According to the Digital Marketing Institute, personalized campaigns that are based on buyer personas drive 18 times more revenue than broadcast emails.
Let’s examine what you should know about each from a high level and why using both of them can be beneficial to your organization.
Do you know who you’re trying to reach with your marketing efforts? Who are the people you’re trying to connect with and convert?
According to HubSpot, buyer personas are semi-fictional representations of your ideal customers. These are based on data and research, and they help you narrow your marketing focus. Using information based on them allows you to channel your time and energy toward more qualified prospects. They include factors like demographics, as well as relevant goals, motivators, and challenges that your customers are facing. They can help give your campaigns structure, context, and relevancy.
Of course, buyer personas (also known as audience or marketing personas) are crucial to the success of business-to-consumer (B2C) organizations. But they are also important to have if your business sells products or services to other companies.
Your marketing must be targeted with a laser-like focus to connect with these buyers and purchasing influencers, and solve the problems they have.
A business-to-business (B2B) persona focuses on the individuals you ultimately sell to or who influence the sale. The difference in a B2B versus a B2C buyer persona is that it has more specifics about their professional role.
How many should your organization have? You may consider creating between two and five, but it can vary. The Digital Marketing Institute states that typically three to four buyer personas usually account for 90% of a company’s sales.
Your ideal customer profile, also known as an ideal buyer profile, is a description of a fictitious account you want to sell to. Not only should your ideal customer receive significant value from your product or service, but they should also be a profitable and enjoyable type of company to do business with.
Your ideal account should be the company that is the best fit for your organization. Essentially, your ICP is a fabricated, hypothetical company that has all the qualities that are uniquely suited to do business with yours.
Determining your ideal customer profile is especially helpful if you are using an account-based marketing (ABM) approach because it helps you focus on selling to target accounts that your company is best suited for. This is because an ICP helps define the problems your company solves, identify the right companies for your B2B business, and connects your products and services with your customers’ needs — all crucial steps to having a successful account-based approach.
One of the main reasons ICPs are so helpful is that they can help you increase your customers’ estimated lifetime value since those customers should be good fits for your business, therefore typically requiring less customer support and having a lower attrition, or churn, rate.
Another benefit of creating an ICP is that it helps you maximize your marketing resources. Your ICP gives you the power to optimize the relevance of your marketing and track the results of your sales efforts from a B2B perspective. You can therefore easily view not just sold amounts by contact, deal, or sales representative in a customer relationship management (CRM) system. You can also view sold amounts by target company within HubSpot's Target Accounts dashboard, as mentioned in this previous post about ABM and noted here:
When you’re utilizing ABM strategies, it helps to know which companies are the best fit for your business, as those are the ones you should devote your resources to winning over. HubSpot's comprehensive growth suite helps make implementing targeted ABM campaigns and tracking the success of those efforts even easier and more transparent.
Why is this distinction such an important one? What are the differences between the two?
Some may say that ideal customer profiles are made for B2B organizations that sell directly to companies, while buyer personas are for B2C organizations that sell directly to customers.
However, there’s no reason these two profiles can’t work together for B2B organizations. After all, you’re not selling your product or service to the name of a business. You’re interacting with people who are making decisions on behalf of their organization. You can therefore use both to meet the needs of the organization and the people who work there. Remember — the field of business-to-business interactions is still a human-to-human process!
Your buyer personas and ideal customer profiles should serve one another. Having well-defined profiles for each is the key to successfully marketing to businesses and making a meaningful impact on the people who work there.
Your ICPs help you define who to target, and your personas help you determine the best people to target at those companies, as well as the best ways to communicate with them. Both can help you close more profitable deals. And both are integral to account-based marketing, where you are focusing your efforts on individual target accounts.
Certain things should be included in your personas and profiles to ensure that they are specific enough to reach the right people without alienating potential customers who may prove to be your future best customer.
When defining your ICP, you are helping narrow down a broad field of potential leads to the ones who are the best fit for your company. What kinds of characteristics can help pinpoint your ideal customer profile? Here are some factors HubSpot recommends considering:
This isn’t an exhaustive list, but it’s a good place to start to ensure your sales reps are spending time with leads that are a good fit for your company.
Since your buyer personas are fictionalized versions of real people, you should be able to include and identify the following for each persona you create:
When you take the time to create both, you gain a competitive advantage over those who don't by creating a solid foundation for much more targeted, efficient, and relevant marketing, sales, and customer service strategies.
Our team of writers, web developers, designers, advertisers, strategists, and SEO experts can help you define and implement both of these. As well as use them to develop targeted growth strategies for your company. Want to learn more about what we can do for you? Request a consultation today.