ICP

ICP - Ideal Customer Profile, ideal client profile. Not to be confused with buyer persona (which is broader and includes psychographics). ICP is the hard criteria of a company or person to target with marketing.

For b2b ICP it is usually: industry, company size (by revenue or staff), region, technology stack, size of marketing budget, decision-maker position.

For b2c ICP: age, income, location, behavioral characteristics (for example, for gaming - frequency of play, average bill for hardware over the last 12 months).

The main mistake marketers make is too broad an ICP. In my practice, I have seen many times: “our target audience is men 25–45 in large cities with an above-average income.” This is not ICP, this is the population of the country.

Hard ICP in my current projects: for b2b SaaS - “marketing director in an e-com or SaaS company of 50–500 people, performance budget 2M+ ₽/month, region Russia or CIS.” These are 5-10 thousand companies in the country, you can work with them individually without eroding the budget for mass targeting.