When you’re marketing your business online, it’s important to know who you’re marketing to.
Most digital marketers will have heard of both terms, and they are often used interchangeably. It’s important to understand exactly what each term means and the core differences between the two.
Once you have this knowledge, you can start to develop better marketing strategies to help you cultivate leads andGet more sales.
In this article, we’ll explore the key differences whatsapp blasting between ideal customer profiles and buyer personas, and whether it’s beneficial to have both.
What is the ideal customer profile?
An ideal customer profile (often referred to as an ICP) is essentially a description of a fictional company. One with certain characteristics that can deliver the most value to your business. This is the customer your business is targeting with its products and/or services. They are people with problems, and you provide solutions.
For B2B businesses, the ideal customer profile includes information about the target company’s size, budget, and location. It will also include their niche market.
It’s worth creating an ideal customer profile because doing so can help you qualify leads, saving you time.
While it may seem like all leads are good, that’s definitely not the case. Instead, as you generate leads, you can look at your ideal customer profile to see if they match up.
What is a Buyer Persona?
Buyer personas are semi-fictional versions of your ideal customers.
Essentially, marketers simply don’t have the time to learn about all of their customers individually. Instead, they can create personas based on their ideal customers and then create marketing campaigns for them.
And since you’ll most likely be selling to a testing this association, making amendments variety of customers with different tastes, needs, and buying habits, you’ll create multiple buyer personas. This may also mean that your marketing and approach to interacting with each person will be different.
Once you have this information, you can start creating buyer personas and then adjust your marketing strategy accordingly.
Main Differences
By now, customer profiles and buyer personas probably sound pretty similar. After all, they’re both essentially ideal representations of the people and businesses who will buy your product or service.
However, the biggest differences are:
- Ideal customer profile : The business (or person) you want to sell your products or services to.
- Buyer Personas : In-depth representations of those who would benefit most from what you’re selling.
Not only that, but ideal customer profiles are more commonly used by B2Bs, who create ICPs to help them gain a more complete understanding of the business they are selling to. As mentioned earlier, ideal customer profile characteristics include the size of the company and its revenue.
Buyer personas, on the other hand, are representations of individual customers. Therefore, they are more commonly used by B2CS (but B2B uses them, too).
Furthermore, every business has only one ideal customer profile. In contrast, digital marketers can create any number of buyer personas.
For example, a company that sells real estate malaysia data might create a buyer persona based on a single mom over 40. This would be a very specific persona and would look completely different than a buyer persona created for a growing family looking to buy a home. A mom, a dad, and two teenage kids.
Should you have both an ICP and a buyer persona?
We’ve just learned the difference between an ideal customer profile and a buyer persona.
As you can see, they are somewhat similar, but most importantly – they are not the same thing.
Should you have both?
B2B businesses especially benefit from having ideal customer profiles and buyer personas. That’s because personalized content is important when it comes to reaching out to customers and convincing them that you’ve got what they want.
For example, personalized emails can increase email volumes by:10%Only by understanding your customers can you provide them with more personalized content.
First is the ideal customer profile, followed by the buyer persona
The ideal customer profile should come first. Then, as you follow up with leads, buyer personas will quickly emerge, further qualifying them and pushing them down your sales funnel, thereby increasing your conversion rates.
Or, let’s put it this way: The ideal customer profile needs to be at the top of yourSales FunnelBecause it shows your sales and marketing teams whether a company is worth your time.
Does it have enough revenue? Is it big enough?
If the answer to both questions is no, you can remove the account from your marketing efforts as it is not a good fit.
Summarize
Creating customer profiles and buyer personas ensures that you start focusing on the customers that matter while discarding those that aren’t a good fit for your company.
Once you’ve defined your ideal customer profile and buyer personas, the next step is to look at how to improve your sales and marketing. This means creating epic content,Personalize your contentAnd make sure your sales and marketing teams are working on the same page.
There are many buyer persona tools out there to help you get started with templates, while taking advantage ofStart-up LoansIdeal for businesses that may not currently have the budget to execute a strong digital marketing campaign.