We spend a great deal of time helping our customers define the Ideal Client or Customer Profiles (ICP) for their business.  Some time ago, it was enough to understand the demographics and psychographics of your target prospects.  In other words, we once schooled our customers that they needed to know the size, location, industry, buying habits and experience of their Ideal Prospects so that they could form the most effective messaging and target that messaging at their ICP.  By being more specific in their definition of their ICP, we could help our customers see a higher return on their marketing investment – what we commonly call ROMI.  

Surprisingly, this was really difficult for many of our clients.  They wanted to fall back into the habit of just marketing to as many people as possible – what we commonly refer to as Shotgun Marketing.   Just keep shooting and hopefully you will hit something.  Unfortunately, this type of shooting takes lots of shotgun shells or different marketing campaigns, which costs lots of money.  Also, we don’t always know which shot “brought down” the prospect so it makes it difficult to track the performance of individual campaigns.  Without being able to track campaigns we cannot pick the winners and stop doing the ineffective ones.

As we progressed over the years in the sophistication level of the guidance that we provided to our clients, we added another dimension to the amount of information gathering required to build an ICP.  In addition to the demographic data, we asked our clients to determine which of their customers had the greatest lifetime value so that we could increase the ROMI or at least decrease the cost of customer acquisition over the lifetime of the customer.  In other words, the longer we can keep a customer and the more of our products that they will consume – the better the customer they apparently were.

The next progression in the level of our guidance to our clients was in the area of qualitative value.  Of any company’s customers, some are bad customers, some are okay customers and some you want to take home to meet mother.  By studying these customers, their buying habits and their load or encumbrance on the organization from a support and cost perspective, we could further increase our profits by not only defining and messaging to our ICP, but by defining the types of customers that we actually want to have.

And now, our clients have found that we have become absolutely unreasonable in our demands for them to further define their ICP.  Adding to demographics, profitability and desirability of prospects, we now ask our clients to define their personality.  See – absolutely unreasonable.  Now we want to drill down into their customer’s psyches, their wants, likes, dislikes, fears, and even quirks.  What do they need, what are they looking for and why is this particular product the one that best fulfills that need?  Imagine, for a minute, how effective you could be at gift giving if you somehow magically knew the one thing that the person was dying to have.  Or imagine how effective a negotiator you could be if you knew the exact words that would make your opponent grant you everything you requested and still feel like they had won the negotiation.

Spending the extra time to develop in-depth persona descriptions of your best customers provides so much insight and power to your marketing efforts.  A complete description of each of these customer types can increase the performance of every marketing effort because you can tailor your message to a specific personality of one of your target prospect groups.  Now you can know what they want, how they want it.  And most importantly, you can present the perfect product to them in a way that they cannot refuse to buy it – now that is powerful marketing.