First things first. What exactly is an ideal customer profile (ICP), also sometimes called an ideal buyer profile?
Why is forming an ICP helpful? It can be useful in applying an account-based marketing (ABM) strategy, which is about connecting with multiple stakeholders within a company. ABM strategies can also help improve the effectiveness of your marketing and sales efforts since they prioritize targeted accounts, companies that fit the ICP profile, and therefore de-emphasize the pursuit of poor-fit companies.
Your manufacturing company’s ICP also allows you to align your products with your customers’ needs. It may help you plan out future products to manufacture or determine how to update the products you currently produce.
You could send every lead you get to your sales department, but not all of them may be a good fit. This ends up wasting everyone's time and is therefore not a very wise use of valuable resources.
To keep this from happening, your ideal customer profile can define what a good fit looks like for who you are as an organization and the products you manufacture. What should factor into your ICP?
You can use questions like these to begin to sketch your ICP as you uncover who they are.
When your team sits down to develop your ICP, keep in mind that different people may have very different competing visions of who your business as a whole should target. From sales to marketing, to the engineers who develop your products, everyone will likely have an opinion about who your ideal customer is, and all of their opinions might not be the same.
Your goal when creating your ICP is to come up with a single common vision for your brand. One definition of the ICP that represents the interests of each of your teams. How is this achieved? What goes into the actual creation of one?
ReadWrite suggests that your ideal customer profile needs to meet the following criteria:
What’s next? It’s time to get started!
When it’s time to roll up your sleeves and get to work, there are a series of steps to take to create your ICP that start with the gathering of data. You already have a lot of valuable information at your fingertips to create your ideal customer profile; use the data of your existing customers.
To begin, identify which existing customers are the most profitable for your company. You can then refine this list further to see which of them seem to be the happiest and most satisfied. This gives you a clear picture of who is getting the most value from the products you manufacture. It also provides you with a list of customers to contact for the next step in creating your ideal customer profile.
Don’t be shy about contacting customers if you are having trouble tracking down some of this information. Just let them know that you are using their brand as an example of your ideal customer; it’s an opportunity to further connect with them. Chances are they are already loyal to your manufacturing business. You can also tell them that this information will help you serve them better in the future.
Talking with contacts at your ideal customer profile sample companies is an opportune time to find out why each customer does business with your manufacturing company. You should ask them the following questions:
Once you have all of these questions answered, it’s time to put all your data together, analyze it, and search for correlations and commonalities. Think of it as finding the least common denominators. What do each of these companies have in common? This is the time to comb through your data and find patterns.
A carefully curated ICP can help strengthen and unify your entire team. An ICP empowers your manufacturing company to work from the same clear vision; you’ll know who to market to, what they need and how you can help them.
The next step is taking action to drive growth with what you've learned.
Ideal customer profiles can give your company a great deal of control over where and how you direct your manufacturing company’s marketing resources. They also give you the power to align your sales and marketing teams, which is the very tenet of ABM. They help you to personalize the buyer’s journey, your communication with customers, improve your return on investment (ROI), and boost customer loyalty.
What does this look like in actual practice and execution? Here are some things you can do with your ICP:
Your ICP will streamline your sales process, embolden you to make wise business decisions, and refine your account-based marketing strategies. There’s truly no downside to investing the time for your manufacturing company to better define who you should focus on marketing and selling to. You want to attract, engage, and delight the right customers. An ideal customer profile helps you do that.
We can help your manufacturing business clarify who their ICP is and create personalized marketing campaigns that target the right people at the right companies.
Want to learn more? Request a consultation today.