Poor returns from mass marketing efforts are inevitable when somebody runs their campaigns with no specific data on customer behavior and preferences. An account-based marketing strategy can rectify the situation if you want to make the most of frugal budgets. However, it won’t let marketing teams bring in qualified leads and scale up the customer base.
That’s when ICP marketing should come into play. It’s an agile and genuinely growth-oriented approach that will prompt go-to-market teams on prospects that typically convert. Let’s discuss how to build data-driven ICP for b2b businesses.
The Definition of ICP
ICP stands for Ideal Customer Profile. It’s similar to the buyer persona, as it’s also a generalized vision of the target audience (TA) with strong buying intent. Like buyer persona, ICP is built from demographic, firmographic, and psychographic attributes. The latter defines prospects’ intentions and pains.
How is ICP Different from Buyer Persona?
Buyer persona is more of an initial concept targeting the broad audiences at the start of your marketing efforts. In contrast, ICP provides a richer and more detailed view of prospects by pulling together a great deal of first-hand experience from sales and b2b customer data.
What Sources Contribute to ICP Development?
To build comprehensive and up-to-date ICP, specialists need to gather inputs from the following sources:
- Sales, marketing, product, and customer success (CS) teams. Pulling together data from different teams helps you identify ICP at every funnel stage.
- Inbound lead generation campaigns. Looking into reports from your paid social and SEO campaigns to see what type of content interests your TA most. What keeps them engaged and makes them subscribe to your social media and emails?
- Third-party data providers. Most successful growth teams leverage data from more than one b2b data provider. These are invaluable sources of intent and company-level data to navigate you through the Total Available Market.
How Does ICP Marketing Drive Lead Generation and Revenue?
Practicing ICP marketing can truly boost lead generation, conversions, and revenue. Here are the key factors that underlie these gains.
Product, Marketing, and Sales Alignment
When a company develops and tweaks its ICP, it reaches alignment between product, marketing, and sales teams. As proven by multiple case studies and statistics, such practice is a sure way to convert more leads.
For instance, according to HubSpot, about 79% of marketing leads never make it to sales. But with proper coordination of lead nurturing efforts between salespeople and marketers, companies can multiply the number of sales opportunities.
Higher Match Rates in Paid Social Campaigns
Marketers use ICP as a reference when they enrich b2b data sets and create more granular audiences for social ads. Audience enrichment platforms like Primer can merge company and person-level data for each record in a targeted list.
Eventually, it improves the matching between your audience and members of the ad platforms. For example, the match rate for native targeting on Facebook and LinkedIn varies from 10% to 30%. Conversely, you can hit 60-80% on Facebook and 70-90% on LinkedIn with the enriched audience lists.
Improvement of Customer Retention Rate
ICP helps you understand TA demands and pains better. It allows you to maximize revenue and increase customer lifetime value by building more personalized communication across all advertising channels.
Building an Ideal Customer Profile for a B2B Company in 5 Steps
Here’s a step-by-step guide to developing ICP for a B2B company:
Step 1 – Determine the Objectives of ICP Creation
It starts with identifying the purpose of ICP use for each team. Whereas marketers primarily need ICP to enrich targeting criteria, salespeople use it to tailor sales emails and proposals that appeal to customers. You’ll need a unified core ICP which you can extend later depending on use cases.
Step 2 – Gather Inputs from Different Teams
Consider winning cases of CS teams besides inputs from marketing and sales. Therefore, you’ll build an ICP that correlates with closed-won opportunities. It will represent the segment of TA consisting of soon-to-be buyers.
Step 3 – Enrich ICP with Additional Data Points
Extend the ICP by appending additional data points from trusted data providers such as ZooomInfo or Apollo. Use data enrichment platforms, as advised before, to merge these bits of information into a single dataset.
Once you have it, see whether you need a tighter or broader ICP. For instance, you can level down the company headcount if you’re sure that smaller companies fall under your sales opportunities more often.
Step 4 – Identify Inputs that Might Distort Your Results
Analyze what share of leads go further down the funnel and how you can identify them. It is essential as it allows you to reduce the weightage of a particular TA segment in the ICP model you create.
Step 5 – Get the Ultimate Buy-in at the End
Achieving broad agreement between heads of Product, Sales, and Marketing on developed ICP is crucial. So check if they want to include extra attributes into the formed data set to help them with everyday tasks.
