All customers aren’t made equal.

Some will buy from you and some won’t.

What if you spend all your time, energy, and ad dollars on the ones who won’t buy?

If you try to appeal to everyone, you’ll end up appealing to no one, so it’s essential to target the right people.

Your ideal customer profile (ICP) helps you do that.

Your ICP informs all the major decisions you’ll make, so it’s an important first step.

What Information Your Ideal Customer Profile Needs

Your ideal customer profile needs two types of data – demographic and psychographic.

Demographics tell who your ideal buyer is.

It includes information like age, geographic location, language, marital status, earnings, family, education level, and lifestyle.

Even though all this information might not seem strictly relevant to your business, it should be included if there are trends.

Psychographic information is your buyer’s behavior, values, aspirations, and attitudes.

Pay attention especially to their buying behaviour, such as how they make purchases, how much money they spend, how they feel about spending money.

It’s also important to find out what problems your audience faces.

Look for challenges or issues they’re trying to overcome.

If you can provide the help they need, they’ll become loyal customers.

Objective Data, Not Assumptions

The data in your ICP needs to be based on objective feedback from the market, not just your assumptions.

You might already have a gut feeling about who your target market is.

You can tell some things about them by looking at your products and services and the problems they solve.

However, you need to research and use objective data as much as possible.

As you discover more about your audience, there will be some surprises along the way.

If it’s all based on assumptions, you might miss the mark.

How to Learn about Your Market and Build Your ICP

You can obtain this objective data through direct and indirect methods.

Direct methods include interacting and engaging with your audience.

Listen to their conversations.

Ask questions and start conversations.

Run polls and surveys.

Reach out to people and create opportunities for you to learn about them.

Indirect methods are important as well.

There are some things people won’t tell you, but you can learn through their behaviour.

Look at website metrics, social media activity, buying behaviour, and how they interact with competitors.

How to Use Your Ideal Customer Profile

Your ICP is essential because it crafts your marketing message.

Your message needs to speak directly to your audience and in order to do that, you need to know them well.

You’ll also use it for ad targeting.

When you create ads, you can choose parameters based on the demographics of your buyer persona.

It will determine what content you create and help you understand which leads are worth putting resources into pursuing.