How to build an ideal customer profile (ICP) using real customer data

Your buyer personas are useful for shaping ideas, but they’re often built on assumptions instead of real customer data. Having a stock photo, a made-up name, and a list of pain points and motivations doesn’t really tell you anything about who’s ready to buy from you.

Claudia, the eco-conscious freelance designer, looks great on a slide deck, but she was built from assumptions and has never actually bought anything from you. Meanwhile, the customers who converted most often last quarter have something in common. They had a specific problem, at a specific moment, that made your solution the obvious answer. That’s buyability.

To find out what they have in common and connect with more potential customers facing similar problems, you need to dig deeper than a basic buyer persona. You need to build an ideal customer profile (ICP) that tells you what to look for. 

ICP vs. the buyer persona

There are a lot of people out there who use the terms ICP and buyer persona interchangeably, but they’re not the same thing. 

• Ideal customer profile: Your ICP is the type of customer or company that gets the most value from what you sell, defined by real data from your existing customers
• Buyer persona: This is the individual themselves; their motivations, pain points, behaviors, and channel preferences

Both are valuable, but there’s an order to follow. Your ICP should always come first. If you’re building personas before you’ve identified the customers who are a good fit, you may be creating detailed profiles of the wrong people. 

Put your ICP to the test

If you want to know whether you have a buyer persona or an ICP, ask around. If marketing, sales, and product developers all give you different answers to “who is our ideal customer?”, chances are you don’t have a real ICP. 

Sellability vs. buyability

Most marketing starts with a product or service and asks a simple question: “Can we sell this?” There’s a product, they figure out who might want it, and then come up with ideas to convince people they should get it.

This approach focuses on the sellability of your products. It’s often based on ideas and not data — crafting messages around the person you hope will buy, not people who have bought. 

But buyability flips that. It starts with the buyer and marketers asking who already has the problem and what motivates them to buy. Understanding what makes someone ready to buy means digging deeper to identify what your ideal customers have in common. Once you understand them, finding more of them will be easier. 

This matters because customer behavior has changed a lot in the last few years. The majority of research is happening before they speak to sales or add anything to their shopping cart. By the time they’re ready to convert, they already have a brand in mind. 

Figuring out who those people are and showing up in their world means you’re reaching the right people earlier, before competitors do. But their world looks different depending on who they are, and that varies significantly by generation and market. 

Dotdigital’s Customer Trend Index can help build out a strong ICP with data on where different shoppers actually discover new brands: 

• In-store and real-world experiences are the top channel for 49% of global consumers 
• 39% of Gen Z have discovered new brands through influencer content
• 42% of Gen Z in Australia “always” or “often” use AI to discover new brands 
• In the UK, search engines are the favorite discovery channel for 41% of Baby Boomers
• 50% of American shoppers turn to family and friends for new brand recommendations

Start with customers you’ve already won

You don’t have to host a big workshop or turn to an expensive external consultant to identify your ideal customer profile. The answer is sitting in your existing customer base. 

Look at who you consider to be your best customers. Not the biggest group, but the most valuable. The customers who spend the most, shop with you frequently, engage with your marketing, attend your events, shout about you on social media, and refer you to their friends and family. 

When you figure out who they are, find out what they have in common. These may be a mixture of demographic and behavioral signals, like: 

• Age
• Location 
• Products purchased
• Ads interacted with 
• Purchase recency
• Email engagement 
• Industry 
• Preferred channel 
• Company size 
• Referral source 

But many ICPs fall short because they don’t consider behavioral data. If you’re only focused on who the customer is, not on what they experienced before becoming a customer, you’re only building half a profile. Knowing who your best customers are is just the start. 

To create an ICP that focuses your marketing strategy, you need to listen to and learn from your best customers. Your ICP should be a living document that changes as customer behavior shifts. 

Use customer data to build an even bigger picture

Bringing all your customer data together into a single source of truth helps you identify patterns in customer behavior you might otherwise miss. It’s just one of the many benefits of having a unified tech stack. 

These patterns are based on data collected throughout the customer experience, from email engagements to browsing behavior. Two sources in particular reveal the most about who your customers really are: 

Zero-party data and preference centers

There really is no better source to discover what customers want than the customers themselves. Preference centers give you direct insight into what your customers care about; that’s why they need to go beyond just collecting first names and birthday dates. Ask them to share the products or services they’re interested in, and which channels they want to hear from you on. 

Dotdigital’s Customer Trend Index reveals that email is the preferred channel for 45% of customers, while 40% of Gen Z love using apps for brand experiences. You’ll only know where on the spectrum your customers fall when you ask them. 

Web behavior and content engagement

This is where you’ll discover what people are reading, which pages they’re visiting, and what topics inspire them to click through in your emails. It also helps you see which stage of the customer journey they’re in. 

If they’re looking at pages about contract renewal, you can see what else they’re looking at, or what messages they’re engaging with to get a better understanding of motivations at that stage. Similarly, if someone repeatedly clicks through on links about your ‘Essential Oils’ collection, you’ll learn what products are hot topics for them.  

How to make sure your ICP is successful 

When you go through the effort of building a well-informed ICP, you don’t want to see its value degrade too soon. This often happens because ownership is ambiguous. Sales, product, and marketing all claim ownership, which ultimately results in no one overseeing its maintenance. 

When multiple groups don’t agree on who the ideal customer is, every handoff in the funnel introduces friction. Marketing generates leads that sales doesn’t want. Sales chase accounts that marketing never targeted. And the ICP document gets updated once and then sits untouched.

The only way around this is greater cross-team collaboration with regular check-ins with the ICP as customer behavior changes. Thankfully, a unified customer data platform makes it easy for all teams across your business to feed valuable customer insights into a single source. This makes sure all teams are adequately represented as your ICP develops. 

Know your customers, grow your marketing

For marketers, the need for an ICP has never been greater. Only 15% of customers think the marketing they get is “very relevant” to them. They need personalized experiences that speak to their needs and wants in the moment. But you can’t personalize to people you don’t know, and you can’t really know your customers based on a buyer persona that isn’t grounded in real customer behavior. 

Taking the time to build your initial ICP arms you with a better understanding of your customers. You’ll be able to target similar audiences more efficiently by knowing which discovery channels they use, how often they engage with their favorite brands, and which channels they use to convert. 

To get started, read Dotdigital’s Customer Trend Index to discover where your customers are, what they want, and how they like to be reached.