You’ve probably seen one-page ICPs (Ideal Client Persona or Ideal Client Profile) that look tidy and sensible: job title, age, channels, pain points. Great.
But most of these ICPs miss the single thing that actually makes a persona useful: why that person would want to choose your company over everyone else. As I say in the video: “Why, why, why? Why should that particular group of people choose your business?”
If your Ideal Client Persona (ICP) can’t answer that, it’s not a decision-making tool, it’s decoration.
An essential, and large, part of my Growth Optics Framework is all about really understanding WHO your ideal clients are – then getting intimate with them. You have to know them so well that you can’t help but create marketing that attracts them to your orbit and keeps them there. And what is more intimate than understanding someone’s why?
Start with the three essentials (and don’t skip psychographics)
A meaningful persona is built from three data areas: demographics, psychographics, and communication preferences.
Use the demographics to find them, psychographics to understand what drives them, and communication data to know how to reach them.
Psychographics – hopes, fears, ambitions, attitudes to risk – are where the “magic why” lives.
Too many Business Owners skip this part or do a really superficial analysis of their ICP’s psychographics. This is a mistake because it leads to poor marketing. Why?
Because your marketing messages should be designed to address those internal drivers (e.g. allay a fear or help achieve a goal) and speak to their emotions.
If your Customer Persona only lists a job title and a problem, you won’t know why they’d actually act, so that means you can’t really communicate effectively with them.
How to dig out somebody’s real why – six practical steps
If all of this is sounding hard, it’s because it is! And it’s why so many B2B Business Owners don’t do it. So, let me take some of the pain out of it and give you six practical ways to dig out your Ideal Client’s ‘Why’ so you can create marketing that works.
- Interview actual customers and prospects. Ask about their day, what keeps them up at night, who signs off on choosing a company like yours, and what a perfect solution looks like for them.
- Use the Whys. Keep asking “why” until you get to the root motivation or trigger to buy.
- Map jobs → pain → desired outcome. Link what they need to get done to the emotional reason they’ll actually choose you, to the outcome that choosing you will have on their business.
- Test marketing messages quickly. Run small experiments (emails, social posts, landing pages) that speak to the hypothesised “why” and measure their response.
- Capture objections and decision criteria. What would stop them choosing you? Who else would they consider? Make sure you openly address these in your marketing, showing them all the reasons why you can counter their objections.
- Turn the insight into one clear sentence: “They choose us because we help them [tangible outcome] so they can feel [emotional outcome].”
One-page ICP what to include
The Golden Rule of any One Page Persona is that you need to be able to hand it to someone outside of your business and say,, “Can you tell who I want as my ideal client and do you know that type of person?”
A good One Page Persona allows marketing suppliers, referrers and potential partners to be able to say, “Yes! That is my friend Jo – she was just saying that the other day!” because it gives them more depth than ‘Female Business Owner who is busy’.
In ‘Growth Optic 2 WHO’ of my Growth Optics Framework I show B2B Business Owners how to create a meaningful One Page Persona. They vary in content but all of them have these key elements on them:
- Customer Persona name & role
- Key demographics that let you find them
- Their top 3 Ambitions
- Their top 3 Fears
- The Key Problems you are solving for them
- Why choose you
- Their preferred marketing communication channels
- A ‘likely to say’ statement.
This combination, presented in a visually engaging way, makes it really quick and easy to understand who your marketing has to find, attract, and retain in your company’s orbit.
More than one customer persona?
Your business may have multiple customer groups. Build a persona for each significant segment so that your marketing messaging and tactics (how you reach and engage them) can be tailored, not generic.
Interestingly, as B2B Business Owners work through my transformative Growth Optics Course, they might start it thinking they have many many client segments but I help them understand that they don’t. Why? Because I show them how to see the deeper commonalities that seemingly disparate customer segments have; what might look like five or six client segments is often just two or three.
Key takeaways
- If your persona doesn’t explain why someone would choose you, it’s not useful.
- Psychographics are where marketing hooks live. Dig into hopes, fears and triggers.
- Test your “magic why” quickly and measure if you’ve really found it. If it doesn’t move your key marketing metrics (responses, leads, conversions), refine it.
- Keep the persona to one page and build one for each distinct customer group.
Read this article to find out how to create a Customer Persona.
