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Ideal Customer Profiles For Manufacturing
Manufacturing can be a challenging industry for even experienced marketing professionals to go after. Ideal Customer Profiles can help because they give you a simple, powerful way for your sales and marketing teams to better understand, engage and impact your customers. When you build your efforts around the insights these kinds of profiles provide — customer needs, wants, drives, desires, pain points, priorities, etc. — making strategic decisions, allocating resources and choosing tactics gets much, much easier.
What are "best practices" for developing Ideal Customer Profiles for Manufacturing?
To be useful, Manufacturing customer profiles should represent the most valuable segments of your customer base (as defined by conversion rate, deal size, order volume, production capacity, equipment type, supply chain preferences, etc), be organized around a framework that is directly related to your individual produce or service, like use cases, pain points, journey maps, buying triggers, jobs-to-be-done, lifestyle choices, life stages, professional affiliations, etc., and include personal and professional characteristics that facilitate empathy and understanding, like needs, drives, priorities, pain points, KPIs, etc.
How long does it take to create ICPs for Manufacturing?
If you’re committing to formal research that will include customer surveys, focus groups, one-on-ones, etc., then you’re likely to spend two or three months collecting and analyzing data, segmenting your customer base, and mapping your findings. On the other hand, when formal research isn’t an option, you can usually develop actionable ICPs from personal observations and experiences in just a few hours. The key is to leverage whatever customer knowledge you can get, whether it’s coming from professional researcher or an afternoon white-boarding session with your team.
What do you do with ICPs for Manufacturing?
The biggest problem with ICPs in the days before generative AI is that they just end up in a folder that never gets opened a second time. Now, these types of customer profiles can be incorporated into prompts, allowing you to dynamically generate personalized content and collateral like blog posts, emails, white papers, 1-sheets, etc.
In Manufacturing, that could mean using ICPs to create blog posts that address industry-specific trends like automation or sustainability, or generating email campaigns that offer tailored solutions to manufacturers depending on the type of products they produce. Additionally, personalized 1-sheets can be created to showcase how your manufacturing technology can benefit a particular sector, such as automotive or consumer electronics.
Guides, eBooks & Downloadable Resources: