How do you research your ideal customer profile?

1 Identify your goals

The first step is to define your goals for creating an ICP. What are you trying to achieve with your lead generation strategy? How do you measure success? How do you align your ICP with your value proposition and your market positioning? Your goals will help you determine the criteria and the sources for your ICP research.

3 Analyze your existing customers

The third step is to analyze your existing customers and find out what makes them buy from you. You can use data from your CRM, analytics, surveys, interviews, or testimonials to understand their pain points, goals, motivations, preferences, and feedback. You can also look for patterns and trends in their behavior, such as how they found you, how they interacted with you, and how they made their purchase decisions.

4 Create buyer personas

The fourth step is to create buyer personas, which are fictional representations of your ideal customers based on your research. Buyer personas help you humanize your ICP and empathize with their needs and challenges. You can use templates or tools to create buyer personas, or you can write them as stories. Each buyer persona should include information such as name, age, role, industry, goals, challenges, interests, and preferred channels.

5 Validate your ICP

The final step is to validate your ICP by testing it against real prospects and customers. You can use various methods to validate your ICP, such as feedback forms, landing pages, email campaigns, or social media ads. The goal is to measure how well your ICP matches your target audience and how effectively it helps you generate and convert leads. You should also update your ICP regularly based on new data and insights.