So What? Using Your ICP to Align Your Services - Trust Insights Marketing Analytics Consulting

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In this episode of So What?, you’ll learn how to use your ICP, your ideal customer profile, to realign your service pages for better clarity and performance. Discover practical ways to leverage AI for a deep dive into your current content, identify gaps in your messaging, and unearth potential opportunities to better serve your ICP. We’ll show you how this deep dive helps ensure your content resonates with your target audience and leads to improved marketing ROI. Learn how aligning your content with your ICP can help you reach the right audience, optimize your marketing efforts, and drive better business outcomes.

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So What? Using Your ICP to Align Your Services

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In this episode you’ll learn:

How to use your ICP to refresh your keyword list
Using your keywords to understand product market fit
How to align your services against your ICP

Transcript:

What follows is an AI-generated transcript. The transcript may contain errors and is not a substitute for listening to the episode.

Katie Robbert 00:32
Well, hey everyone. Happy Thursday. Welcome to So What, the marketing, analytics, and insights live show. I am Katie, joined by Chris.

Christopher Penn 00:38
Hello.

Katie Robbert 00:39
Hello.

Christopher Penn 00:39
John’s not here. I can’t high five anyone I know, and I refuse.

Katie Robbert 00:45
I’m just—I won’t do it. It’s not what I do. John is in the wild somewhere. He’s off running road races and doing silly summer things and taking a much-needed break. So, we will hear from John again next week. But this week we are talking about using your ICP, your ideal customer profile, to align your services. If you are curious about how to put together an ideal customer profile and different use cases, you can go to our YouTube channel, Trust Insights AI YouTube and go to our So What playlist. And we have done quite a few episodes about building ICPs using them. And this week is no different. There is.

Katie Robbert 01:30
What we’re finding, Chris, is that there’s really no shortage of things you can do for your business once you have your ideal customer profile put together in such a way that you can brainstorm with it. You can bounce ideas off of it. You can iterate with it. You can say, “What am I missing? What am I doing? Am I addressing pain points?” So this week, one of the things that was on my to-do list, and now we’re going to do it on the show live, was to realign our services. So, we’re not changing our service offerings, but we’re realigning the messaging so that it’s clearer to our ideal customers what the heck it is we do and how we can help them, how their problems can be solved by us. So where would you like to start?

Christopher Penn 02:23
Gosh, where would you like to start on this? Because we obviously have an ICP.

Katie Robbert 02:27
Yep.

Christopher Penn 02:28
And we have, of course, no shortage of AI tools, and we have no shortage of services pages and stuff on our website. We can and we will walk through how you will actually do this, but I guess, from a big picture perspective, what’s the general process that you want to use for tackling this?

Katie Robbert 02:54
So, definitely starting with the five Ps is probably 100% of the time where you should start because it gives you a focus and a sense of direction. So, the purpose of realigning our services on our website with our ICP is to basically increase the traffic to these pages. When I think about sort of the measurement, we want to increase the traffic to these pages, but we also—as the CEO, I want to align my services pages with my ICP so that I sell more things, so that I increase revenue, so that the number of people contacting us about our services increases. So, I want to increase contact form fills. I want to increase revenue. I want to increase sales, qualified leads in the pipeline. So very tactical, measurable things.

Katie Robbert 03:52
But the big picture is that I want it to be easier for people to know what it is we sell. Chris, one of the things that we hear—have heard a lot over the years—is “I don’t know how to sell you, or I don’t know what you do, and I don’t know about you.” But it’s always been a point of frustration for me. I’m like, “What does that mean? What do you mean you don’t know what we do? Look at all of our clients.” And then was like, “Okay, what are you doing for them?” “Well, we’re fixing their data.” “Well, what does that mean?” And so it sort of became this—like, because we’re so close to it, it’s hard to articulate. But now we have an ideal customer profile, which is a stand-in for our customers.

Katie Robbert 04:36
It is not a replacement for talking to people, for talking to our audience, but it is a real time. We can iterate with it without bothering our audience and our customers for every little thing that we need. And we can say, “This is what we do. Where are we getting it wrong? How would you know how to buy from us if you saw this?” And without even doing the alignment reporting, I’m guessing the answer is no, because this is just a bunch of words.

Christopher Penn 05:08
It is a bunch of words. But more importantly, I think having that very clear intent definitely helps to say, “This is what a services page, which is a landing page—what it should do—it should inform, and then it should persuade to say, ‘Hey, you probably want to reach out to us to buy the thing.'” As opposed to, say, our blog posts, which are mostly informational, “Hey, here’s something you might want to know.” So, differentiating between educational intent and sales intent is a big part of this. Now, the ICP gives us essentially a virtual customer, which is, as you mentioned, super helpful. So, the first thing we would probably want to do is pick a page and understand how it serves our ICP now, what they think of it in its present state before we dig into future state.

Christopher Penn 06:02
So, of all the different pages here, which one would you want to start with? We’ll just start digging in.

Katie Robbert 06:08
I mean, the big thing—I think our bread and butter—is marketing strategy. So, I—you know, this is sort of my own sort of insider baseball. I know our AI consulting services pages need a lot of work, but for the purposes of this live stream, there’s a lot of content on our marketing strategy services pages that I feel is going to make for a better episode of the live stream. We have to do the other ones anyway. But this one I know I feel good about in terms of there’s enough data on it.

Christopher Penn 06:41
Okay. So, the first thing we need to do is we need to get the page content. AI tools, at least the ones that we’re going to be using—even if they could read the page, I don’t trust they’re going to read the right information on the page. Because every page has things like navigation. Some pages have ads. Some pages have things like pop-ups saying, “Hey, do you consent to tracking?” And all that are irrelevant words. One of the things that AI is very sensitive to—even with today’s state-of-the-art models—is relevant words. We always say to people, “The more relevant, specific words you use, the better they’ll perform.” If you’re vacuuming up all the data on a page, you’re going to get some irrelevant words. So, we need that. We will need a copy of our ICP.

Christopher Penn 07:27
Now, I’m storing in a text file, but obviously you can use Google Drive, you can use whatever. We’re also going to be using Google’s Gemini, the developer version, because it gives me more control. But again, this is something you can do with chat, GPT, with Anthropic Claude, with the consumer version of Gemini, it doesn’t matter. Any large foundation model will do. One other question I had for you, Katie, is this: what is our corporate tone of voice and writing style?

Katie Robbert 07:59
I would say it’s similar to what we have structured for KDGPT with taking out some of the casualness. So, I would say you could use KDGPT. So, for those who aren’t aware, we’ve built out system instructions to mirror my writing style. And so it has tone, clarity, audience awareness, conversational, approachable. I think all of that holds up because, for better or worse, Chris, you and I are the corporate brand. And I think that my writing style is not that. Actually, it’s not that far off from yours. We just write about different things. So, I feel like this is a good stand-in for the corporate tone because if I’m not representing the company correctly, what the heck am I even doing?

Christopher Penn 09:05
Just drinking your cold brew?

Katie Robbert 09:07
I am. I got my cold brew today. It’s very nice.

Christopher Penn 09:10
All right. So, we’ve got our writing style. We’ve got our page content. We’ve got our ICP. Let’s go into Gemini. Let’s go ahead and start a new prompt. One other thing that we’ll probably want to have handy would perhaps be a way to understand whether or not a product or service is a good fit for the ICP. And there’s a bunch of different ways to do this. One of my favorite ways to do this is to have the model build the prompt for us. So, I’m going to put in our system instructions, which basically—if you’re not familiar, the Trust Insights PARE Framework is what we’re using for this. And I’m going to—let’s make sure our safety settings are off because I like to live dangerously.

Christopher Penn 09:54
And we’re going to say your topic today is best practices for determining product-market fit for a management consulting firm’s service offering. Now, what’s going to happen here is that the PARE Framework is going to direct Google Gemini to essentially say, “What are the best practices?” And it’s going to spit out what those best practices are. And then after it goes to the best practices, it is going to then say, “What are the things that people do wrong when they’re doing product-market fit?” “Here are mistakes people made.” “Here’s a familiar one: failing to clearly communicate value, relying on outdated assumptions.” Let’s debunk some myths: “If you build it, they will come,” “a great network,” “guarantee success,” “hidden truths,” “the best marketing is delivering exceptional results,” “expert secrets.”

Christopher Penn 10:54
So, this is a pretty good mix of what you would want to do to assess product-market fit. Now, that is part one. The next step is to take this collection of discussion points and have our language model build a scoring rubric. So, a scoring rubric is one of those very fancy, specialized terms. What a scoring rubric does is it asks a model not just to say, “Hey, this is good or bad,” because there’s no transparency there. There’s no understanding that we even know what the model is doing. Instead, we’re just kind of hoping that AI is doing the thing for us. When you build a scoring rubric, you’re basing it on all those conversation points, but you’re asking the model as it evaluates something. “Hey, score each piece. Tell me how you’re thinking about each piece.”

Christopher Penn 11:48
It’s a way to get the model to talk about what’s going on, to show its work, to explain itself. So, we’re going to have this lovely scoring rubric here. Now we’ve got this chat session. If we pre-populate with best practices and with a scoring rubric. So, what I’m going to do now is I’m going to provide it with our ICP. I’m going to provide it with that page content and have it evaluate product-market fit against the market, our ICP, and score it. So what? Entertain the masses while I get this.

Katie Robbert 12:25
Well, so while this—for us is a little bit of a humbling exercise—to be showing everybody, “We know our alignment for our product-market fit and our ICP is probably off, and that’s why we’re fixing it.” But what I really like about this is that we’re showing everybody that it’s possible and that we’re not doing anything wild, or paying tens of thousands of dollars to an external research firm to tell us what we already know. We already know. We just want to fix it. We want to do better so that we can reach more people. And it really comes from the foundation of knowing who your ideal customer is.

Katie Robbert 13:14
Because the trap that I run into is thinking that I can represent the ideal customer, but I’m still an n of one. And so as well-rounded as I feel that my understanding is, I’m missing a lot of things. And I also have biases—whether conscious or unconscious—as to what I think they want. And so by having an ideal customer profile that you can interact with, it basically takes me out of the equation and just gives me the facts and says, “Well, this is what your ideal customer needs. These are the pain points. This is what you have to deliver to reach them.” And so what I think they want is taken out. And I think that’s been incredibly helpful as we have been developing these ICPs for ourselves, but also for our clients.

Katie Robbert 14:10
And if you want to learn more about our ICP service, you can reach us at Trust Insights, AI contact, because we do develop these as a service offering, which, again, it’s not on our website. That’s a huge miss. Here we are.

Christopher Penn 14:29
Our assessment is this page scores a 78. So that’s a C. I mean, it’s—okay.

Katie Robbert 14:36
That’s actually better than I thought it would be.

Christopher Penn 14:39
Well, you picked this page because some of our other pages are. So, it’s going to have a D.

Katie Robbert 14:43
Or an F?

Christopher Penn 14:44
Exactly. So, we have strengths: strong niche focus, value proposition, clarity, leveraging expertise, areas for improvement, deeper ICP tailing, quantified value and differentiation, client-centric language. And then if you look, this breaks down the individual scores from each section of our scoring rubric. This is where you, as the person, as the marketer can go understand your client needs that. Scored the lowest in this section. So, our writing on that is not particularly great. Market validation scores of eight or above—that’s not bad. Client-centric approach, seven out of ten, we didn’t do so hot there. And so now it says, “Here’s some additional recommendations.” So, already we have a very good x-ray of this page’s content. Go. All right, it looks like we got some work to do.

Christopher Penn 15:30
So, our next step would be to say, “Okay, taking into account all this, what would a revised page look like?” So, we’re actually going to ask the question, say, “Taking into account all of the recommendations and the ICP, create a refinement of this page’s content that incorporates as many of the recommendations as possible while still remaining truly accurate.” Because we’ve had experiences where Gemini has very helpfully created things that don’t exist. We had that happen the other day. It’s like, “Hey, here’s a great case study.” We’re like, “We never did that.”

Katie Robbert 16:19
Yeah, and it sounded—here’s the thing, it sounded really credible. And I was like, “Did we do that? Wait a minute.” And we had to go back and look. And it’s like, “Oh, that’s a total hallucination.” But the way that it was written with such authority and it was using KDGPT that I was like, “Wait a minute, am I just forgetting?” So, it is really important that you can do that fact-checking because it can be really convincing—hilariously convincing.

Christopher Penn 16:52
Exactly. So, this has come up with a new version of the page. Our next task is to say, “Great, score this refinement using the same rubric.” Because after all, what’s the point of a new AI version if the new AI version isn’t any better than the original one? So, this one came through. It came up at the 90. So, went from a C to an A minus. That’s—that’s better.

Katie Robbert 17:21
That’s an improvement for sure.

Christopher Penn 17:25
The big ones are things like the client-centric approach. So, let’s take a look at this copy here and see what it comes with. Now, knowing this scored an A minus already, the language is different. You can see how it is much more you, the audience-focused, not us and how awesome we are. So, this upset of updates reads better in terms of just the copy alone. However, one interesting question to ask is: do the services themselves best fit what the ideal customers’ needs and pain points are? Or are there additional related services that we should be offering in this landing pages, categories of services?

Christopher Penn 18:25
So, this is now going into true product-market fit, not just rearranging the deck chairs in the Titanic, if you will, but asking the legitimate question: are there things that we’re not doing that we should be doing that our ICP would find very valuable? So, things like CDP strategy and implementation—we actually have a fair amount of experience with CDPs. We’ve implemented Snowplow. We’ve done work with Treasure Data. And those are some things that could be on here. And we’ve talked about our CDP strategic framework in past newsletters. It’s probably time to put that on the page: marketing automation optimization, data governance and compliance for marketers. I mean, that should probably be kind—

Katie Robbert 19:09
Of the core of what we do.

Christopher Penn 19:11
AI-powered content, strategy, and creation.

Katie Robbert 19:16
And this is humbling, but in a good way.

Christopher Penn 19:23
Exactly. The good news is that these adjacent services are all capabilities we have experience with. For CDPs, we have our own framework for strategic implementation: the framework: authenticate, augment, activate. And we have extensive experience with marketing automation tools such as HubSpot, Pardot, Marketo, Modic, etc. Let’s see what’s—Theorem. We have decades of experience in data governance and compliance, especially in highly regulated industries such as pharmaceuticals. And we are the world’s leading experts in AI and marketing. Here are the bios of our two principals, which can inform the copy of the landing page in terms of capabilities. So, now let’s go over to our team page and let’s vacuum up our team with this new information, revise our page copy, including the recommended but omitted services.

Christopher Penn 21:26
So, let’s see how the software will now infer additional stuff and make this page as good as it can be.

Katie Robbert 21:37
What I like about this too is that—you know—we’ve—I’ve experienced this, and we’ve talked with others where it’s so easy to help someone else, but when you have to talk about yourself and your contributions, you kind of—I mean, I do stuff. And it’s easy to forget all of the things. Like, nowhere in here is like, “Oh yeah, by the way, we’re really strong in data governance.” Like, “Oh yeah, that’s probably a big thing that should be front and center” because—and we know for people who are looking to do AI integration, data governance is a big part of that. So, they probably want to know what’s involved and that we actually have a lot of experience doing it.

Katie Robbert 22:26
You know, what’s interesting is there are—you know—I don’t know if it would fall under “branding experts” or “consultants” or “copywriters” or all of the above—this is not a knock at people who do those things for a living. What I like about this is I’m not looking to overhaul our brand. We know who we are, we know what we do. What we need is just a little bit of a nudge in the right direction to make sure that all of the content, all of the experience, all the things that we know we do well are just packaged up in a little bit more of a focused way. So, I’m not opposed to outside help getting this stuff, but we’re also not in a place where we’re so stuck in—

Katie Robbert 23:16
This is how it has to be—that we need to bring in that outside help to get us unstuck.

Christopher Penn 23:22
Exactly. Let’s take a look. The final score for this page: 97 out of 100. Yeah. So, went from a 78 to a 97. Our report card is doing better: seamless expert integration, errors for minor refinement, subtle case study hints if possible. And then, of course, it goes through the whole scoring thing. So, we now have this brand new page that contains the existing services, but also has the ones that are missing. And—but now here’s a question for you: language check. When you read that copy, how does it feel to you?

Katie Robbert 24:00
You’re assuming I can read things that are that tiny, so I’m going to have to get back to you on that one. So, let’s see. With decades of experience in highly regulated industries, including pharmaceuticals, we help you navigate the complex world of data privacy. Oh, it went away. I don’t—

Christopher Penn 24:17
Yeah, hang on. I’m making it larger.

Katie Robbert 24:20
Like, where did it go?

Christopher Penn 24:22
There you go.

Katie Robbert 24:25
“Led by our CEO, a recognized authority, and data governance compliance, we will work with you to ensure marketing campaigns are not only effective, but also ethical and compliant, protecting both you and your customers.” You know what’s interesting is that is all correct. That is all the way that it probably should be. I personally would never write it that way because—to me—it’s funny. And this—you know—not to get too deep into my own psyche, but I also—I’m like “Why do we have to brag so hard?” Like, that’s sort of where I get stuck. But obviously, that’s the whole point of a services page: is to brag about your accomplishments, your experience. And so for me, that’s my disconnect because I’m not comfortable doing that. So, this is a great exercise.

Katie Robbert 25:14
So, as I’m reading it, I’m like, “Oh yeah, that’s exactly what it is. Like, the CDP’s struggling with fragmented data. Yep. Our unique AAA framework provides a proven roadmap for selecting, implementing, and maximizing, it will help.” Like, that’s—”Yeah, okay, now I know what I’m buying.” Like, that’s exactly what it’s meant to do. What I need to know—and I don’t know if we can figure this out because now my competitive streak has kicked in—what is that 3% that we’re missing? That would get us to 100?

Christopher Penn 25:48
The areas. We’re missing a point. We are missing one point on market demand and opportunity, two points on alignment with firm capabilities. But we need a case study of some kind on that page that’s linked in that can say, “Hey, look at how awesome we are.” Those are the three points. And the good news is we do have case studies for this episode. It’s just not on this page. So, we could certainly include that. “Hey, click this link to go check out our case study on this.” And that would at least—that would get us to 99.

Katie Robbert 26:23
Well, in terms of market demand and opportunity, effectively implies strong market demand. Adding a concise, data-driven statement about the growing importance of CDP strategy. I mean, that ties in nicely with being able to construct interactive ICPs. If you have—that’s—I mean, that’s sort of the—not to get too off-topic, but a CDP is essentially a mega ICP. It’s a mega ideal customer profile because a CDP is meant to be that. What is it? The central data, the customer data platform for centralizing all of your data. And so if you can figure out how to make a—you know—centralized CDP, you can understand better your customer behaviors. And so, I mean, yeah, that’s what everybody wants. Everybody wants that.

Christopher Penn 27:14
So, yeah, there’s a single view, the customer, 360-degree view of the customer and all those wonderful terms. Although there’s actually this really brand new stupid thing called the composable CDP, which is basically a CDP in reverse. Yeah, stop it for another time.

Katie Robbert 27:33
All right, moving on.

Christopher Penn 27:34
That said, this page is now in reasonably good condition. However, the one thing that we have not asked our software to do yet is to come up with the kinds of search terms that we would want to include on this page to make sure that they’re there. So, let’s ask that of this—of our recipes using our ICP as a reference. “What two to four—two to five-word phrases would our ICP search for that would naturally lead them to this page?” Focus on words and phrases that indicate intent—high intent to purchase—an example would be “recommended CDP vendors” or “recommended AI consultants.” High intent terms. Low intent terms would be informational terms like “What is ACDP?” Or “What is AI?” that indicates the ICP is in a very early stage of the process and would not need our services yet.

Christopher Penn 29:11
So, let’s see what it comes up with. So, we have a nice location-based stuff. So, we have pain point-focused: proving marketing, ROI marketing, mixed modeling services and things like that. So, those are pretty decent. We would then want to take this into a traditional SEO keyword tool and make sure that validate them. That like, there actually is search volume for this sort of thing.

Katie Robbert 29:44
Yep, that makes sense. Yeah, I mean this—we’re actually faring better than I thought. One of the things that I feel just about our services pages, in general, is—you know, despite our best efforts to sort of clean up and streamline them—there’s still a lot of information. So, there’s five or six different sections of services, and not for this live stream because it would be a lot of work. But I think the direction that we should go—but this would be a question for the ICP—is: should we just have one page with everything, or all of? I think the fact that we have people clicking into things and then clicking in and levels and layers is probably also preventing the ease of use.

Katie Robbert 30:38
And so I bring that up because I know for other clients and for other projects, we’ve built website scoring rubrics that basically say, “How’s the ease of use of your website? Like, is it any good?” And so I feel like that would be phase two. Like, phase one: do this. Rebuild your services pages based on the feedback from your ICP. Phase two: go back to your large language model and build a scoring rubric for how good the page is in terms of ease of use. And it sort of becomes that 360 solution of you’re not just addressing the pain points, but you’re also making the page something that somebody can actually get to and read. Mm.

Christopher Penn 31:29
You could do that. You could also use the ICP and use the information to just uplevel the usability period to say—because we’re doing this with another client—”I am a CMO, CTO, whatever. I need to do this. Basically, you’ll be following this format.” “I am this, I want to do this.” And then instead of the—so that it’s a—it would basically just bounce someone correctly to the page that you want them to go to. “I’m a CMO. I need to get a CDP implemented. How do I do that?” Boom, you go to the CDP page. Because you’re—if you use the language that your real customers or your synthetic customers are using—it shortcuts accessibility stuff by saying, “Look, here’s what you’re looking for.”

Christopher Penn 32:26
If we know the words and phrases that you’re going to use, we can create navigation that is customer-centric to say, “This is where you probably want to be.” And if this isn’t then we weren’t clear, and we didn’t do a good enough job anticipating what your needs were. Maybe our ICP needs some refinement because we don’t have the right needs and the right pain points.

Katie Robbert 32:49
And I think you hit upon the exact reason we’re doing this. It needs to be customer-centric. All of us get into this trap of thinking we know what the customer wants. And—we started the episode—with this statement, it’s like, “We think we can represent the customer, but we’re still injecting ourselves into it.” And while it’s the customer who buys our services that we provide, it’s about them and what they need, not what we have to offer them at that time. It’s “What are—what problems are they having?” And making that mindset shift is really difficult sometimes. So having this ICP to work with that can give you that mindset shift.

Katie Robbert 33:36
To say, “No, give me the point of view from the customer, not from my point of view of what I think they want” is so powerful. And I just—I’m still giddy about being able to do this because—you know—I love market research and I love focus groups. Those can be expensive. Those can be labor-intensive. And they can be just not the timeline for getting the feedback maybe just isn’t as efficient as you need it to be. And I’m just—I’m so in love with being able to use these proxy ideal customer profiles to do this kind of stuff, to keep it customer-centric.

Christopher Penn 34:19
And speaking of which, if you want to be customer-centric and maybe you don’t have all of the pieces that you would need to construct an ICP, there is a backdoor way to get to that. And this is going to be really interesting because this is going to be a contrast to what we know our ICP is. So, I’m going to save this because otherwise, you’re going to ask me about it in 20 minutes, 100%. I’m going to start a new prompt. And let’s just make sure our safety settings are nonexistent. And to say, “Today, we’re going to construct an ideal customer profile (ICP) based on what our customers think we do. The information that will comprise this will be search terms for which our customers already find our website. We have no additional information,” which is not true.

Christopher Penn 35:31
“Additional information other than these terms from Google Search Console: infer the demographics, thermographics, needs, pain points, goals, and motivations of our customers from this search data.” So, essentially, we’re going to build an ICP in reverse. This is not the best way to do this. To be clear, this is kind of a backdoor way of getting at. But if you are a marketer, you have absolutely, positively no other data—which we run into the situation where a team has just no other information—this is—this will be a reflection of that. Now, what will be very interesting is if this data paints a different ICP than the one we know about. So, let’s go ahead and get this rolling here. That’s unhelpful. All right, let’s—I have attached the data that is.

Katie Robbert 36:49
I do that a lot as well. It happens.

Christopher Penn 36:56
That is really having a hard time with that. Oh, let’s try moving up. Oh, wait, I know what the issue is—as stupid as it is—I have to provide the prompt first, and then the data file. Order matters.

Katie Robbert 37:25
I can see that.

Christopher Penn 37:26
Yep, there we go. All right. Demographics: tech-savvy; strongest: AI professionals, English speaking, potentially global, no geographic information; B2B focus, marketing-driven, varied size needs, data analysis, insights, marketing optimization, AI and automation training development, competitive intelligence; pain points: data silos and quality, keeping up with technology, content creation challenges, lack of resources, inefficient marketing processes; goals: improve marketing ROI, data-making, drive business group; motivations: career advancement, professional recognition, business success; key takeaways: content strategy, service offerings. So, that’s cool. We got our—I guess it’s not ideal—it’s an actual customer profile from our search data. Let’s say this. Great. “Next, I’m going to provide our known ICP. Compare and contrast it with the Google Search Console data ICP you created.”

Christopher Penn 38:28
So, let’s do a little bit of comparison and see how what we came up with using a bunch of different data sources compares to just search data alone.

Katie Robbert 38:42
Yeah, well, and we did something similar a few weeks back. And again, you can find that on our YouTube channel, Trust Insights, AI YouTube, at our So What playlist where we took a look at our actual customer profile based on what was in our CRM and compared it and aligned it with our ideal customer profile. And this—what I like is—this is another version of that. Because who our ideal customer profile is may not be who we’re attracting to our website, and therefore that’s where we need to realign our services, which all full circle makes sense.

Christopher Penn 39:20
It says, “The Google Search Console data largely validates the existing ICP. It has a potentially broader market beyond the current ICP, including smaller businesses,” which is—we know is true from a subject matter perspective, not true from a “Can you afford our fees?” perspective. “Content strategy is good service diversification. We might want to offer smaller businesses,” which we do to some degree. I mean, we have, for example, a course that people can take if they want to self-serve on this stuff. And then geographic targeting, continue monitoring. But this tells us based on—and this is kind of should be somewhat reassuring to you, Katie—”What’s on our website is not so wildly different from our ICP that the wrong people are finding us and we’re being known for the wrong things.”

Katie Robbert 40:06
That is reassuring because—you know—getting a 70% score on our services pages is like, “Oh, well, we’re missing a lot of people.” But this revalidates, like, “Okay, maybe we’re actually doing maybe better.” And of course, my first thought is, “Well, we should probably update our ICP with our Google Search Console data as well.”

Christopher Penn 40:32
Yep, we could definitely include that. Though I think there’s a case to be made that who is your ideal and who is your actual—you may not want to blend those two data sets because you may not have the right actual customers.

Katie Robbert 40:46
That’s true. And so—you know—it’s all really interesting. Sort of the—you know—what is it? Fiction versus reality of—you know—a company like us, like Chris, you’re looking at two-thirds of the company, and we have a lot of control over who we want to be serving, who our audience is. But when you get to those larger, enterprise-size companies, where you’re farther removed from who’s actually needing your services versus who you want to be serving, these tools become even more essential to bring you back to a grounded place of what’s actually happening. Because again, your company is so big, you have so many different business units that getting that market research, getting that customer feedback just might not be a good use of time.

Katie Robbert 41:39
It may be expensive. It may be a cost center that you just can’t afford right now. So, having these kinds of tools to stand in as a proxy is going to be really helpful to refocus and redirect your efforts. I mean, I just can’t say enough good things about it. Not because I created it, but because it’s just so incredibly useful. Okay, because I created it, but also because what I’ve seen happen since it was put together is how it’s already, for us, become so integrated into everything we do and how many use cases we’ve been able to come up with and demonstrate on the live stream for our clients of—”And this is what you can do when you have it.” And I just—I love stuff like that.

Christopher Penn 42:31
It solves a fundamental marketing problem. And the fundamental marketing problem is this: how often do you talk to customers? Most marketers—the answer is—we don’t. We don’t go and have lunch with customers. We don’t conduct focus groups. You know, even in companies that do that, they have a market research division that doesn’t necessarily talk to marketing. So, having an ideal customer profile that is a synthetic entity in AI, derived from real data, means that now marketers can talk to customers. So, one of the things that I think is a key takeaway for the use of an ICP is, “What would you talk to a customer about if you had unlimited amounts of time and budget? What would you talk to a customer about?” Use a synthetic customer like this to do that so that you are at least getting some level of feedback.

Katie Robbert 43:28
It’s a great reason to put together some user stories. You know, as the CEO, “I want to talk to my customers.” So, that as the chief data scientist, “I want to talk to my customers.” So that because, Chris, you and I may have very different reasons for wanting to talk to our customers. I want to know: are they happy with what we’re doing? Are they getting services provided? You may want to know their maturity in terms of using certain tools or analytics techniques. Very different, but all important. And so you can use that as your starting point for building your ideal customer profile to say, “Can I answer this question with that?”

Christopher Penn 44:12
Exactly. So, to wrap up, the process is: you need an ideal customer profile first. That’s important. Then you need to use the PARE Framework to build out the knowledge base of what it is you’re trying to do: product-market fit for. You need to then construct a scoring rubric from that knowledge base. Then you can start feeding in your content. Say, “Here’s the content, here’s the ICP, here’s a scoring rubric.” Sort of a three-part—a three-legged stool. The tools can then infer what the intersection of those things are and tell you, “Hey, this content is off-base, or on-base, compared to what we know is best practices for product-market fit and what we know the ideal customer wants.” If you do those practices, you will be able to create content that resonates better. If you think about it,

Christopher Penn 45:03
Even before we asked the question about search terms, the content that it created was rich with the language that you would expect a good SEO person to come up with because it’s customer-centric. It’s what the customer is after. So, I would strongly encourage folks to follow the steps that we’ve done in this live stream. You know, if you want help with building that ICP, we’ve got—certainly happy to do that, stop by and say hi. But any parting words, Katie?

Katie Robbert 45:35
I mean, if I think if you don’t have the bandwidth, the resources, the means, the skills to get direct access to your audience and your customers, I think an ICP is—you know—a really great stand-in. But if you do want to talk to actual people, like myself and Chris, you can join our Slack community, free Slack community, Analytics for Marketers, where we talk about a lot of this stuff. And I think that having that balance of talking with people in real life and having your large language models is a really good balance to strike.

Christopher Penn 46:10
It is. So, next week, Katie and John will be holding down the fort. I’ll be on a plane. So, we will see you all next time. Thanks for watching today. Be sure to subscribe to our show wherever you’re watching it. For more resources and to learn more, check out the Trust Insights podcast at TrustInsights.ai/tipodcast and a weekly email newsletter at TrustInsights.ai/newsletter. Got questions about what you saw in today’s episode? Join our free Analytics for Marketers Slack Group at TrustInsights.ai/analyticsformarketers. See you next time!

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