Day-to-day, it seems obvious that we don’t talk to people from our various social circles the same way — we tailor our messaging to make sure it stays relevant and engaging.
For some reason, it’s often not the same in business. Most companies treat website visitors or click-throughs from their marketing campaigns or ad impressions as equal. Only after a lead reaches your BDR does the filtering process begin. This is both expensive and ineffective.
Luckily, you can significantly improve your results at little extra cost by identifying your ICP (ideal customer profile). ICP marketing allows you to better understand your audience, target them more specifically, and customize your communication.
What Are ICPs?
An ideal customer profile (ICP) is a precise description of your target audience. However, it’s not the same thing as a buyer or brand persona.
While personas are often created to work with your offering at a more emotional level and granular level (e.g. accompanied with names and job titles), ideal customer profiles zero in on who gets the most value out of what you sell — at an account level.
Ideal customer profiles are indispensable when trying to figure out if there’s actually a growing need for your product and its total addressable market.
For example, you can decide that your ICPs are partners at mid-sized law firms in Houston, and then you can estimate how many people fall into that category. This could also tremendously help your marketing efforts by targeting more precise keywords for online ads as well as creating more specific content.
You could also have a few distinct ICPs (and you probably do), so segmenting your campaigns based on icp marketing will bring more clarity to your budgeting and also positively affect your conversion rates.
A few common ICP marketing characteristics are industry, number of employees, annual revenue, number of locations, etc. To identify your ICPs, you could also focus on past performance metrics, such as CLV (customer lifetime value), CPA (cost per acquisitions), churn rate, and so on. The key is to focus on what is relevant to your offering.
Once you have clear ICP characteristics in place, you can use a more targeted approach to customer acquisition rather than addressing various audiences with the same message. The more control you have over where your website visitors are coming from the easier it would be for your BDRs to actually close deals.
How to create accurate ICPs?
ICPs can vary greatly from company to company. As mentioned above, this depends on a variety of factors, from your total addressable market to your current customer lifetime value.
A good place to start describing your ICPs is looking at your best customers today. What characteristics do they share? What’s their industry, size, location, and growth rate?
Then think about and analyze those companies’ goals, strategies, and tactics. Do they prefer one method of communication over another? How do they procure new vendors?
Make sure to use a few up-to-date sources for all this information. And keep updating your records to evolve your ICPs over time.
Finally, define both opportunities and challenges your ICPs face, and list all the ways you can address them. Just knowing and using these throughout your sales and marketing process is going to improve your conversions considerably.
How to Identify ICPs On Your Site
While ICP marketing is great at pre-qualifying your target customers because your messaging resonates with them, they are still mostly anonymous when they land on your website and there’s hardly any way you can distinguish them from other traffic.
How do you identify anonymous website visitors (up to 98% of all visitors) and rank higher those interested in your product without your BDR team talking to every single one of them?
Lift AI is a unique buyer-intent solution that uses an enormous machine-scoring model to determine which of your website visitors are more likely to buy.
As soon as your visitors land on their first webpage, Lift AI starts developing an accurate ranking for them. High-scoring visitors (on average around 9% of the total) get connected to your BDRs right away through chat. Lower-scoring ones can either be qualified with a nurturing bot or offered to use a self-help interface.
The result of your salespeople talking primarily to the highest-scoring visitors is a two to 10 times increase in conversions within 90 days.
Lift AI works with any enterprise chat software (from Drift to LivePerson), takes seconds to install (by placing a JavaScript snippet to your code), so get in touch with us Today.
So while using ICP marketing to go after and properly segment the right customers is increasingly important, having a tool like Lift AI to identify anonymous website visitors can further supercharge these efforts and help you engage the best ones while they are on your website.
