ICP, Persona, and Target Audience: Don’t Mix Up These 3 Concepts
Ideal customer profile (ICP), buyer persona, target audience…
There are so many terms that we can end up getting confused— or thinking that they are just different words describing the same concept.
But don’t be mistaken!
The three are indeed related, but there are significant differences between them.
In fact, each of these concepts evolves from the other.
After defining who your company’s best customers are (ICP), it becomes possible to identify who the decision-makers and influencers in the buying process are for building personas.
The personas, in turn, will be the base used by marketing when prospecting new clients as the target audience.
Want to understand each of these concepts in detail?
Let’s dive in!
Why is Defining Customer Profiles Important
In a scenario with more competition and where the user’s attention span is ever-decreasing, defining your personas and establishing your digital marketing ICP is essential.
This is because we are more connected than ever, and it feels like we always receive the same offers for content, promotions, discounts, product types, etc.
In other words, by defining a well-characterized, segmented, and complete customer profile, you will be helping your company differentiate its products and services from competitors. Also, think about how your strategies and marketing campaigns will be far more effective and personalized.
🔎 Read also: Business Marketing: Where to Start? 5 Current Marketing Tips
What is the Ideal Customer Profile (ICP)?
The ICP, or Ideal Customer Profile, is a detailed description of your perfect customer—the type of customer who sees great value in your product or service and also generates enough value for your company to make a profit.
Think about your best customer.
They use all the features of your product, are highly engaged, provide feedback and suggestions for improvement, refer new customers, achieve the best results with your company’s help, and, in return, generate excellent financial returns for your business.
If you can make a detailed description of this customer, you’re very close to defining your ICP.
Now that you know what ICP is, let’s understand why defining it is important and how to do it!
Why Define an ICP?
Defining the Ideal Customer Profile isn’t just about getting to know your customer better.
This profile acts as a filter for lead generation and helps the sales team focus their efforts on leads that best meet the qualification and purchase-readiness criteria.
Thus, the chances of conversion increase—improving your company’s sales results.
Furthermore, lead qualification is enhanced, you can reach your target more easily (we’ll get to this concept soon!), save time, money, and resources, and even increase customer loyalty post-conversion.
Other benefits of defining an ICP include:
- Defining better qualification filters;
- Prioritizing customer service for more qualified leads;
- Defining your personas and target audience;
- Aligning expectations and results between marketing and sales teams;
- Creating more accurate marketing campaigns with better segmentation;
- Generating more qualified leads;
- Improving sales approaches;
- Generating more value for customers—and more revenue for the company;
- Increasing your customers’ Lifetime Value (LTV).
Read also: 8 Sales and Marketing KPIs Leaders Want to See on Your Dashboard
How to Create an Ideal Customer Profile?
There are several methods that can help define your company’s ICP. But generally, this is the order to follow:
- Identifying your best customers
- Conducting qualified interviews
- Analyzing data
- Creating the Profile
When talking to these customers, it’s important to identify how they found your company, their journey up until the purchase moment, what led to the final decision, and what benefits they gained from your product or service.
You can consider factors like average ticket, budget, company size, digital maturity—among other important criteria for your sales cycle.
Here’s an example of Cognism’s ICP:
What is a Buyer Persona?
On the other hand, the concept of Buyer Persona can be defined as a fictional representation of your customer, which helps understand how each type of audience you wish to target behaves and consumes.
The Buyer Persona is an evolution of the ICP, identifying the influencers and decision-makers in the buying process to build profiles that can assist various areas of the company.
A company may have multiple personas but will only have one Ideal Customer Profile.
With all these factors in mind, it will be much easier to define the strategies and investments that will be made to achieve your goals.
What is the Difference Between Buyer Persona and Brand Persona?
There is another term that may appear in your marketing and sales research and strategies: the Brand Persona.
Unlike the Buyer Persona, which is the fictional representation of ideal customers, the Brand Persona is the personified representation of a brand or company’s values.
This tool is created to guide teams working on content production for the brand, making it easier to understand and maintain the same tone of voice and personality across all materials produced in the brand’s name.
🧐 Learn more: Brand Persona and Buyer Persona: Differences and How to Develop Each
Why Define a Buyer Persona?
By creating a persona, you help the company and the marketing department understand how to position themselves and communicate with potential consumers at any stage of the buying journey.
Additionally, personas guide other areas of the company, experiments, and improvements by adding a more realistic layer to the discussions.
By defining all the persona’s characteristics, you can understand and prioritize new features or products and services created, improve websites and Landing Pages, enhance interface and user experience, determine offers, and produce targeted content in all materials developed.
Some benefits of defining your Buyer Personas:
- Facilitates positioning and communication definition;
- Improves user experience;
- Guides sales and marketing strategies throughout the sales journey;
- Helps other teams make consumer-focused improvements.
How to Create a Buyer Persona?
When creating your buyer personas, keep in mind that combining different practices will result in more precise information about who your ideal customer really is and the behaviors, pain points, and desires they have.
Among the best tools, techniques, and practices for building your brand’s personas are:
- Quantitative surveys;
- Qualitative surveys;
- Interviews with real customers;
- Empathy maps;
- Persona Worksheet;
- Value Proposition Canvas.
Be creative in collecting, analyzing, and combining the data that will lead to the profile representing your audience.
And remember, the profiles should include information such as demographics, interests, pain points, consumption behavior, goals, and also explanations of how your product or solution will make a difference in the consumer’s daily life.
How to Use the Value Proposition Canvas in Creating Buyer Personas?
One tool that we at Leadster find very useful for creating Buyer Personas is the Value Proposition Canvas.
The Value Proposition Canvas is a tool that facilitates defining and creating this strategic part of a company. It is an in-depth part of the Business Model Canvas.
On the right side of the Canvas, there’s the Customer Profile—very similar to what we are trying to define for our personas.
It includes tasks your customer needs to perform, problems they are trying to solve, and needs they aim to satisfy.
The main benefits your customer expects, desires, or would like to obtain by completing their tasks. These can be tangible benefits (like profit, savings, and sales results) or intangible benefits (like success and recognition).
And the major pains, negative emotions, risks, and unwanted situations your customer might experience before, during, or after completing their tasks.
A value proposition is a promise to be delivered. Clearly and concisely, it is what your company or brand has to offer. It is the main reason why your consumer buys from you.
We won’t dwell too much on this part of the Canvas, as it’s not the focus of this article.
But you can learn more about the subject by reading the article What is a Value Proposition, What It’s For, and How to Create One.
Examples of Companies with Well-Defined Personas
To make it easier for you to understand, we’ve selected 5 types of well-defined personas from established companies that can help you when defining your business’s personas.
Check them out!
Airbnb
Airbnb aims to facilitate accommodation for both hosts and guests, which is why their personas strictly follow all the needs and preferences of the clients.
We’re talking about the types of trips they usually take, budgets, and specific interests.
Based on the collected profiles, Airbnb is able to personalize the accommodation experience for each client, offering accurate recommendations and helping them find the ideal place to stay.
One persona defined by Airbnb is the “Adventurer.”
The company realized that many of its customers were looking for unique and exciting experiences during their trips, so they created a specific persona for these needs, recommending the most thrilling activities and tours in their destinations.
Salesforce
Salesforce, which offers CRM software, defined its personas based on different roles within companies, such as the marketing manager, sales manager, and customer service manager.
Based on this ICP in digital marketing, the company can provide personalized solutions and address the specific needs of each customer at the right time.
Take the persona “Marketing Manager,” for example. Salesforce understood that marketing managers have specific needs and goals, such as managing leads and marketing campaigns, and based on this, the marketing manager persona was established.
Netflix
The video streaming platform Netflix uses data analysis to understand what its customers like and create personalized profiles for each one.
By analyzing the movies and TV shows watched, the company could identify patterns and preferences, such as favorite genres and actors.
A real example of how Netflix leverages data to personalize the customer experience is the creation of user profiles. The brand can define personas based on the consumer’s browsing and interaction history.
Nike
With a persona definition process similar to Airbnb, the sportswear company Nike creates personalized profiles for different types of athletes, based on their preferences, habits, and specific needs.
One example among the personas for each type of athlete is the “Long-Distance Runner.”
Nike understood that long-distance runners have specific shoe and apparel needs, such as greater durability and cushioning. From that, they created products to meet these needs, as well as personalized marketing campaigns to connect with this specific persona.
What is Target Audience or Target?
Finally, we reach the third point that can cause confusion and doubts: target audience or target.
These two terms are used to refer to the same concept: segments of potential customers identified through characteristics defined by your company.
For defining the target audience, Buyer Personas are used as the basis to identify these criteria and create the segmented group of consumers that your company wants to reach with specific campaigns and actions.
Why Define a Target Audience?
By defining a target audience, you can better direct your efforts and resources to create attraction and lead acquisition campaigns.
Whether offline campaigns or paid online media, defining the target audience is essential and often mandatory on platforms to ensure that ads are shown to the right people.
How to Create a Target?
It’s worth reviewing the target for each action or new campaign.
For example, let’s say your brand is an optical store that sells both online and in physical stores.
Probably, the target audience for an Instagram campaign directing traffic to the e-commerce will differ from the target for a promotional action directing people to physical stores, right?
The target should align with the Buyer Persona and must be defined or reviewed according to the objectives of each specific campaign.
Additionally, some details will vary depending on the funnel stage, channel, or campaign type.
An example of a target we use in our Leadster campaigns:
How to use Technology to Define your Target Audience, Persona, or ICP?
Okay, we know there’s a lot of data to be collected in order to define your target audience, persona, and ICP.
With that in mind, we’ve separated ways to leverage technology and make your collection, analysis, and creation process easier. Check it out:
Demographic Data Analysis Tools
Demographic data like gender, age, and location are essential for defining your personas, ICP, and target audience.
Nowadays, you no longer need to conduct endless surveys to discover this information, as there are tools that collect this data and analyze it for you.
I’m talking about tools like Google Analytics and Facebook Insights, which gather information about users’ age, gender, location, and interests, helping create more accurate audience profiles.
CRM Data
CRMs (Customer Relationship Management) are systems for managing customer relationships that collect and store data about your interactions with clients.
Besides helping with customer and lead management, the data can be used to create personalized customer profiles and better understand consumers’ needs and behaviors.
Some of the best CRMs include:
- Fleeg
- Simply CRM
- Snov.io
Usability Testing and User Surveys
By conducting usability tests and marketing surveys with your users, you can identify errors in your channels and track the behavior of those interacting with your brand.
With data in hand, you can build a much more specific, precise, and personalized persona.
Some examples of tools include:
- UserTesting
- SurveyMonkey
Artificial Intelligence
Finally, we couldn’t leave artificial intelligence out, right?
AI uses machine learning algorithms to analyze customer data and create personalized profiles based on users’ preferences, behaviors, and needs.
Some AI tools that can help create personas include:
- IBM Watson
- Amazon SageMaker
🤿 Dive deeper: Artificial Intelligence in Digital Marketing – 21 Use Cases
ICP, Persona, and Target Audience in Practice
So, to recap and summarize, the terms ICP, Persona, and Target Audience are used to refer to the audience desired by your brand, but the key differences between the three concepts lie mainly in their applications:
- ICP – the ideal customer profile that will guide sales and marketing actions;
- Persona – the fictional representation of the main decision-makers and influencers in the buying process;
- Target Audience – also known as the target, is used to determine the group that should be impacted by specific marketing and sales actions and campaigns.
It’s very easy to understand how these 3 concepts are very different, right? But it can be tricky to separate them in practice, day after day.
If there’s anything else we can hel you with, feel free to comment and we’ll figure something out, alright?
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