Knowing your audience is critical to business success. Even for global enterprises that sell seemingly universal products or services, knowing who makes a buying decision—and how—remains crucial to optimizing sales and marketing efforts and focusing on the most profitable customers.
Buyer personas and ICPs offer two methods to clarify who customers are. Companies often create multiple personas and ICPs, but they’re not interchangeable.
Rather than deciding on ICP vs. personas, the two approaches work together to offer a framework (ICP) and fictionalized individual (persona) that guide strategic sales, marketing, support, and development decisions.
An ideal customer or client profile exercise yields one or more ICP sheets, with each summarizing a company profile to represent a key market segment for the business. It’s most often used for business-to-business (B2B) organizations, where the ICP details a business entity target (that may or may not contain end users) rather than individual consumers.
A B2B ICP typically identifies firmographics, behaviors, and traits, including:
Some of these answers are guided by your company’s limits and sweet spots rather than researching it all from scratch. For instance:
ICPs are critical for account-based marketing, which is used by 94% of B2B marketers. It involves identifying large-scale target companies to approach and crafting customized materials and messaging for them.
Both quantitative and qualitative analyses are valuable in creating ICPs. This includes:
Steps to develop an ICP include:
Although more common within B2B entities, ICPs absolutely provide value to B2C (business to consumer) companies as well for capturing segments, organizations, or environments that B2Cs target.
So, what is a buyer persona? Buyer personas represent ideal customers at the individual level. They’re conveyed as fictionalized characters who are crucial to the buying journey—typically primary decision-makers, even if they’re not the individual who handles the administrative aspect of completing a sale.
One of the top goals for persona creation is personalizing marketing content and delivery—a practice that drives 40% more revenue for the fastest-growing companies that excel at it. Think of it like this: An ICP helps you attend the right convention with a great display and product offerings, and a customer persona helps you figure out where to locate the right contact person at the show and what to say to them to close a sale.
The factors that go into creating a persona card include:
For B2B entities, buyer personas often prioritize the buying role and how traits are expressed in a professional environment while still describing some non-numerical traits. At the B2C level, the description leans more toward private life, with attention to behaviors and values that are useful to understand.
Both B2Bs and B2Cs rely on personas for the nitty gritty of campaign planning when they:
While their focus and use diverge, the process of creating a buyer persona reflects that of an ICP. Both start with market research and data analysis to identify patterns that are tested and refined. Organizations then create a one-page slide or card that summarizes distinct characteristics and which teams will use to guide their efforts. Over time, the organization continues testing and updating to achieve ongoing improvement.
Additionally, you might develop a negative buyer persona, which is equally important. This persona identifies customers who are not a good fit for your product or service, helping you avoid wasted resources and effort.
ICP vs. persona research methods differ only in that buyer persona research often incorporates more than the methods mentioned under the ICP section above, such as:
You may have encountered a few “deja vu” moments reading the ICP vs persona sections above. Between the two, there’s a significant overlap in:
The differences between an ICP vs. buyer persona show up more when it comes to which questions are posed during the research phase and how the two tools are used. Consider:
When it comes to market profiling, it’s not a question of ICP vs. personas but rather layering the methods together to become greater than their parts.
For example, consider a metropolitan restaurant supply business. Their ICPs might include:
Each ICP would reflect different buying schedules, budgets, needs, and challenges, and each might connect to one or more buyer personas. For instance, the culinary schools ICP might be home to:
Audience profiling isn’t a matter of ICP vs. buyer persona; rather, it’s about selecting the right mix of approaches for your business needs. You can benefit from using ICPs at a company or segment level to structure sales, lead-gen, and account-based marketing, and then personalizing content, ad targeting, and media buys based on individual, fictionalized buyer personas.
Both models help you identify prospective customers and understand how and where to introduce yourself.
With Nextdoor, you can connect to current customers and potential clients geographically, down to the micro-neighborhood, in addition to targeting specific demographics and interests. Start with a free Business Page to establish a local online presence. Then, use Business Posts to interact with your community and Nextdoor Ads to identify your ideal customers and promote special offers.
Nextdoor Ads Manager offers an easy-to-use, interactive dashboard to track engagement and ad performance with real-time feedback. It’s how entrepreneur Rita Shelley promoted specific, targeted messaging to neighbors in various zip codes, and what helped family-run Canseco’s Gardening Services grow their local business by 40%.
Looking for more Nextdoor insights and guidance on customer profiling? Visit the Nextdoor Business Center to learn more.
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