handy because what this is looking at is what core problem does your product or service solve? What do you do? What do you provide that solves the problem of the end user?
Whether you're talking about a product or an online service, for example, we have a form builder at Power. It's one of our core products. There are hundreds of form builders out there. So what challenges do people face in creating online forms? And what problems do we solve? More [00:08:00] importantly, how we solve them is what makes us different from our competitors.
So these are very important things for you to figure out are the challenges and pain points of your consumer. And number three is goals and aspirations. What do your customers want to achieve, both short and long term? These are not supposed to be easy questions. Number two and number three especially.
Number one. Everyone does number one, that's why it's audience targeting. What makes it an ideal customer and what improves your conversion rates are the answers that you find in your data from questions two, number three that we're on now, and then number four, which we'll get into in a moment. So what are the goals that they are trying to achieve?
What does your product provide them that will get them to their end goal? Again, this is going to look very different based on your product, based on your company, based on where you're located. A lot of things are going to influence these answers, but they're so very critical in really honing in on what that core customer looks like so you can craft all of your marketing to speak [00:09:00] directly to those individuals.
Earlier, whenever I was showing the buyer personas that we have, we were talking about Joan. One of Joan's goals was to get her e commerce shop to 6, 000 earned revenue per month. That I have to answer whenever I'm writing content for power is how does our product help Joan achieve that goal? If she can find out that information and she purchases our tool and she reaches that goal, we've just made a new brand loyalist.
She is going to be a customer of ours for a very long time because she had a very clear goal she needed to achieve. My content spoke to that need in her goal. She used our tool, and she got there. Number four, and probably my absolute favorite, is behavioral traits. This is the how. How do they arrive at a buying decision?
What influenced them? To make a purchase. This is only becoming more important by the day. There's tons of new information and new content coming out every single day. So determining how your buyers make their decisions and what [00:10:00] influences them to purchase is the most important thing that you can do in building an ideal customer profile.
I'll give you a real world example from my personal experience, if you'll indulge me a little story time. Many years ago, I was working for an agency and I worked mainly on attorney firms and automotive accounts, big ticket items, lots of money. And I took on a particular case that I normally wouldn't for several reasons, but mainly because they weren't spending what I typically looked at in a particular client.
But it was very personal to me. It was a rehab facility, a substance abuse recovery center. The reason why it stuck out for me is because of their unique situation. You've seen ads for these places before. They usually talk about how grand everything is, the beautiful grounds, the nice rooms and hallways and staff, and they make it look very exclusive because it's very expensive.
These guys were the exact opposite. They had, they had completed recovery themselves many years before [00:11:00] and realized that that's what they wanted to do with their lives, were help other young men like themselves. find answers and get through recovery. So, that was the reason that I took it on. What I didn't realize, uh, at the time, is they really did not know who they were trying to speak to, and truthfully, neither did I, because I never worked with a clientele such as that before.
So, I went out to their, to their location, took a tour of their facility. You guys, it was a, it was a closed down nursing home before that they had purchased and rehabbed themselves. So I did not have very beautiful scenes to, to show. But what I did have is I had their results. The biggest result in, in that world I found out is a low rate of recidivism.
People that, Don't relapse, which is that is the pinnacle. That's the most difficult part is to try and get that solved for these for these folks So that was what they had over everyone else is that their their rates were seven times higher To not [00:12:00] relapse than than their competitors. So that was their unique Proposition is that hey people that finish our program They don't come back.
So I had my answer. Now I needed to figure out who is it that I'm going to talk to? Who is going to be the target audience? What is going to be my ideal customer for this particular service? I really didn't have a good handle on it. So whenever I was leaving, I opened the front door and I was met by this young man who I could only imagine had made some poor decisions.
before and it appeared he was there for services. He would not look up. He was very frail. I was dressed relatively nicely so he probably assumed I worked there and he asked me where to go for sign in. So I explained like, hey, I don't, you know, I don't work here, but you can go to the front desk there and they'll take care of you.
And I thought, well, maybe, maybe that's who I need to write for. That's who I need to speak to. And then I caught a glimpse of the vehicle in the parking lot. Who I could only assume were his parents, were [00:13:00] clutching each other in the front seat. Emotions coming through the windows. There was so much emotions and just absolute sobbing happening in that vehicle.
And then I realized, that's who I need to speak to. That's who I need to reach. That whether it was his parents or not, they were his loved ones that wanted to see him get better. And that was who I needed to write for. That, that's how I needed to make the content. Speak to, were to those people that were trying to seek treatment for their loved ones.
And that, so that was the angle that I took in writing. We hired a sweet, uh, sweet lady that did our commercials for us. Luck would have, I say luck, luck would have it that she had someone in her family that had gone through a similar ordeal so she could speak from experience and that came across in the commercials that we shot.
So that was, I, I decided on what my content was going to be. I knew who needed to say it. I knew why they needed to hear it and what the end result was going to be. So I could speak to the [00:14:00] goals and aspirations, and then I knew exactly how to influence them into choosing this particular place because these were people who had been through this before, and that's what came across in the writing and in the video that we did.
The next thing was, when? When do we need to run this? And we chose the middle of the night, midnight to 5 a. m. I want to say, and that was purposeful as well for two reasons. Number one, it's very cheap to advertise during that time, time of the night because not many people are looking for that time frame.
So we got ads purchased very cheap. But also, if you've had anyone in your life that has experienced substance abuse and recovery, there's a lot of sleepless nights. Again, I speak from personal experience. There's a lot of sleepless nights of wondering where they are, what's happening with them. So that was the time that we ran them.
So we checked all the boxes, they got their, uh, their, their doors were overrun with people that were looking to, uh, come to their program and they helped many, many hundreds of [00:15:00] young men for the next several years. from that one six month ad buy that was one one hundredth of the normal purchases that I saw from other clients of mine and it worked for for many years to come as far as I know it may still.
It was a long time ago but thanks for indulging story time. That's a very real world example of how speaking to the right person can really make a difference in getting your product or service in front of them and start changing their lives as well. Okay, so to this point, you should know what an ideal customer profile is, you know how to make one for yourself, and even gave you a real world example from my past.
What I have not talked about is what do you do with all of this information? The short answer is you make it the north star for every business decision that you make. In the next episode, we're going to get into the content marketing and content writing piece, how you take all this information and turn it into actual content.
It should steer everything that you do. Especially from a marketing standpoint, but also sales [00:16:00] strategies and product development as we discussed, but mainly it's going to begin with how you write your content and what you put out into the world. And that's where the path begins to true and sustainable growth.
The Spray and Pray method is gone. It just doesn't work anymore. There's too many different ways to reach people to not be highly personalized. We've gone through all the steps to do that. Now we want to set it, put the plan into action, and what'll happen is, you won't be getting just customers, you'll be getting brand advocates and ambassadors that can really take your company to the next level.
Alright, we made it! This episode was a bit longer than what I expected, but the thing is, is that if you don't get your ideal customer right in the very beginning, everything else that comes after can have errors in it, can have the wrong target. I've seen a lot of really, really good businesses go under because they didn't follow this simple premise.
Looking back at the very beginning. The reason why the room of 5, 000 people is not where you want to begin is because the thing is, [00:17:00] there could be 4, 850 of them that are not customers at all. How much time, effort, and energy did you spend to find that out? As opposed to the other room where it was clear that everyone in that room was a potential buyer.
So the path to conversion is a lot quicker, a lot cheaper. And a lot easier to do. Be sure to tune in for next episode where we get into content marketing. Hope to see you there. If you haven't already, please subscribe, hit that notification bell, and we look forward to next time. Until then, stay curious.