Hey,
This might be one of the shortest emails you ever get from me. I’m putting the finishing touches on the guided strategy template. You’ll be able to get your hands on it on Monday, September 11, so watch this space closely 👀.
🔦Community Spotlight
- You Are The Media empowers people to create businesses that others naturally want to be with. When you cut out the middleman, the algorithm, and take control, you attract people and you become the media. Get the Thursday newsletter here.
- The Creator Tribe is a newsletter that empowers creative founders to achieve six-figure success. Get weekly expert insights, strategies, and guidance to fuel your business growth and monetization.
- My friend Vaughan Broderick writes an insightful and wicked smart newsletter about design thinking and innovation. Subscribe here.
💡 Want your name here? Scroll to the bottom of this email to find your referral link & start referring people to Ideas to Power Your Future!
I just realized I may have jumped the gun a bit. Two weeks ago, I told you how to build a fanocracy and I never explained how to find the right audience. Follower counts matter, but so does fan-business fit. Today, we’re fixing that; we’re talking about identifying your ICP (Ideal Customer Profile), ICA (Ideal Customer Avatar), or whatever you want to call it.
“Buyer persona” used to be the norm in audience research — it essentially referred to building a fictional person, with a funky name and everything, that matched the firmographics and demographics of your perfect client.
This is how “Marketing Mandy” or “Finance Jim” were born. Nice people but rather useless in the grand marketing scheme. They came with a ton of background details (Mandy loved her frappuccinos and Jim was a tea guy) that rarely mattered when building a marketing strategy.
We know better today. We know that too much data is worse than too little so we can build better ICPs.
My approach to this is medically-inspired:
Treat your ICP the way doctors treat their patients
If there’s no obvious wound, your doctor will ask about pain:
“What’s hurting?” is the most common question in a medical examination. Once they’ve clearly identified the pain, they’ll dig deeper.
They’ll ask about your age, your environment, your habits, your lifestyle, and anything else that might help them figure out how you got sick and how they can best treat you.
They’ll prescribe different medications depending on your age and your medical history. But they need to know what’s hurting first so they know where else to look.
Use the medical approach in your audience research. Whether or not you have a completed product or a well-defined service, you surely have a vague idea of what you’re trying to sell — is it cough medicine or something that soothes sprained ankles?
Start with what’s hurting.
Then figure out which socio-demographic features matter and which don’t. Doctors take thorough medical histories but they know that a broken arm 12 years ago isn’t very likely to influence today’s coughing bout. So they’ll disregard that information even though they have it.
Psst, my subscribers read this before you did. Want to be the first to see analyses and roadmaps like this one? Subscribe to Ideas to Power Your Future and get them in your inbox every Thursday.
Socio-demographic and firmographic traits — which matter and which don’t
Now that you know what pain you’re soothing, it’s time to figure out who’s suffering from it most often.
You’re ready to define where your ideal patients are — if it’s cough medicine, you’ll find them in schools and crowded areas. If it’s a sprain soother, you’ll find them in gyms or running in parks.
Location, location, location
Say you’re a copywriter. From the US to Australia and from the UK to Canada, your clients share a pain point: they can’t write well enough or they don’t have the time for it.
Does location matter? If your business happens mostly online, it likely matters less than you think. The internet has created what economist Noah Smith calls vertical communities i.e. communities who don’t share a location but share a lot of other things: needs, hobbies, cultural identities, and more.
Manga and K-pop fans are good examples here: they are spread all over the world and united by a common passion.
In digital services, location matters only if it influences price sensitivity.
Median incomes differ a lot across the board. If your products are fairly expensive, it makes sense to target clients who can afford them. If your products are very cheap, it makes sense to avoid targeting wealthy clients who will most likely perceive them as low-quality.
Firmographics — use them or ignore them?
Firmographics are to companies what demographics are to individuals: they tell you what industry your prospect is, the size of their company, their job title, and their annual budget.
And yes, they matter, especially today when the lines between companies and individuals are blurred.
Solopreneurs, content creators, influencers, coaches, consultants, and even some founders build companies that are one-person shows.
They are B2B buyers disguised as B2C buyers. Their pains are business-related, not life-related.
Use firmographics the way doctors use your current unrelated treatments to figure out what pills to prescribe so they complement each other instead of canceling each other out or, worse, instead of creating a severe adverse reaction.
If you’re a copywriter who’s very familiar with a certain industry, you can use firmographics to niche down — like a GP versus a cardiologist, for instance.
You can specialize in SaaS, coaches and consultants, tech — pretty much any industry. Beware of the perils of niching down, though.
Alternatively, you can use firmographics to expand your ICP if you’ve over-niched or if you want to grow your business. For instance, if you already know SaaS, you can easily pivot into other tech subdomains. If you work with fitness coaches, you can easily add nutritionists to your ICP and so on.
Demographics — do you need to know your ICP’s favorite coffee blend?
Knowing quirky details about your ICP helps with making small talk more interesting. But how deep should you go?
- Income level → yes, especially if you’re in B2C
- Marital status → you’ll rarely need it
- Parent or non-parent → you’ll rarely need it
- Age → important for B2C, less so in B2B
Demographics are less important for the core of your marketing strategy and more important for how you deliver it.
If your product’s USP is that it saves your ICP time, demographics will help you figure out how to frame it
- More time to spend doing what you love.
- More time to spend with your kids.
Specificity always wins and, if your ICP is a parent, mentioning more time with their kids packs a stronger emotional punch.
What really matters beyond firmographics and demographics
Think of your ICP as a vertical community. They are united by a pain point and your solution is likely NOT the first one they’ve tried or read about.
Before you try and sell them something, you need to reach them first. To do that, you have to know where they hang out online and what other pain-point-related content they consume.
My go-to solution for this is SparkToro. All you need is a tiny insight into what your ICP needs/wants and you can start searching for their favorite hangout spots: social media platforms, creators they follow, podcasts they listen to — pretty much any type of media they consume.
SparkToro is a paid solution but you can get by nicely on the free tier too.
[This is not an ad. I’m not a SparkToro partner, just a very happy user.]
Knowing the media your ICP consumes will give you the insight you need into tone of voice, placement, marketing channels to us, and so on.
Pro tip: do more searches on a single ICP and take an in-depth look at what the media outlets you’re seeing sell — is it similar to what you’re selling? This will help you avoid falling into the all-too-common trap of creating content for your peers, not your buyers.
Use the Fogg Behavior Model to diagnose the validity of your ICP
Created by Dr. B.J. Fogg, the Fogg Behavior Model states that three elements must converge at the same moment for a behavior to occur: motivation, ability, and a prompt (or a trigger).
It looks like this:
- The motivation is the why or the pain your ICP is trying to soothe
- The ability or the capacity to act on something (financial, emotional, time-related, and so on) is what you’ll find in the demographics/firmographic traits.
- The prompt/trigger is all about timing — do they need it NOW? You’ll find cues on how to build strong triggers in the media your ICP consumes but, in the end, it’s about your ability to create offers that are compelling enough.
Quick example based on my own products: my ICP is someone who needs help with marketing/strategy. I won’t bore you with the details but I’ll tell you how I created products that solve specific pain points:
- Motivation: no time to write a compelling email sequence/no knowledge of email copywriting.
- Ability: affordable + it only takes a couple of minutes to add your own specifics and send the sequence on its merry way.
- Trigger: needs to launch a product/service soon OR wants to level up their email game in general.
- Motivation: needs extra clarity about strategy, business in general, a seasoned sounding board.
- Ability: fairly priced + requires low initial effort
- Trigger:people who feel their growth is stalled, are ready to launch a new product, or want to pivot to a new field/business.
Guided strategy framework (launches on Monday):
- Motivation: doesn’t know how to create a strategy from scratch and doesn’t have time to research everything independently.
- Ability: affordable and very easy to fill in thanks to the guided approach
- Trigger:people who know a documented strategy could help them gain clarity and grow almost instantly, so they don’t want to postpone it anymore.
You can (and probably should) have more than one ICP
Unless you sell a single product or service, you probably have more than one ICP. Instead of shoving all the traits into a single ICP, try building more than one.
This will bring extra clarity to your strategy and to your messaging.
That’s it from me today!
See you on Monday (can you tell I’m excited about this launch?!)
Here to make you think,
Adriana
P.S.: Well, this isn’t a short email after all. I should have known I can’t refrain from burrowing away at stuff I’m passionate about.
_______________________________________________
Adriana’s Picks
- TikTok is adding more social networking features. Look who discovered there’s “social” in social media.
- “Loud laborers” is the new workplace buzzword. And yes, it’s the exact opposite of quiet quitters — they spend more time talking about work than doing it. (Just like I talk about my guided strategy framework instead of finishing it up.)
- The EU Digital Services Act is claiming its first victim: Meta is considering adding an ad-free tier in Europe.
_______________________________________________________________________________________
Need me in your corner? There are three ways I can help you:
- Get my product launch email templates that sell: 5+1 emails you can send to your list in 45 seconds.
- Book a 1:1 strategy session with me. Let’s unlock your growth in 60 mins!
- Get content or copy that converts AND ranks. My digital marketing agency is here.
