So What? You Built An Ideal Customer Profile, Now What? - Trust Insights Marketing Analytics Consulting

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In this episode of So What? you’ll learn how to use your ideal customer profile to improve your marketing. You’ll see how to analyze your content to make sure it aligns with what your ideal customer wants. You’ll also see practical examples of how to use your ideal customer profile to get sponsorships.

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So What? You Built an Ideal Customer Profile, Now What?

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In this episode you’ll learn:

What kind of data your Ideal Customer Profile should include
How to include your Ideal Customer Profile in your processes
Lesser known use cases for interacting with your Ideal Customer Profile

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 00:35
Well, hey everyone. Happy Thursday. Welcome to so what, the marketing, analytics and insights live show. I am Katie, joined by Chris and John.

Christopher S. Penn 00:42
Hello.

Katie Robbert 00:43
Hello.

Christopher S. Penn 00:44
Oh, so almost.

Katie Robbert 00:45
So, I don’t know, Chris. I’m going to give you a B minus for that effort.

Christopher S. Penn 00:50
That’s because my camera’s so much further away. Like, I stick a whole hand out and still—I’m still far away.

Katie Robbert 00:56
You need the go gadget arms.

Christopher S. Penn 00:58
I do. Or I just need to move the camera.

Katie Robbert 01:01
We would have been so much closer. Yeah. All right. On this week’s episode. So, you built an ICP. Now what do you do with it? So, we’ll be going over what kind of data your ideal customer profile should include, how to include your ideal customer profile in your processes. And some lesser-known use cases for interacting with your ideal customer profile. So today is all about—so you built an ICP. What the heck do you do with it? And I think that this is a good conversation for us to have, because a lot of times in business, in life, we’ll do something, and then it will just kind of like sit there like, “Okay, great. I did the thing, I checked the box.” But with an ideal customer profile, the purpose is that it’s a stand-in for your customers.

Katie Robbert 01:54
So, it takes away the overhead of reaching out to your customers, having those conversations. You still want to do those things, but this is a good proxy. So what do you do with it? Before we get into sort of the use cases, John, what would you do if you had an ideal customer profile for marketing over coffee?

John Wall 02:19
Yeah. The big thing with this is being able to surface stuff that you just didn’t know at all. Commonalities amongst who your customers are or places to find them—anything that gives you some insight that you never had before as far as who they are, where they go, who they associate with, what they have in common—because that’s the gap we see over and over again. People think their customer base is a certain thing, and then they run one of these reports, and it’s like, “Well, no, actually, it’s a different vertical.” Or, “You’re going too high or too low.” So, it’s really an opportunity to kind of focus and get things back on track if you’re wasting money in places that aren’t going to do anything for you.

Katie Robbert 03:01
Makes sense. So Chris, where would we like to start this week?

Christopher S. Penn 03:06
Well, gosh. Why don’t you talk about the ICP that you built for my newsletter, and tell me—actually, let’s do this. Let’s pretend as we are wanted to do that I am the client. I have purchased this service, which was reassuringly expensive, and now I’m like, “So, I’ve got this thing, what do I do with this, Katie? What even is in here? I don’t know what I’m looking at.”

Katie Robbert 03:38
Yeah. Okay. So, let me back up for a second. So, it’s not on our website yet, because I’m still in the process of beta testing it, because I’m a perfectionist, and I really want to make sure I’ve nailed it. But we’ve developed a service offering where, using a minimal amount of your data—meaning it’s not a heavy burden on your side—we can give you a high-level ideal customer profile based on information that you give us. And so, if you want a version of that, or if you want something more in-depth, you can reach us at Trust Insights, AI contact. So what I’ve done is I’ve built a set of system instructions in chat GPT with some assistance from Chris. Let’s be totally honest, he went through and refined my system instructions, but I did do the majority of it.

Katie Robbert 04:30
What it does is it says, “Okay, I’m here to help you build an ideal customer profile. Give me some information.” And so, we look at information like LinkedIn data, we look at Google Analytics data, we look at channel data, and all of that together makes this ideal customer profile analysis. And so, as the client, Chris, what you have is now some direction in terms of the types of people that you want to attract to your newsletter for the purpose of more sponsorships. So, if you get the right readers, if you get the right kind of interaction and engagement with your newsletter, it’ll be easier for you to get sponsorships. So, what you’re looking at is starting off with the basics: your firmographics. What industries are these people in? What are their general company size, locations? What’s the ownership structure?

Katie Robbert 05:28
It’s interesting because I see a lot of ICPs for more of the agencies where the ownership structure are publicly traded companies, and not startups. Yours is interesting because yours—your ICP sits nicely in an entrepreneurial space. And so, that is sort of a bit of a differentiator for you. So, that is something for you to be mindful of. Then you have your usual data, such as your demographics: who are these people, their titles, technographics you have. And then, we move into psychographics, if you could scroll down a little bit. So, the psychographics are those emotional drivers, so common problems and business goals. You have behavioral traits, such as purchasing patterns and decision processes. And then, you have budget, which is really interesting, too, because you want to make sure you’re targeting the people with the right budgets and asking for appropriate sponsorship fees.

Katie Robbert 06:29
And so, generally stable with potential for rapid growth—that ties in nicely with those startups. And then, what you get in this analysis, which is really important, are their pain points. So, it’s one thing to say, “Here’s the firmographics, demographics, and so on and so forth,” but then you also need to know what the problems are that you can solve for your ideal customer. So what you would do with this, Chris, as the client, is you would look at these pain points, and go, “Great, for my newsletters, I’m going to write about all of these things, because that’s what’s going to speak to my ideal customer profile.” So, if you continue to scroll down, then we have what’s called the alignment report. So, the alignment report section of this is, “How well do the services that you offer align with your ideal customer profile?”

Katie Robbert 07:20
You may find that it’s a perfect match because you know your customer base so well. Or you may find, “I’m over here quilting socks, and they’re telling me that they need hats.” And so, it’s like, all right, there’s a misalignment. So, this section for you, Chris, as the client goes through: here are the things you offer. Here’s how well they align. And then, here’s where you could find some opportunities to align your services better to meet the needs of the customer profile. Because what this is all about—it’s not about what you want to give them, it’s about what they need. And so, it’s really from the perspective of: this is what the ideal customer needs. Here’s what you need to do to meet them where they are, not the other way around.

Katie Robbert 08:04
And so, it goes through all of your different services. It gives you some specific advice. And then, because we’re not done, because I like to make sure there’s a nice little bow on everything. And so, there’s a “So what?” I give you an action plan. So, this is where a lot of the traffic data and some of your GA data comes in. “What are you doing? And then, how can you meet those ideal customers where they are?” So, we’ve also put together an action plan for you based on their pain points, based on your services, based on where they are. These are the things that you could be doing to reach them even better. So, it’s an evaluation of your current efforts. Here’s some immediate things that you can do and then go forth and conquer.

Christopher S. Penn 08:52
Okay, I can go forth and conquer. Where should I start? This is a lot.

Katie Robbert 08:57
So, where you should start is after you’ve digested the information and said, “Yep, okay, this tracks.” Personally, I would start with the summary of the immediate actions. So what are the three things? And this is in the system instructions, what are the three things this person should start with? So, enhance your digital marketing and SEO efforts. Leverage social media and email marketing. Develop interacting and engaging content. Now, keep in mind that you didn’t give me any budget for what you’re doing. You didn’t give me any constraints of like, “I don’t have social media,” or this, that, or the other. It’s using the data provided. And so, if somebody wants to run this, and then they want something more in-depth, we can absolutely do that. It’s just a bigger ask on the client’s part to put together and provide that data.

Katie Robbert 09:48
But based on very straightforward data snapshots—exports of existing systems—the first thing you should do, Chris, is take a look at your digital marketing and SEO efforts, and so optimize your website and blog content. Create SEO optimized blog posts and then use tools like Semrush for keyword research and tracking. And so, what you would do is you would go back at those pain points, and go, “What content do I have now that addresses those that I can optimize and say, ‘Hey, look, I do the thing?'” And then you can move on to step two, is like, “Okay, I’ve optimized the thing. I’ve made it really clean, really relevant to put it on social media, feature it in your newsletter.” And then, I would say then you can develop new content.

Katie Robbert 10:35
So, I would start with what you have, make sure that it’s clear you’re addressing those pain points, and then move on to creating net new.

Christopher S. Penn 10:42
Got it. Okay. One thing that I didn’t provide: what I’m currently doing.

Katie Robbert 10:50
Nope.

Christopher S. Penn 10:50
And I didn’t provide any information about my point of view on things. So, I figured what we could do is bring in some of that, and then have the model kind of compare—I call it like a company profile almost—with the ideal customer profile to see like, “Here’s the company and what they can do. Here’s the ideal customer profile and what the ideal customer wants. Is there a disconnect?” And I’ve—of course, I absolutely know there’s a disconnect, because I know I have a very clear idea of what the disconnect is. The disconnect is my newsletter is what I do for myself, personally. I don’t actually care if anyone else likes what I write, because I want to write it for me, which is not ideal for an ideal customer profile, but that’s how I operate.

Christopher S. Penn 11:33
So, to do this, I’m going to use the Gemini 1.5 model again. You can use whatever language model you want, but I’m going to start off by saying, “What do you know about marketing and AI expert Christopher S. Penn of Trust Insights?” So, this is—we’re skipping straight to the PARE Framework, the Trust Insights PARE Framework—priming the model. I want to see if it’s—if it knows who I am because that’s kind of important. So far, so good. Check the box of Marketing over Coffee’s. Got my correct job title right. Got my book title right. Okay, great. So, hey, look, even has URLs. Now, that’s actually really surprising. That didn’t used to have that. And they’re right.

Katie Robbert 12:23
Well, that’s half the battle, isn’t it?

Christopher S. Penn 12:25
Exactly. So, this is the company profile. Now, the next thing I’m going to do is over lunch, and between chewing, I did a voice memo of just, “Hey, here’s what I’m doing. Like, here’s the kind of stuff that I’m doing.” So, I’m going to say, “Here’s additional information from Christopher Penn about his marketing efforts and his almost timely newsletter,” and let’s put that in. “You know, this is foaming at the mouth,” so I was like, “Oh, I do this, I have this,” etcetera. It says, “Here’s information about the newsletter. There are 280,000 subscribers weekly. Focuses on artificial intelligence. Been running for 17 years, runs on Substack, has a podcast for audio, has video,” etcetera. So now, this is sort of a breakdown of what I was foaming at the mouth at. So let’s say, great.

Christopher S. Penn 13:24
“Combining your knowledge of—plus the information provided—create a comprehensive company profile for the ‘Almost Timely Newsletter.'” Now, we’re going to synthesize this. We’re going to take this data, glue it together, and see what it has to say about this company. This would be ideal. Then, this is something I should have provided to you for the ideal customer profile. What the heck? We’re going completely backwards.

Katie Robbert 14:04
Sure. But I think that the purpose of today’s livestream is—all right, so you’ve created an ideal customer profile. What do I do next? So, it sounds like the first thing is you want to amend it with additional information and then we can move on to the other use cases.

Christopher S. Penn 14:23
Right. And also to understand, am I even capable of using the information in the ideal customer profile? So, we talked about, for example, all these different recommendations. Well, if fundamentally, I’m doing one thing as a business, we’re going to put on my client. I’m saying, “Yeah, I do this because I want to do it this way,” and you’re saying, “No, but the customer wants this.” And the business owner says, “Yeah, but I want to do it this way.” That disconnect is going to make it very hard to get value out of an ideal customer profile because you’re saying the map says turn right, like I’m going left, and you can’t tell me otherwise, and it’s just not going to end well.

Christopher S. Penn 14:59
So, I think that’s an important consideration for the use of ideal customer profiles, is like with all analytics, if you don’t do anything with the data, or you go in the opposite direction of what the data says, you’re not going to get value out of it.

Katie Robbert 15:13
Right?

Christopher S. Penn 15:19
Okay. So, let’s ask that. Let’s go ahead and add in, “Ideal customer profile for Christopher Penn,” which should be—there it is. Let’s add that in, and let’s see what Gemini says about comparing these two things because I’m legitimately curious. I did not do this before the show. I want to see what’s going on here. So, from the target audience scope, the company profile casts a wider net. The ICP is more focused. Potential conflict. Yeah. So, if I just try and write a newsletter for everyone, it dilutes my messaging, which makes it less the primary target. Decision-makers in SMEs looking for practical marketing AI advice: company profile, ICP. Practical application of AI within marketing data science is more a supporting element. Here’s the conflict: The business model emphasis—newsletter sponsorships and company speaking engagements. The ISP prioritizes growing the newsletter to attract sponsors.

Christopher S. Penn 16:31
So now, I have a much better idea of where I think I am, and with what reality says, based on the data I provided from the ideal customer profile, to say like, “Okay, I need to focus more on the use of AI within marketing, and maybe not so much on the technology itself.” I’m not going to do that, but that’s what it’s telling me to do.

Katie Robbert 16:53
But here’s—I think this is as frustrating as it is for me to hear you say that—it is such a common thread within a company of “It’s the same data-driven conversation all over again,” of “I don’t care what the data says. This is what I want to do.” You can create an ideal customer profile. And so now you, Chris, if you were really dedicated—and we’re picking on you as the client, because you offered yourself—if you were really dedicated and committed to growing your newsletter, not just by numbers, but with the right people, you would follow this advice. You would write about AI and marketing—not the technology—for, 600 paragraphs.

Katie Robbert 17:41
I’ve read your newsletter and I can’t follow it. But I think that’s the important thing to remember is: why bother creating it if you’re not going to use it? And so, yes, you’re supplementing the information, but you’re still saying, “Great, but I’m still not going to do that.” And so, I think it’s just an important—I’m not saying don’t create an ideal customer profile. What I’m saying is, much like anything else, it’s a dataset. It’s just a dataset. It’s not a magic wand to suddenly, like, fix all your problems. John, as you were sort of stating at the beginning, it’s a way to find out some of the stuff that maybe you weren’t aware of about where your audience is, or what they care about. And it’s—to me, it’s more than just like, “Oh, well, that’s nice to know.”

Katie Robbert 18:29
“Okay, I’m just going to go do my own thing anyway.” Like, you need to be able to execute on these things. I don’t know. That’s just sort of my rant, my soapbox, because I see it a lot. It’s like, “Yeah, I want to do the thing. I want to check the box,” but then it just sits there.

Christopher S. Penn 18:45
Exactly.

John Wall 18:47
Well, it’s interesting, too, because this is brought to light. We always talk about Christopher as being a data scientist, and data science is always figuring into this. But as I look back now, I’m like, “Well, really?” Over the past year, everything has been AI and marketing and tactical stuff. Like, we’ve not had anybody say, “Hey, I’ve got this data science conference that I want Chris to come speak to.” Like, that’s not—you know, it is in your skillset, and it’s what you do, but it’s not part of the ideal customer profile.

Christopher S. Penn 19:14
Right. So now, I told Gemini, “Update my company profile with the insights from the ideal customer profile so that it’s more focused,” and there’s—you know, again, it’s implementing the device. So, the key differentiators, the expertise, the small, mid-sized enterprise approach, the data-driven approach, partnership opportunities. So now that we’ve got a company profile that’s more aligned with the ideal customer profile, I could, for example, put that in my media kit if I wanted to hand this to potential sponsors. Like, “Here’s what our focus is.” If the newsletter words own company, the next thing I might say is, “Great, one of my key goals is to attract sponsors for my newsletter. Based on my ideal customer profile, who should I be soliciting? What kinds of companies would want to sponsor the Almost Timely Newsletter?”

Christopher S. Penn 20:23
Now that we know who the ideal customer is based on real data—and I fix that little misspelling there, that’s unhelpful, because we now need to implement this, we need to do something with this. So, let’s see. “Knowing your ICP is crucial for targeting the right sponsors. Some prime candidates: marketing technology companies that provide tools and software directly to relevant—to your audience—need marketing automation platforms, analytics tools, social media management platforms, AI-powered marketing solutions, agencies serving SMEs.” You know, I’ve never actually thought about having an agency sponsor the show. That’s a—that’s a really interesting idea. “Business intelligence data platforms, education and training software, course events and conferences,” etcetera. So, already the ideal customer profile has given a focus to who should sponsor the newsletter. Well, there’s five different categories. Let’s do this.

Christopher S. Penn 21:27
“Based on the company profile and the ideal customer profile, rank these different sponsorship opportunities, companies in order of most likely to sponsor to least likely to sponsor.” Now, if this was a real paying customer, the other thing I would do is go to five or six other newsletters—like, Morning Brew marketing, Brew Sources of Sources, etcetera—look at their sponsors and say, like, “Hey, here’s companies are sponsoring other newsletters. How does this fit in?” But we have here most likely to sponsor: AI-powered marketing solutions, marketing automation platforms, analytics tools, moderately likely, least likely. Now, this is super helpful, because now I’ve got to focus. Now I know what to do, which—

Katie Robbert 22:28
Is incomplete though, because you jumped straight to, “Okay, who’s going to sponsor?” But part of the recommendation was to fix up your content. So, if you don’t—so if you as the client, and it is in the key considerations, content synergy—if you don’t look at the recommendations as a whole, and you’re just like, “Great, what’s the fastest way to make money?” you’re missing the big picture of what you’re—because you’re now—you’re still focused on what you want, not what your ideal customer wants. Your ideal customer wants different content than you’re creating based on your goals. So, I just want to sort of like highlight that in terms of when people are thinking about using the ideal customer profile, it’s still not about you. It’s the actions you have to take for someone else.

Katie Robbert 23:24
And so, it’s interesting to me because we actually—it was funny when we were going through this yesterday when I first showed you, “Here’s your analysis.” You were like, “Well, I do this and I do this.” And I had to keep reminding you, “This isn’t about you.” And I think that we’re picking on you, because you offered it up. But a lot of companies get stuck in that mindset of: “This is what I want to be known for, this is the services I want to provide, these are the problems that I solve,” which is all good information, but it’s the wrong way to think about it.

Christopher S. Penn 23:57
Absolutely. So, to that point, the next thing that I asked it to do is build a scoring rubric. So, if I give this language model any piece of content, I want it to score it against my ideal customer profile—not in general, but my specific audience. So, it’s going to go ahead and identify what those things are, build the scoring thing, and then—okay. So, it’s done. So, it has the rubric now. So now, let’s take this rubric, which is derived from the ideal custom profile, and put it to use. I’m going to say, “Great, score this piece of content, and then deliver recommendations for how to improve the score.” So, let’s go ahead, and I’m going to take a LinkedIn post that I did the other day. Just swap that in here, which it’s—

Katie Robbert 24:55
Interesting that you’re taking a LinkedIn post, and not your newsletter, which is the focus of your ICP.

Christopher S. Penn 25:02
Oh yeah. Well, so stuff that is in LinkedIn, if it does well, goes into the newsletter. Okay, let’s see. So, we have here, “This post scored a 76 out of 108.” Out of ten on “Addresses key challenges,” six out of ten on “Practical applications,” nine out of ten on “AI focus,” seven out of ten on “Context,” seven out of ten on “Clarity,” “Visual appeal to promotes newsletter value” very low, and so on and so forth. So, boost practical application, how to create your own benchmark, enhance visual appeal and engagement, of course, strengthen the call to action. So, to your point, let’s go and pick the most recent issue of my newsletter.

Katie Robbert 25:46
Can you see doing this kind of exercise, John, with like, Marketing over Coffee episodes, like, past episodes, to better align with your audience and sponsors?

John Wall 25:55
Yeah, you could do that, but I mean, the angle I’m thinking about is using the sponsor list—you know, ICP for as far as “Who are the sponsors” would be. So, it’d be the media kit that would run against that. And sales emails, you know, stuff like that. Trying to figure out if there’s a better way to get sponsors in the loop.

Katie Robbert 26:16
That totally makes sense.

Christopher S. Penn 26:20
Okay. So, this issue of the newsletter. So, the LinkedIn post that we did scored 76. And the areas, besides visuals, the areas where it kind of fell down was “Promoting newsletter value,” that scored poorly there. “Engagement, shareability, and focus on practical application.” With this issue of the newsletter, this time through, we now have “Practical applications,” eight out of ten, which is improvement over six out of ten. “AI focus,” eight out of ten on the target. “Clarity and organization,” that’s what you were saying, Katie: too long. That needs to be tightened up. “Visual appeal,” it can’t see the graphics. “Engaging, shareability” is good. “Consistent tone, promotes newsletter value.” So, 87 out of 100 is a nice jump from 76.

Christopher S. Penn 27:03
Says, “Add some more visuals, add some more discussion-provoking things, and test a more prominent design for the CTA.” So, that we’ve now used the ICP to take last week’s newsletter and understand what was good and what could have been better about it.

Katie Robbert 27:20
And the way that I use our ICP is, when I write something ahead of publishing it live, I’ll give it to our ICP and say, “Score this for me. What could I do better?” I’ll fix it up before. And so, I can see you using this scoring rubric that you’ve created on your newsletters moving forward, knowing that you’re trying to appeal more to your ideal customer profile. And really, all it takes is—like, you’re going to write it anyway—you’re already pretty well aligned with your ICP. Here’s just some additional things that you can do to push it over the line of super alignment.

Christopher S. Penn 28:02
Exactly. I’m curious now. So, one other thing we can do is we can start to use other data to better understand. So, I’m putting in another issue of the newsletter, and I want to see how this one scores because I have a separate data source that shows what actual readers thought. So, every newsletter has its own “What did you like? Thumbs up? Meh, or thumbs down?” And so, I pulled the newsletter from July 7, which got the lowest scores of my newsletter in almost a year. It was—it did not score well, and I want to see what it came up with. So, this scored in an 80.

Christopher S. Penn 28:39
At an 80, which is seven points down from the other one. I think it would be interesting, and this is something I’d want to programmatically do, is to take every issue and its Net Promoter Scores for issue, and see how it correlates to its alignment to the ICP. If my ideal customer profile is who is subscribed to the newsletter now, then these issues that are below the green line, probably it will show like, “Yeah, you’re not as well aligned here as you are when you’re scoring almost 90s.”

Katie Robbert 29:15
Well, and I think you’re missing a step too, is because we’ve outlined your ideal customer profile, we haven’t realigned that with: who is your current subscriber base? So, we don’t know how much of your list—of however many people you have—is actually the right list. And so, I feel like that’s an important point too. So, the way that you can use your ideal customer profile is with your assets. So, you’re scoring your content, but you can also score your subscriber list. You can score, you know, past customers. I mean, you could say like, “Hey, we’ve had some customers that we don’t really think we’re the best fit. Let’s figure out why, so that we can try to avoid making those same mistakes or to bring in the right customers.” I think that those are other use cases that can’t be overlooked.

Katie Robbert 30:06
Because, again, the ideal customer profile is just that. It’s a future state. It’s not reflective of what you have today. So, use the—use this dataset to look at what you have to be like, “Okay, where do we need to make adjustments?” Because for—if you were my client, Chris, that would 100% be an action item for you is, you know, before we go creating all this net new, let’s do an audit of everything that’s existing. So, do you have the right customers on there now? How much of them are the right ones? Is there an option where you sort of like segment them off?

Katie Robbert 30:46
Where it’s like, “We know these people are the right ones, so we sort of move them into the ‘Advanced,’ or this.” And then, the people who aren’t right, maybe we sort of move them into a different version of the newsletter, whatever the thing is. But, I think that would be a big recommendation that I would make for you as a client.

Christopher S. Penn 31:06
And the good news is, particularly newsletters, that is relatively straightforward to do. You know, it’s very difficult, obviously, to know exactly who people are, unless you’ve collected that data. But what you can do is you can go and take, for example, all the domains that are on that are subscribed to newsletter list. And in my case, let me see what I got here. We have—that can’t be right. Is that really right? 15,000 different domains? Which is—yeah. I mean, that is—these are all just the domain names, not the individual people’s. Then, this is just opens from the most recent newsletter. So, I guess the next thing I could do is I could feed all this into a data appending system—for example, like HubSpot—and build out from my subscribers.

Christopher S. Penn 32:08
Here’s all the different companies that are identified subscribers of the newsletter—that’s today. And in fact, we did that, what, two weeks ago, the actual customer profile episode.

Katie Robbert 32:22
But what you haven’t done is look at this list against your ideal customer profile to say, “Of this list, how many people are the correct people?” Like, anybody who wants to subscribe to your newsletter can do it. But, if you have a business goal, then you need to make sure you have the right people on your list, and that you’re catering more towards them, versus everybody. The Trust Insights newsletter subscriber list is significantly smaller, but it’s more focused. It’s more of the right people on the list. Whereas—and I’m not saying you don’t have the right people on your list, but the focus of your newsletter has evolved so much over time that it’s hard to say that people have come along for the journey, for the right things.

Christopher S. Penn 33:16
Yeah. Yeah. And this is just from the opens from this week’s issue, so it’s not the last six months. That would require substantially more data processing. But, I think that would be—that’s probably an exercise I have to do offline, because there’s so much PII involved that you can’t show it on screen. But it would be a very interesting thing to say, like, “Here’s the actual customer profile of the 280,000 people that are on the list.” And then say—it raises a strategy question. So, we’re talking the ideal customer profile. It was based on the premise of sponsorship. Depending on who’s actually there, that might suggest a different strategic approach. Like, “No, don’t sell sponsorships to these folks. Instead, have them do X,” whatever X is.

Katie Robbert 34:00
Right. Well, and so that goes back to the purpose of today’s episode of, “So, you built an ideal customer profile. Now what?” And so, I think the first order of business is reconciling your existing assets with your ideal customer profile to see where those gaps are and then adjusting your plans to say, “All right, we either have to start from scratch, because we’ve totally been targeting the wrong people, or we’re pretty closely aligned. Let’s put together a plan.” And, in the ideal customer profile that we, Trust Insights, put together for you, we do give you a plan. And so, you know, let’s say, Chris, your subscriber list is 80% or more aligned with your ideal customer profile.

Katie Robbert 34:46
I would say, “Great, then just start, you know, moving down the action items of optimizing your content, utilizing social, and then creating, you know, additional things that appeal to them.” But, until you know—if your current customer base aligns with your ideal customer profile, it’s really hard to do. So, that is one of the “Now whats.” So, what that I would recommend.

Christopher S. Penn 35:10
I think that’s a really important question then, is: so, if you are a company that wanted to buy an ideal customer profile, could you also strategically, logically buy an actual customer profile, so that you could say, “Yeah, here’s where I want to go and here’s where I am right now, and they may be like this, or they may be like this.”

Katie Robbert 35:31
Oh, 100%, I would. I think that would be the number one recommendation, is that’s where I would start. So, as I mentioned at the top of the episode, I’ve been doing these as a beta test because I was curious like, I could just roll this out and say, “Here’s the service.” But, I was naturally curious to say, “How well aligned does the analysis we put together—how does it align with what people feel they already know about who their ideal customer profile is?” So, we did a beta test. I actually ran this one last week, and, on a scale of zero to 50, being least aligned, five being the most aligned, the analysis I put together compared to the ideal customer profile that was existing scored a four out of a five, which I thought was really good.

Katie Robbert 36:22
What I found was that the analysis we put together was more top of funnel. So, it was like, “Who do you need to approach,” versus the existing, which was bottom of funnel. “These people are already in our funnel, so how do we close them?” And so, there was a big gap. And so, with more time, what I would do is then do the analysis to say, “Great. Who are all of the customers? Who are your subscribers? Who are your followers? How well aligned are they to the analysis we did?” So that, when you get to your version of your ICP, you can just close them like that.

Christopher S. Penn 37:00
Exactly. Another use case for what we do with these things. This is an exercise we did this week. We took every post on the Trust Insights blog, and we broke it out into three, four categories. The livestream, because we transcribed livestreams and put them up, the Trust Insights newsletter, Inbox Insights, the Trust Insights Podcast, In Ear Insights, and then, everything else that goes on the blog. And, every post programmatically got pushed through Google’s Gemini Flash model, and said, “Here is the ideal customer profile for Trust Insights. Here is this piece of content. On a scale of zero to 100, how relevant and helpful is this piece of content to the ideal customer profiles’ needs and pain points?” And then, we summed up and looked at it month over month.

Christopher S. Penn 37:50
And what you see here is this chart of the average alignment, zero to 100, by month, for the last, like, five years’ worth of content. Now, the good news is that the dark blue line, which is the running average, is going up, which means that our content is getting more focused towards our ideal customer profile. They find it more helpful, but this is a useful exercise to audit your current content. Kind of. What recommendation was one for me from my ideal customer profile in my analysis, to say, like, “Is what you have right now serving your audience?”

John Wall 38:25
So, day recipes in there at the 42.7?

Christopher S. Penn 38:30
Probably, yeah.

Katie Robbert 38:32
The, “Does It Waffle?” Thanksgiving edition? Well, I was going to say, John, so I asked you to participate in the beta test because I would love to put together an ideal customer profile for Marketing over Coffee, just to continue to out the system. Has this conversation changed the way that you’re thinking about putting that data together or the kind of information you would want to see in your ideal customer profile?

John Wall 39:00
No, I mean, it still matches the promise of what we were originally talking about. It is that idea of getting a better picture of who the people are and trying to figure out where the gaps are, if there’s opportunities we’re missing. Yeah, unfortunately, I can’t think of a good way. There’s not enough content on the sponsorship side to do this kind of analysis. You know, this—I would say this would be more like, “Okay, let’s run all the shows through and see how it matches what listeners want to hear.” So. But, I—but that’s not as much a concern. That’s not as much of a business problem as the—you know—securing sponsorships. So, that would be a nice to have, and be interesting to see.

John Wall 39:38
But, yeah. And, you know, what would be really interesting is to see that as far as guests—like, the people that are—that come on, like—which ones ended up identifying more with the ICP and aligning better, because that’s always an interesting thing. Of, you know, you get a bunch of people to feature and to tell their stories, and sometimes—sometimes, you get lightning in a bottle, and other times you get a bottle full of sewage. So, it’s—you know, you’re rolling the dice with that. And it’d be good to know who the prime hitters—especially with the past successful ones. Like, I’m sure there are people that—probably—people would love to hear again, that have been in the past, and I’ve just—you know, they haven’t done a new book or something, so there’s been no reason to reach out.

John Wall 40:18
But it would be interesting to see how that works.

Katie Robbert 40:20
Well, and—but see, I would make the argument that, by getting the right listeners, it would be theoretically easier than to get sponsors, because you’re getting people who are engaged, you’re getting people who are downloading more consistently. So, your overall podcast numbers would go up, therefore, making it easier to attract sponsors who know they’re reaching people who—it’s not just a blanket. “I have this many—you know—people who’ve ever subscribed.” Like, you’re getting, per episode, “This is how many downloads, because I’m reaching the right people. This is how many comments, this is how many reviews, because I’m reaching the right people.” It’s very similar to the exercise with Chris and his newsletter—you know, to—you know—continue to pick on him again because he put himself out there and volunteered himself.

Katie Robbert 41:10
I, personally—I’m not, like, if I were a sponsor, I’d be like, “I don’t really care that you have 280,000 readers. I don’t care about that. I want to know: “Of that number, how many of them are engaged? How many of them, potentially, are going to buy something? How many of them are the right demographic?” And so, to me, those metrics are more important. So, by Chris—the client—tuning up his approach to his newsletter, the sponsorship should just sort of fall into line. I would say the same is true if you’re evaluating a podcast.

John Wall 41:48
Yeah. Because with any publishing thing, you’ve got this weird triangle of consumer, advertiser, producer. And, it kind of creates a lot of problems. And that’s an interesting angle I hadn’t thought about. It would also be interesting to see what it would say about Substack, like, Marketing over Coffee, taking subscribers. Should that be something that should be considered, or not? And, that’s interesting because it takes complexity out of the loop.

Katie Robbert 42:14
And I think that’s when we think about the—”So, you built an ideal customer profile.” Now, what if you take that data of your ideal customer profile and give it back to a large language model to interact with it? Those are the kinds of questions that you can ask and say, “Hey, ideal customer profile of Marketing over Coffee. How would you feel about me being on Substack?” And I think that’s part of the—now, what is that? You can interact with it. You can ask it questions. You have to set it up so that you can do that. But, that’s part of the next steps, is interacting with it. So, what Chris was doing was building a scoring rubric, but he could have just said, “Hey, here’s a piece of content. What do you think?”

Christopher S. Penn 43:01
One of the other lesser-known use cases for ICPs, which is kind of fun because you can do this with a minimum of information—using publicly available data—is to construct a competitor’s ICP, based on what you know about a competitor. And then, have a language model compare the two to say, “Here’s my ICP, here’s my competitors. Are we competing for the same customer?” Because if we are—okay, then I know I need to sharpen up and rigorously follow the advice. If we’re not, then you say, “Well, maybe there’s a collaboration opportunity here because we’re not competing for the same person. We’re not competing for the same audience.”

Katie Robbert 43:42
Well, and to take that a step further: if you have your ICP, and you have your known competitor, all you need to do is give your ICP their services and say, “How well do they meet your needs?” That’s a very simple exercise, and it’s like, “Great, they check nine of the 10 boxes. We only check five. So, it’s no wonder we’re losing to—you know—we’re losing out on business to someone else.” So, it’s—there’s a lot of different ways to think about it. You can get really complex with it. You can keep it really simple and ask it basic questions, of like, “Hey, I think I might start doing ads. Is that a good idea? Should I bother, you know, spending those resources?” Great question. “What does your ICP think? Would they—are ads—on their list of places where they get information?”

Katie Robbert 44:34
Let’s find out.

Christopher S. Penn 44:36
Yep, you can. And you should, if you have the capability of doing so. Create your ideal customer profile. Once you’ve done the process of building it—is actually create the ideal customer profile as a persona—as a synthetic customer that you can talk to, day or night, whenever you want, and ask them questions. So, for example, this is one that we built. This is Agent Sarah Johnson, who is the Trust Insights ideal customer profile, remixed as an actual persona. So, we say, “Here’s who Sarah is, the kinds of things she likes—dogs,” etcetera. And then, you can have a chat with Agent Sarah at any time in the interface. Or, as we’ve done, put it in Slack. We’ve created a Slackbot that Katie or anyone can talk to at any given time and say, “Well, Agent’s here. What do you think about this?”

Christopher S. Penn 45:31
So, as we refined, for example, the Almost Timely Newsletter, I can create an agent of that, and then I’d be able to do exactly that. The ideal use case of an ideal customer profile is: it’s a customer. It’s just a synthetic aggregation of your customer data. So, if you’re thinking, “Well, what are the use cases for? What are the use cases for talking to a customer?” And, if you don’t talk to customers, that’s a different problem.

Katie Robbert 46:02
Yeah, but I think it’s a good start. I mean—you know—the, what I would, personally, do with my—you know, if I were to reach out to Trust Insights, and I said, “Hey, I want to get a copy. I want to get my own ideal customer profile.” And then, I give you the analysis—very similar to what I gave to Chris—you know, also with a walkthrough explainer deck, which he didn’t get because he works at Trust Insights. And, it’s just one more PowerPoint that I would have had to create. But, there is a PowerPoint that comes with it. I, personally—if I were a client—I’d be like, “Great, you have all of these different demographics and firmographics listed. Can I drill down into each of those and create those as their own customer profile?”

Katie Robbert 46:46
The answer is: “Yes, you can absolutely do that.” And so, I think that those are things that are worthwhile so that, when you’re segmenting your audience, if you have, like, an email list, you want to segment it out by those titles. What do those specific segments of your audience need? Or how can I segment out by industry? “If we’re doing healthcare, versus, we’re doing manufacturing, versus, we’re doing B2C, how can I target those industries specifically?” Versus, an ideal customer profile is great, but it’s still very broad. So, you want to get down into the details a bit more.

Christopher S. Penn 47:23
Exactly. Again, this is one of the things where, once you have it, and you realize it’s basically just having a customer to talk to, the use case—infinite, as many ways as you would talk to a customer. Focus groups, one-on-ones, you know, running copy by them. The advantage is, you don’t have to buy a pizza.

Katie Robbert 47:42
You can buy yourself pizza because that’s delicious. It’s more pizza for you, John.

Christopher S. Penn 47:49
That’s it.

Katie Robbert 47:51
No, but I mean, and think about like, the companies that are wanting to highlight thought leadership. You know, that’s—I don’t want to say “thought leadership” is tricky, but it’s tricky to find the right topics for thought leadership sometimes. So, having an ideal customer profile would be like, what—you know, it can be very tactical, or it can be very strategic, of like, “If I were to create a thought leadership series, what would that look like? What would resonate with my ideal customers? How would I frame that? Where should it go? What should it include? What should it not include?” Which is just as important.

Christopher S. Penn 48:26
Exactly. Any final thoughts?

John Wall 48:32
That keeps you off the bad idea train. That’s a wonderful—

Katie Robbert 48:37
I say, just do it. Just—you know—reach out to us, or build your own. But—you know—we definitely have a streamlined process for building them. So, if you want help, you know we’re here.

Christopher S. Penn 48:50
All right, that’s going to do it for this episode. 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, at a weekly email newsletter at Trustin— Cource Insights—AI newsletter. Got questions about what you saw in today’s episode? Join our free Analytics for Marketers Slack group at Trust Insights, AI analytics for marketers. See you next time!

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