Knowing who your customers are is a key element of successful digital marketing. 

In order to get the right messages to your audiences during the right time of their customer journey, you need to know exactly who you are targeting and build a strategy that focuses on key groups rather than the population at large. 

However, there are a few different ways to go about creating those audience portfolios that sometimes get confused with each other. 

Two terms you might have heard of in relation to understanding customer segments is an ideal customer profile, or ICP, and a buyer persona. 

These two terms are often used together as interchangeable ideas, but doing so is incorrect. 

There are key differences between an ideal customer profile and a persona, and in order to successfully market to your preferred audiences, you need a marketing strategy that includes both. 

Keep reading to know more about ICP vs persona.

ICP vs Persona: What’s the Real Difference?

The short and sweet of ICP vs persona is that an ICP represents an ideal business that you want to sell to, while a persona is a detailed account of the people who could benefit from your products or services. 

Oftentimes, a persona will represent a specific buyer or decision-maker within your ICP. 

In other terms, your ICP is a helpful tool at the beginning of a sales or marketing funnel when you are trying to narrow down the types of companies that you think you want to focus your sales tactics on. 

The buyer persona is more useful throughout the entirety of the marketing funnel as you focus your messaging and try to create personalized experiences with your customers based on their specific needs.

It’s pretty common, actually, for marketers to spin their wheels with personas that aren’t grounded in any real ICP. You’ll see beautiful visuals and wildly detailed fake biographies, and then—crickets—because nobody checked if that “person” actually works at a type of company that could use your product. It happens all the time, especially in startup environments where folks get excited about storytelling and forget the basics.

This misalignment can eat up a ton of resources and leave teams feeling frustrated. When your ICP is too broad or vague, everybody downstream starts guessing: is this campaign for a hospital, or a digital agency, or both? Suddenly, you’re trying to be everything to everyone, and that rarely pans out. It’s a bit like casting a fishing net the size of your bathtub and hoping for a whale.

Should You Have Both an ICP and a Buyer Persona?

The short answer? If it makes sense for your business, yes. 

Having both an ICP and a buyer persona helps you create a strategy that knows exactly who to target from beginning to end. 

A good way to think about how to use both an ICP and a buyer persona together is to consider the goals of each profile. 

Your ICP will help you know what types of businesses you want to target. However, once you’ve determined what businesses those are, you need to take things to a human level. 

After all, deals are made between people, not organizations. 

You can use your buyer persona to help create consistent messaging and key marketing tactics that target the individual stakeholders or decision-makers within your ICPs. 

For example, say you identify that Business A matches your ICP and you want them to buy from your company.

You can then use your buyer persona profile for a Business CEO to create targeted marketing messages and campaigns that will be of interest to the CEO of Business A. 

→ By using the ICP and the buyer persona together, you can identify the companies you want to sell to, then create strategies to market to the individuals in that business.

Wrap Up

Both ideal customer profiles and buyer personas are needed to create digital marketing strategies that work. 

However, there are key differences between an ICP vs persona that need to be taken into consideration while building out your audience segments. 

By knowing what makes each term different and knowing how to create each one as a separate entity, you can find a way to match the two together into a cohesive marketing strategy for your brand.

To learn more about how to create buyer personas, check out our Buyer Persona Generator tool!

You’ll be able to work through the entire process of creating a persona including naming them, picking their appearance, and diving down deep into the demographic and personality questions that will make your persona come to life.

 

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