A 5-Step Framework to Refocus Your ICP

By Donnie Kenneth , Vice President of Marketing at Total Expert

Most marketing professionals groan when they hear the infamous quote, “Half my advertising spend is?wasted;?the?trouble is, I don't know which?half.” But, more than 100 years after retail magnate John Wanamaker allegedly uttered it, the adage still defines the central challenge of marketing: Research from Proxima suggests that 40-60% of marketing budgets aren’t effectively targeted.

On top of that, the pressure to refine target audiences and tightly focus marketing spend is higher than ever. If you’re not regularly reevaluating and refocusing your ideal customer profiles (ICPs), you’re not making the most of your marketing dollars.

Why customer acquisition strategies need to get more targeted

The old “cast a wide net” strategy to customer acquisition just doesn’t make sense anymore—for several reasons. Technology is making it easier for new entrants to quickly gain a foothold in their markets. Particularly in the SaaS world, those markets are increasingly saturated. With more competition vying for the same customers, marketers need to get more strategic about their ICPs.

Those customers are also expecting more and more personalized marketing messages. They’re wise to (and turned off by) general messaging that doesn’t speak to their unique pain points and needs. Adding the current macroeconomic landscape into the equation ratchets up the urgency, as it becomes harder to find those growth opportunities—and marketing budgets tighten.

Practicing what we preach: How Total Expert identifies our ideal customers

At Total Expert, we’re helping financial services organizations harness broader customer intelligence to be more strategic about identifying and targeting their ICPs. But the general approach and best practices aren’t unique to the B2C financial services world—they’re widely applicable to just about any business. We’re also practicing what we preach as we develop and refine our own marketing strategies to better target our ICPs.

Here's our five-part framework for identifying and connecting with our ICPs:

1) Identify your best customers

The logical?starting point is to look at the existing customers that love your business. Customers that have broadly adopted your products or services, have seen measurable results, driven solid profitability, and have a great vendor-customer relationship. Targeting prospects that look similar to your best existing customers is a no-brainer.

2) Profile your best customers

As you look at that list of customers that love you, a set of profiles will start to emerge. Look for commonalities in terms of the size of the company, the business model, lines of business, or other unique factors about the company itself. Also look at where their buying journey started, what the key buying criteria were, and how they’re using your product/service today.

3) Prioritize shorter sales cycles

Few businesses will have a single ICP, so the next question is how to prioritize among these profiles. At Total Expert, we approach prioritization by time-to-value first, and profitability or lifetime value (LTV) second—essentially a snowball method for customer success. We take all our ICPs and evaluate the sales cycle, looking for which ICPs give us the easiest and shortest path to winning the sale and realizing value. Those quick wins build momentum, internally and externally. Your team gets excited—and enthusiasm and motivation grows—while your reputation grows organically, and you get valuable customer testimonials and case studies to demonstrate value to future prospects.

4) Evaluate profitability and LTV

The best things often take a little more time. So, we also evaluate the potential return or LTV on our various ICPs. This is where you ask key questions like “How small is too small?” and “Where is our profitability the highest?” It’s important to look holistically at LTV, including the potential to expand the business relationship in the future. This future growth potential is what can make some of those big “whale” prospects worth the extra time and effort to go after.

5) Identify intent signals and buying triggers

Once we’ve narrowed things down and prioritized the quick wins and the high-LTV prospects, we start diving deeper into each ICP. We’re looking for data and anecdotes that tell us what’s most important to each segment, as well as what their intent signals and buying triggers look like. This deeper intelligence helps us build out our targeting and marketing journeys to action on these data signals.

Connecting intelligence with action

Like I said earlier, Total Expert is helping financial institutions do this kind of audience analysis and hyper-targeting every day. But both in our work with our customers and in our work on the Total Expert marketing team, the most common point of failure is effectively putting that customer and prospect intelligence into action.?

In practice, this intelligence-to-action pipeline looks like highly automated engagement journeys that match each of their distinct ICPs. We’re using those unique intent indicators for each segment to fill our top-of-funnel with the right types of prospects. Then, as they come down the funnel, we’re gathering more granular data that’s helping us understand exactly what they’re doing and where they’re at in that buying journey.

If we do it right, our intelligence monitoring will alert on those buying triggers or other actions that we need to respond to immediately. And our automated journeys are ready to spring into action, so we can show up at those critical moments; make those hyper-relevant, individualized connections that drive deeper engagement; and start to build that trust and loyalty that wins customers for life.

We don’t get it right every time—no company’s marketing spend will ever be 100% efficient and effective. But by spending the time to do our homework on our ICPs—and using the right technology to surface and act on insights in real time—we’re confidently spending our marketing dollars where they’ll make the greatest impact while moving further and further away from that Wanamaker cliché.