As a recruitment business, you need to be at the top of your game to attract new clients and successfully match top talent with their ideal role. To do this, your marketing strategy needs to work as hard as possible for your business, which will be difficult without the support of a considered and well-researched ideal customer profile (ICP).
What Exactly is an ICP?
An ICP can be thought of as a checklist that details the attributes required to separate qualified and unqualified leads. ICPs have an array of benefits, including helping to create, for example, accurate personas that will help you connect experienced tech professionals with an organisation that requires that talent.
Ultimately, developing a comprehensive ICP will help you understand your target audience and give you the knowledge required to tailor your marketing messaging to align with your branding and crucially “speak” to the right people at the right times. With an ICP, your marketing budget can be better channelled towards the areas that will drive the best return on investment (ROI). Your marketing processes will be improved, saving valuable time and resources.
A Step-by-Step Guide to Creating an ICP
1. Gathering your Team
In most instances, many people will need to be involved in creating an accurate ICP (download our ICP template here). Your sales team will be able to prospect and qualify leads better and have a clearer idea of what products a prospect will be interested in.
2. Analysing your Current Clients
When key decision-makers and team members are present, you can begin by looking at your current clients. Start by selecting up to five of your ideal clients. These will be clients you would like to replicate if it were possible.
When doing this, setting out a few key differentiators can be beneficial. These may include:
– Profitability: which clients are driving the most revenue for your business?
– Loyalty: which clients have been with you for the longest time?
– Preference: which clients do you actively enjoy working with?
It is also essential to consider which clients drive the most value for your service.
For start-ups, this process will need to be tweaked slightly, with more focus placed on the type of clients you most want to attract.
3. Identifying Shared Attributes
Once you have your list of ideal clients, you can start identifying the attributes they share, which will help you put together an inventory of trends that will shape your ICP.
4. Collating your ICP
While no two ICPs are ever identical, there is a selection of key attributes that most will incorporate. The number of employees an organisation has, the industry in which they operate, their location, surface-level pain points, deeper-rooted pain points, and revenue are all examples of attributes that are likely to be beneficial for all recruiters to incorporate into their ICP.
5. Utilising your ICP
There are numerous ways to leverage the power of your ICP, particularly when it comes to social media marketing. It will help you define your target demographic accurately across social media and search. Still, it can also be used to refine your messaging and imagery to best appeal to that demographic.
6. Reviewing your ICP
Notably, the creation of an ICP is not a one-and-done task. Provision should be put in place to regularly review your ICP to ensure that it is as accurate as possible. In doing so, you will find that your business is better placed to help more businesses and more talented individuals to connect, automate processes to improve the efficiency of your business and perform well more consistently by being in a position to fully meet the needs of your clients in new and innovative ways.
If you’re looking for an experienced outsourced marketing team who can help you to create your ICP, Your Marketing Needs has a team of dedicated professionals who are on-hand to offer tailored support and advice. Additionally, we have put together a free ICP template, which you can download here.
Your Marketing Needs offers package-based marketing solutions for various customer acquisition strategies, including design and PR.
To book a discovery call, get in touch on 01582 292016 or email info@youmarketingneeds.co.uk