When is an Ideal Customer Profile Not Ideal?

Your ICP or Ideal Customer Profile is a marketing term related to figuring out the exact type of person that would be perfect for your business and convert sales. Many marketing agencies will highly recommend that you fill out your Ideal Customer Profile and make sure that you’re targeting all your messaging towards this particular person.

In this article, I’m gonna cover why I think it’s important to be somewhat diversified and target people outside of your Ideal Customer Profile so it’s not always just those type of people that you’re messaging is focused on. Good marketing is usually thinking outside the box and not staying within the same lanes and that’s why it’s important to reach everyone not necessarily just your ICP.

Now of course when you’re doing Facebook advertising or Google advertising an ICP is very important because we want to only serve ads to the people that we feel are going to be the best return on the investment for the ad spend. This makes a lot of sense and you do want to make sure your ICP is very dialed in for that. And, actually for most of your marketing messaging you do you want to think about your ICP, but I want to encourage you to also think outside the box and maybe think of people that wouldn’t necessarily think of your product.

Today, I had a 93-year-old Author contact me wanting to build a website for him. This gentleman is at the age where I didn’t really believe that I would ever have a customer wanting to build a website. I didn’t really think that it would be someone who I would be able to show the value of a website. But to my surprise, I didn’t have to show him the value of a website he already knew it and wanted to purchase our web design product at the rate and thought it was fair and that he needed it for his book.

This goes to show that you can’t bracket people in and not focus on them with your marketing messaging. For example, a makeup company may think that they’re only demographic is women between the ages of 13 and 65, however, they may want to think outside the box and have a section for men and maybe a section for older people or even a section for younger people that are under 13.

These are all demographics that could want to use makeup and don’t want to necessarily miss out on that market share. If you can offer a certain part of your website that’s geared towards men or older, or younger people outside of your what your typical ICP for a make up company would be, that’s a great way to win new business.

I think this type of thinking outside the box and making your company accessible to all people of all demographics. This is a really smart way to place your company in markets your competitors are not in. I’m a big believer in generalization even though most marketers will tell you to niche down.

I do believe in niche-ing down, but I think that one should be diversified in each niche and make sure that the website covers all the different niches that are possible in a generalized way.

What do you think about that? I think as a business owner it’s important to really feel that you reached the demographic that you want to reach and that all those bases are covered on your website.

That’s why I do so much blogging and putting out content because I wanna be able to reach people that are other web developers people that are other business owners people that are just thinking about going into business or going into Web Design. I want to reach people at all different stages and parts of their lives even a 93-year-old.

I have one client who is 18 years old and he runs a detailing company in Las Vegas and he’s at one end of the spectrum at 18 and then my author client is at 93, at the other end of the spectrum so I have people of all ages and I certainly wouldn’t exclude them based on age.

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