Nowadays, you've got a boatload of competitors building similar products to yours. It's safe to say competitors, or even copycats, are nothing new. That's why it's your job to make sure your product stands out.
How do you do that? Well, let me tell you...
You Need Effective Marketing Messages to Stand Out
Effective messaging is about delivering a message that hits home, a message your ideal customers want to hear. Not what you think they want to hear.
I repeat. A message your ideal customers want to hear. Not what you think they want to hear.
This is because you want to be relatable to your potential customers. When they can relate to you, you’re tapping into the psychological principle of “liking”. After all, people are more likely to buy from brands they feel a connection with. This isn’t a hunch though. Research from Sprout Social reveals that when consumers can relate to a brand, more than half of them (57%) will increase their spending with that particular brand, and the majority (76%) will be loyal to that brand over a competitor.
You can have the most extravagant marketing in the world. But without effective messaging, you may still lose to someone with a worse product and a better message.
But First, You Need to Build a Solid ICP
Before you can craft your effective message, you must first know your ICP. ICP stands for ideal customer profile. According to Breadcrumbs, a revenue acceleration platform, an ICP is
Companies that are likely to benefit the most from your product and, in turn, are also the most lucrative customers for your business.
A solid customer profile always has detailed and rich data such as country, city, company size, number of employees, industry, funding raised, etc.
Please take note that ICP isn’t the same as a buyer persona. ICP is about your preferred company to sell to while buyer persona is who you want to speak to and persuade in the company.
| ICP | Buyer Persona |
|---|---|
| US private equity company with a minimum employee of 100 | CTO who's tired of working overtime |
You might be wondering: “Why the heck do I need ICP for? A customer is a customer. Any sale is a good sale.”
Hold on right there. If you try to appeal to everyone, you’re appealing to no one. This will cause chaos in every aspect of your business because you failed to focus on any particular group.
For example, you may fail to connect with your customer because your copywriting is ineffective and weak. You also may waste money adding features your customers won’t use. You also may waste your sales reps’ time trying to close difficult customers while easier customers are ignored.
So, by building a solid ICP, you can prevent miseries and in turn, increase your customer lifetime value. Don’t believe me? New Breed, Hubspot's top solution partner, increased its deal size by 83% in just one year by refining their ICP!
Here’s their chronology:
- In 2016, New Breed was selling to Startup Sams, a customer profile New Breed created about the type of customer who was (and is) highly interested in working with New Breed, but they are difficult to sell to because of their lack of budget
- New Breed stopped selling to Startup Sams in 2017 and, for that year, experienced an 83 percent increase in their average deal size
- During the first full year of not selling to Startup Sams (2018), they experienced another 30 percent increase in their average deal size from the previous year
- In just the first few months of 2019, their average deal size has been 152 percent higher than in 2016
So, How to Build a Solid ICP?
Most businesses build their ICP through gut feelings. But here’s how to build a solid one based on data.
1. Analyze your best customers
How you define your “best customer” depends on your business goals. It could be customers who spend the most, stay the longest, refer you the most, etc.
2. Find common attributes
After that, look for similar attributes across all your best customers such as the industry they’re in, how many employees they have on average, do they received funding, and so on.
There are various tools that can help you get those data such as Sapiengraph and ZoomInfo. We would recommend Sapiengraph because you can enrich your customers’ data directly within your Google Sheets spreadsheet. All you need is their LinkedIn profile URLs.
3. Know their challenges
Once you have completed the first two steps, this is how you discover the message that your customers want to hear. Not what you think they want to hear.
First, ask them what happens when they realize they need your product/service. What problem they are trying to solve? Then, ask them questions related to your “best customer” earlier.
If you choose who has spent the most, ask what makes them confident to spend a lot on you. If you decide who has stayed the longest, ask what about your company that makes them loyal.
The easiest way to reach out to them is just by email. If you want to go a step further, schedule a video call meeting or go meet them face-to-face.
How to Use Your ICP to Craft Effective Marketing Messages?
Believe it or not, your copy can fail even before you write a word.
You probably do this when writing copy. You sit at your desk, open a document, and then you lean back thinking about what you want to say. Notice the mistake? You think about what you want to say.
Because what you want to say may have absolutely nothing to do with what your prospect actually needs to hear on your website or in your emails.
Crafting effective messages that hit home never starts with you. It’s never about what you want to say or how you fancy saying it. It's always, always about what your potential customer needs to hear.
So, once your customers have answered your questions, identify a similar theme. Then, you can borrow those similar-themed answers from your customers and slap them into your marketing materials. This way, your copy speaks your customer’s language and hits their pain points even better.
How to Find More Leads That Fit Your ICP?
Once you have refined your ICP, it’s time for you to find more companies that meet your criteria. I’ll show you a similar example of how Ramp used Sapiengraph to build their ICP list.
Say your ICP is a US private equity company with a minimum employee of 100.
1. Search for the LinkedIn URLs of US private equity companies with a minimum employee of 100
We’ll use the Company Search formula.
2. Find the LinkedIn URLs of the founder for each company
We’ll use the Employee formula.
3. Find the founders' personal email address for cold email
We’ll use the Personal Email Lookup formula.
Tada! With just a simple formula, you have found 14 new leads that fit your ICP. However, it’s a bummer our personal email lookup formula only surfaces 3 personal emails. But if you can code, you can try Proxycurl API to find their work email addresses. If not, sorry about that. You may have to search for their email through Google or other sources.
Conclusion
You know that saying “a good product sells itself?” Don't be fooled. It’s utter nonsense.
In reality, a product may appear to sell itself when satisfied customers recommend it to others. However, to initiate this cycle, you can't wait for buyers. You must actively spread the word and create that initial spark of interest.
You can’t just throw everything at the wall and hope something sticks. That’s inefficient. So, that’s when refining your ICP and sending effective messages to them comes into play.
If you found us helpful, sign up for Sapiengraph to get 100 free credits so you can explore the formulas firsthand. Have inquiries? Email us at [email protected].
