Welcome to Part I of Edition No. 75 of my weekly newsletter, providing practical analysis in the world of digital content strategy.
I had a fairly minor car accident this morning and my day has been a bit hectic. Fortunately, I already had this newsletter drafted.
I won’t be doing Friday’s this week while I rest and recover. Hopefully back to normal next week.
Thanks for understanding,
Brad
Defining Your ICP or IRP
Wouldn’t you love to write for readers who are most likely to buy a subscription to your publication? Or users who are most likely to purchase your product or service?
You could focus your content on the audience that’s going to bring you the most value and not waste time with those who won’t.
That’s not as harsh as it sounds, if you’ll allow me to explain.
We’re going to talk about the “ideal customer profile,” or for those of you at news outlets, your “ideal reader profile.” The latter isn’t a real term people use, so take it or leave it, but it will help you better understand who you’re writing for (without neglecting your duty to serve your community/sector).
What is an ICP?
An ideal customer profile is a qualitative and quantitative combination of attributes for your ideal client at the company- or customer segment level. It’s someone who will not only bring your company a lot of value, but do so for a long period of time. It’s a hypothetical representation of your dream customer that helps you nail product-market fit.
That last distinction is an important one, because ICPs are often confused with customer personas, which are more specific.
While never perfect (and sometimes not close, at first), developing this profile gives you a clear direction about who you should pursue for new business. Depending on your industry and the services you provide/products you sell, this will look very different from one business to the next.
What if your customers aren’t businesses?
For news outlets and other subscription-based publications (or any B2C company), it may be difficult to define the ICP at a company level.
After all, a stay-at-home suburban mom or an urban recent college grad are hardly companies.
In this case, you’re focusing on an ideal person, but you’re still thinking about who you’re selling to and now how to sell to them, which is the function of personas.
What are some examples?
For a B2B firm that sells a group messaging software:
Industry: Food & Beverage
Company Size:
Annual Revenue: $10 million
Budget could also be a consideration, though this can be more difficult to determine
Employees: 10,000
Location: Southwest United States
Pain Points/Challenges:
Internal chat tool and CRM don’t work well together
Poor mobile experience for internal communications
Technology:
Internal Communication: Microsoft Teams
CRM: Salesforce
How you identify some of these sweet spots (I made these up) – e.g. why Food & Beverage industry instead of Manufacturing? - is a topic we’ll cover next week.
For a local news website in Asheville, N.C. (no app):
Residence and/or Work Location: Downtown Asheville, N.C.
Salary: $80,000+
Pain Points/Challenges:
Little time to access news throughout the day
Lack of detailed information about local community
Devices: Any device with access to an internet browser
It’s difficult to go too deep on a B2C ICP without bleeding into buyer personas, which is why this example is pretty light.
Again, the main thing to keep in mind as that ICPs are meant to define WHO you’re selling to and not yet HOW you’re selling to them.
Why identify an ICP?
This will have some overlap with the previous section, but those points are worth repeating. (And will segue nicely into benefits, the next section.)
To identify and prioritize accounts that are most likely to bring your business high value in the long-run
To align your editorial/marketing team’s content with sales, product and leadership
To focus your team on who they should be pursuing for business…
…and therefore not waste your time on those who are much less likely to buy
This may sound cruel, but it’s just good business. Would you market dairy-based ice cream to someone who’s lactose intolerant?
To create target account lists, segments and organizational structure for your sales team
i.e. What accounts should they be going after, what are the priorities (by creating priority tiers) and who is going after which accounts?
To use the Asheville online news example, take their minor league baseball team, the Tourists.
While they are in fact in Ashville and it might make sense to cover them, imagine the local news website surveyed 1,000 residents and less than 1 percent of them said they would buy a subscription to read coverage on the Tourists, which they could easily find for free elsewhere.
It would make little sense to waste resources on a topic that won’t drive new subscriptions when, let’s say, 60 percent of respondents said they would pay to learn more about new restaurants opening in town. In that case, you would want a full-time restaurant critic but would rely on other sources to aggregate coverage of the Tourists at minimal cost and effort.
The same goes for a software company selling its messaging platform. If your product costs $1,000 per month for the first 100 users within an organization, you wouldn’t want to go after a 500-person organization that relies primarily on email for internal communications with little budget to add on a new software.
Keep reading with a 7-day free trial
Subscribe to Gerick News(letter) to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.