Why you Need an ICP for Effective Lead Generation
In the modern business, you constantly meet problems that are not so easy to solve. Marketing problems are particularly numerous, and a huge part refers to the lead generation process. It suggests about ten steps to take before any success in selling your product or service, and each stage requires meaningful preparation, analysis, and repetition. Defining your target audience matter is one of the most significant, so let’s clear up what the ICPs are and how they impact the lead generation results.
How to define a lead generation?
Lead generation is the process of creating and multiplying your potential clientele base. Top agencies like Belkins’io use complex means and tools to make lead generation the most effective possible. But there are two kinds of tools and methods you use: indispensable and optional ones. One of the irreplaceable steps in the lead generation strategy is the Ideal Customer Profile (or ICP) creation. It specifies the peculiarities of your product or service and its compatibility with the audience’s requirements.
Ideal Customer Profile – is the only?
The ICP is an artificially created image of what criteria your customer should meet to make his interactions with your sales representatives the most productive. Simply put, it is several critical criteria that make a potential customer the most likely to close the deal.
The notion of a Buyer Persona
People often confuse the notion of ICP with the Buyer Persona notion. The latter image is a generalized picture of the customers you have already made deals with and the potential clients. It includes no criteria but the collected information about what these people are and what they live. So usually, to create this picture, the marketing specialists use the information about:
- demography data (nationality; age, etc.);
- suggested goals these people strive for;
- motivators that make them act;
- difficulties they face daily.
This list is generalized, but these points should be filled in with an eye to the product or service your brand offers.
Criteria for an ICP to consider
Returning to the idea of the ideal customer profile, let’s concentrate on the fact it consists of specific features a potential customer should have to make a deal with your salesperson. If talking about B2B relations, the list of these features would include the following:
- a measure that indicates how much money a particular company can spend on buying your services;
- specificity of business that a customer is involved;
- the geographic limits of your offer;
- possible discussions about the legality of your products or services for certain population groups;
- limitations referring to the SLA.
You can complete this list according to your situation.
In generalizing, any marketing campaign should involve the formulation of an ICP. It is one of the crucial steps in running a lead generation strategy and a huge advantage over blind trying. Struggle to create it by yourself? Leave it to the Belkins professionals and breathe easily.