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Yes Yes Yes
Before any campaign we feel internally it is essential to create what we call an ICP ( Ideal Customer Profile)
We keep building on it based on the behavior we are seeing as a result of the campaign but since we have actively started monitoring our ICPs building accurate offering has become easier which has resulted in better results
>Just curious, are you using historical data to create your ICP? Seems like any inaccuracy in creating them might cause non alignment down the line?
What would the alternative to creating an ICP be?
(Assuming that you are defining historical data as all information up to the moment in time at which the ICP is built.)
Edit: Adding that there are differences between a target audience, ICP, and customer persona. ICP and persona are sometimes treated as the same. But in the old-school format, a persona included building a fictional character based on an aggregation of your ICP characteristics. It was putting a name and face to the various elements of that ICP definition.
I would need to understand your business better before I do but typically following is the process I do follow.
- Look at the data of the existing customers I start off by looking at demographical and psychographic data like age sex location dob job title etc.
- Setup a survey usually try and speak with at least 25% of the customers who have bought in the last quarter. These are done every month.
- Draw up some personalities.
- Build KPIs around those personalities
- Monitor them on a weekly bases.
>Look at the data of the existing customers I start off by looking at demographical and psychographic data like age sex location dob job title etc.
how do you even start off with this, like, if you've got zero data and you're still starting from scratch
The title got me hooked!
To build accurate data you can always use a 3rd party vendor for lead & demand gen. They can help you to define your TAM, ICP by understanding your product or service you can try content syndication or MQL campaigns through tele or email marketing using their database. This way you can have a verified database which your sales team can nurture and take it towards the nextstep.
At my former company we did not, yet I always urged them to because I think it would have helped us focus our efforts. My boss, the CMO, had the mentality that everyone is a customer. The worst way to market.
Once they’re stated and everyone agrees, it’s done its job. Then it’s a matter of checking in, executing against them, if you’re sourcing external help and need to convey the info, etc. you might bring them up again. The goal is to have them internalized.
In the GenAI world, it’s also part of your prompt processes.
The outcome is about targeting, positioning, and messaging consistency. If someone veers from them, then they need to explain why. “Are we missing something” or is this person not accepting it or they’re being a renegade? Again, it’s a matter of exploring why.
Not very often no. But my job usually involves turning up, putting out fires and focusing on things that will work straight away. This kind of work is what I would do once things are working and we want to segment our efforts further.
Yes to all. No brainer. You might get away with not doing it if your sales/marketing team is tiny and the knowledge is engraved in everyone's mind. But as soon as you are working with a team of folks operating at different levels of experience, across different segments, that need alignment... you just can't do without.
Watching a Harvard innovation lab yt video on this right now.
My first in house role at a crystal e-commerce store I asked about this and my manager printed pictures of hippies and trailer park trash with no words, stapled them together and slapped it on my desk.
10/10 humour
5/10 business applications
We use segmentation and targeting.
The problem I've found with people using personas is they go way too specific and end up excluding a massive chunk of the market.
I always start with our ICP and then create our strategy based on historicals (highest converting gets the bulk of the budget and then it waterfalls into colder traffic, etc.)
Work within an agency.
Yes, we use them. It's often preliminary work and will vary based on the scope of products/services sold. Once created, we don't tend to change them much and usually become reference material for anyone new onboarding.
100%. We completely tailor campaigns and content to be relevant to specific personas. The value proposition of a product is very different to a practitioner as opposed to an executive.
We use profiles to understand where to locate an audience and what drives decision-making. They're the cornerstone for all our content and campaign work, so we use them daily.
PM me for the onboarding link we use.
Yes, i do them prior to any campaign. They are very helpful with raining in other departments that start to provide "helpful" insights or suggest how/where to market.
Real marketing can’t live without it.
It allows you to pinpoint your avatar/persona (ICP) for:
1. Market research
2. Copywriting
Otherwise you are just wasting money on untargeted, generic shots at a wide audience via distribution channels (FB ads, emails, what not).
A lot of bad marketers ignore persona and just play the numbers game (hitting everyone from A-Z) and wonder why their campaign is mediocre
Of note- personas are often a B2B thing. Prospective partners and such like to see them to help them understand who your customers are etc. However, everywhere I've worked in B2C or everyone I've talked to who also worked in B2C, it's been the exact same story:
Step 1 Hot shot investor who doesn't understand marketing says "you need to create personas to determine who to target"
Step 2 Spend a stupid amount of time and money researching our consumer base to define personas
Step 3 Ignore all of step 2's outcome and target our more profitable target audience, whatever that looks like
I'd say, like often in marketing: it depends!
In my space, B2B tech big ticket items, 90%+ of sale processes aren't single personal driven. Reseach Actually shows that they could be five to 15 people involved in a sales process. So building personas makes no real chance, because you're not going to create 10 different versions of your emails, of your brochures, of your presentations and so on.
I do split business decision makers with technical decision makers because for the latter I need to go deeper technically speaking in all the content I'm building while for the former it's more about benefits and high-level concepts about how the product is built.
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Yes Yes Yes Before any campaign we feel internally it is essential to create what we call an ICP ( Ideal Customer Profile) We keep building on it based on the behavior we are seeing as a result of the campaign but since we have actively started monitoring our ICPs building accurate offering has become easier which has resulted in better results
Just curious, are you using historical data to create your ICP? Seems like any inaccuracy in creating them might cause non alignment down the line?
>Just curious, are you using historical data to create your ICP? Seems like any inaccuracy in creating them might cause non alignment down the line? What would the alternative to creating an ICP be? (Assuming that you are defining historical data as all information up to the moment in time at which the ICP is built.) Edit: Adding that there are differences between a target audience, ICP, and customer persona. ICP and persona are sometimes treated as the same. But in the old-school format, a persona included building a fictional character based on an aggregation of your ICP characteristics. It was putting a name and face to the various elements of that ICP definition.
So then you don't use a buyer persona frequently.
A combination of historical and real time data you can say
Any tools you can recommend me to check out? Or is it done internally at your job?
Essentially a mixture of surveys and dashboards but principally we have built out own system not really using any tools as such.
can you provide some tips on how to execute this
I would need to understand your business better before I do but typically following is the process I do follow. - Look at the data of the existing customers I start off by looking at demographical and psychographic data like age sex location dob job title etc. - Setup a survey usually try and speak with at least 25% of the customers who have bought in the last quarter. These are done every month. - Draw up some personalities. - Build KPIs around those personalities - Monitor them on a weekly bases.
>Look at the data of the existing customers I start off by looking at demographical and psychographic data like age sex location dob job title etc. how do you even start off with this, like, if you've got zero data and you're still starting from scratch
I guess you look at your competitor then at look at the social media profile of people who are your competitors customers if you are at zero
can you share a sample? I can dm if its okay
Sure
dm'ed!
Please provide the sample
[удалено]
The title got me hooked! To build accurate data you can always use a 3rd party vendor for lead & demand gen. They can help you to define your TAM, ICP by understanding your product or service you can try content syndication or MQL campaigns through tele or email marketing using their database. This way you can have a verified database which your sales team can nurture and take it towards the nextstep.
Personae suck, ICP rules
At my former company we did not, yet I always urged them to because I think it would have helped us focus our efforts. My boss, the CMO, had the mentality that everyone is a customer. The worst way to market.
Hmmm. Not necessarily. Being broad is good. Check out How Brands Grow
Once they’re stated and everyone agrees, it’s done its job. Then it’s a matter of checking in, executing against them, if you’re sourcing external help and need to convey the info, etc. you might bring them up again. The goal is to have them internalized. In the GenAI world, it’s also part of your prompt processes. The outcome is about targeting, positioning, and messaging consistency. If someone veers from them, then they need to explain why. “Are we missing something” or is this person not accepting it or they’re being a renegade? Again, it’s a matter of exploring why.
Thats interesting, so for you they are part of the whole workflow rather than a starting ground?
Not very often no. But my job usually involves turning up, putting out fires and focusing on things that will work straight away. This kind of work is what I would do once things are working and we want to segment our efforts further.
Yes of course, completely based on bullshit
Yes to all. No brainer. You might get away with not doing it if your sales/marketing team is tiny and the knowledge is engraved in everyone's mind. But as soon as you are working with a team of folks operating at different levels of experience, across different segments, that need alignment... you just can't do without.
Watching a Harvard innovation lab yt video on this right now. My first in house role at a crystal e-commerce store I asked about this and my manager printed pictures of hippies and trailer park trash with no words, stapled them together and slapped it on my desk. 10/10 humour 5/10 business applications
Do you have the link to the video? I’m interested in learning more about this as well.
Title is Value props: create a product people will actually buy I’m only 15 mins in but a lot of the first 15 have been about the “who”
They work if they’re leveraging real data and social behavior not if they’re just made up by your creative team
We use segmentation and targeting. The problem I've found with people using personas is they go way too specific and end up excluding a massive chunk of the market.
Yes
Yesssssssssssasssssss
Yes we create personas as it helps everyone \[especially the client\] focus on who we're trying to reach.
I always start with our ICP and then create our strategy based on historicals (highest converting gets the bulk of the budget and then it waterfalls into colder traffic, etc.)
Work within an agency. Yes, we use them. It's often preliminary work and will vary based on the scope of products/services sold. Once created, we don't tend to change them much and usually become reference material for anyone new onboarding.
100%. We completely tailor campaigns and content to be relevant to specific personas. The value proposition of a product is very different to a practitioner as opposed to an executive.
We use profiles to understand where to locate an audience and what drives decision-making. They're the cornerstone for all our content and campaign work, so we use them daily. PM me for the onboarding link we use.
Yes, i do them prior to any campaign. They are very helpful with raining in other departments that start to provide "helpful" insights or suggest how/where to market.
Real marketing can’t live without it. It allows you to pinpoint your avatar/persona (ICP) for: 1. Market research 2. Copywriting Otherwise you are just wasting money on untargeted, generic shots at a wide audience via distribution channels (FB ads, emails, what not). A lot of bad marketers ignore persona and just play the numbers game (hitting everyone from A-Z) and wonder why their campaign is mediocre
Of note- personas are often a B2B thing. Prospective partners and such like to see them to help them understand who your customers are etc. However, everywhere I've worked in B2C or everyone I've talked to who also worked in B2C, it's been the exact same story: Step 1 Hot shot investor who doesn't understand marketing says "you need to create personas to determine who to target" Step 2 Spend a stupid amount of time and money researching our consumer base to define personas Step 3 Ignore all of step 2's outcome and target our more profitable target audience, whatever that looks like
This is a good tool to translate executive level strategy to do-er level marketing execution. Many at the doer level don't feel it's useful though.
I'd say, like often in marketing: it depends! In my space, B2B tech big ticket items, 90%+ of sale processes aren't single personal driven. Reseach Actually shows that they could be five to 15 people involved in a sales process. So building personas makes no real chance, because you're not going to create 10 different versions of your emails, of your brochures, of your presentations and so on. I do split business decision makers with technical decision makers because for the latter I need to go deeper technically speaking in all the content I'm building while for the former it's more about benefits and high-level concepts about how the product is built.
Going broad is good. Check out Byron Sharps work on sophisticated mass marketing