Smarkly's guide to marketing: ICPs and personas

Key takeaways

• Your ICP is the kind of customer you're best for. Personas are the people inside it, each with their own goals and worries.
• Start from the job the customer is trying to get done, not from demographics.
• Build both from evidence you already have, mark your guesses as guesses, and write each piece for one persona.

On this page⌄

1. ICPs and personas
2. Why one message rarely works in B2B
3. Start from the job, not the demographics
4. Build them from evidence, not imagination
5. What it looks like on your team
6. How to use them when you write
7. Where Smarkly fits
8. Sources

Most marketing that misses doesn't miss on the writing. It misses on who it was written for.

You can hear it in a draft. It says "businesses of all sizes" and "anyone who wants to grow." It answers questions nobody asked and skips the one the reader came to find an answer for. The fix is to define who your content is for: your target audience, which marketers call Ideal Customer Profiles (ICPs) and personas.

ICPs and personas

Your ICP describes the kind of customer who gets the most from what you sell and is worth the most to you. For a B2B company that's usually a type of company: its size, its industry, the problem it has and what it already uses. For a consumer business or a credit union, it's a type of individual, household or member.

In B2B, your ICP is a business, but you can't market to businesses. Instead, you target the individuals within those businesses. Those individuals are your personas, each described by their role, what they're trying to get done, what worries them and what they need to hear before they act. Personas keep you from writing one message for five different people. However, you need a good balance between the right ICP and the right personas within that ICP. A great persona at a company you're wrong for is still a lost deal.

Why one message rarely works in B2B

In B2B, you're almost never selling to one person. Gartner describes the modern buying journey as involving numerous buying group members who may have different goals and needs, each doing their own research.

Think about who touches a software purchase at a 50-person company. The person who'll use it every day wants to know it saves them time. Their manager wants to know the team will actually adopt it. Finance wants to know what it costs and whether it can be cancelled. IT wants to know where the data goes. It's the same product, but it needs to answer the questions from four different perspectives.

If your website, your emails and your posts only answer the first one, the deal stalls at the second. Personas are how you make sure every question has an answer somewhere.

Start from the job, not the demographics

The most useful persona isn't "Sarah, 34, likes yoga." Age and hobbies rarely change what you should write. What changes it is the job. Clayton Christensen and his co-authors put it this way in Harvard Business Review: "When we buy a product, we essentially 'hire' it to help us do a job." Understand the job, including the circumstances around it, and you understand why someone buys.

So for each persona, write down:

1. The job. What are they trying to get done when they find you?
2. The trigger. What just happened that made it urgent?
3. The worry. What would make them hesitate, or get them in trouble if it went wrong?
4. The proof. What do they need to see or hear before they act?
5. Their words. How do they describe the problem? Not how you do.

That last one matters more than it looks. Customers often don't use your category name. They describe their own situation. Write in their words and they recognize themselves.

Build them from evidence, not imagination

A persona made up in a meeting tends to describe the customer you wish you had. Build yours from what customers have already told you:

• notes from sales calls and demos
• support tickets and the questions people ask before they buy
• reviews, of your product and your competitors'
• the pages on your website that people actually read
• churn reasons, if you collect them

If you can, talk to customers too. The best short guide to doing it well is The Mom Test by Rob Fitzpatrick. Its core advice is to ask about what people have actually done, not what they think of your idea, because people are polite about ideas and honest about their past. It's one of the books in our reading list for marketers.

And when you have to guess, write it down as a guess. "We think finance cares most about cancellation terms" is a fine starting point, as long as everyone knows it hasn't been checked.

What it looks like on your team

Small in-house teams. Your ICP is usually clear because sales already knows who buys. The gap is personas: the website talks to the buyer, but the person who'll use it every day has different questions. One persona per role in the deal is a good start. Our page for small teams has more.

Startups. Your ICP will move, and that's fine. Write it down anyway, with a date, so you can see what changed and why. Early on, one sharp persona beats five vague ones. See our startups page.

Agencies. Every client has its own ICP and its own personas, and the newest writer on the account usually knows them least. Keeping each client's audience written down, in one place, is what lets a new writer get the tone right on day one. See how agencies use Smarkly.

Credit unions. Here personas are often life stages, not job titles: a teenager opening a first account, a young adult buying a first car, a family buying a first home, a member planning for retirement. Each has a different job, a different trigger and a different worry, and each needs different content at a different time of year. More on our credit union page.

Founders doing it themselves. You probably know your customers better than anyone, because you've talked to most of them. Writing it down still helps: it's what lets a contractor, a first hire or an AI tool write for them the way you would. See Smarkly for entrepreneurs.

How to use them when you write

An ICP and personas that live in a slide deck don't change anything. Use them every time you write:

1. Pick one persona per piece. A post for "IT and finance and the end user" ends up speaking to none of them.
2. Open with their job or their trigger, not with your product.
3. Answer their worry before they ask it. If finance worries about lock-in, say how cancelling works.
4. Use their words. If they say "our numbers are all over the place," don't write "data inconsistency."
5. Check the draft against the persona. Would this person stop scrolling? Would they forward it to the next person in the buying group?

Where Smarkly fits

Smarkly learns your company from the sources you trust: your website, your documents and the content you've already written. Your whole audience (your ICP) is built from those sources when you sign up, so your first drafts are written for your customer from the start. You can correct anything it got wrong.

On a paid plan, Smarkly also builds individual audience members, each with their own goals, pains and needs, and you can write a piece for one of them. Your whole team works from the same audience, so everyone writes for the same people.

If you want the longer story of why we built it, read Introducing Smarkly. If audience work is the kind of thing that keeps sliding on your team, this post on the marketing work that gets dropped is for you. The first 14 days are free, and you don't need a card.

Sources

• Gartner, The B2B Buying Journey: Key Stages and How to Optimize Them.
• Clayton M. Christensen, Taddy Hall, Karen Dillon and David S. Duncan, Know Your Customers' "Jobs to Be Done", Harvard Business Review, September 2016.
• Rob Fitzpatrick, The Mom Test (2013). Listed in our books for marketers.

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