Developers are a unique audience, and your developer marketing strategies need to reflect that. This is where segmentation comes into play! There are many reasons why you’d want to split your audience into different groups or categories, mainly the fact that it allows you to deliver tailored messaging to your customers.
Segmentation is usually demographic, psychographic, behavioral, and geographic, and you choose what makes more sense in the context of your marketing campaigns.
We understand this can be a difficult task, which is why, when you become a member of the Developer Marketing Alliance, you get access to many perks, including persona templates to help you better understand your target market.
What are ideal customer profiles?
When we talk about segmentation, the first thing that comes to mind is probably personas, but they aren’t the only type.
Ideal customer profiles (ICPs) are descriptions of fictional companies that derive value from your product while also providing value (and the best return) to your business.
ICPs are usually broad descriptions that help companies understand what their ‘perfect’ customer is, and they also tend to have a solid lifetime value, since they don’t churn as much. ICPs can also advocate for your brand and product!
Ideal customer profiles can help you to better define the problems you’re looking to solve, ensure your operations are aligned with what your audience needs, and help you to improve your offerings in the future.
With ICPs, you’ll know which leads to send to sales, for example, and which are unlikely to convert. The characteristics that make a customer ideal will depend on your circumstances. For example, do you sell to a particular region/country? If so, geographics are important. How much budget do you have? How much revenue is your audience turning over? Are there any barriers to purchase that might impact your audience?
This can help you to identify what your ICP looks like. If you believe a lead doesn’t qualify, then you can set them aside and save your sales team the time to engage them.
Why do you need an ideal customer profile vs buyer persona? Because they’ll let you know exactly who you should target (and, considering there are so many different types of developers nowadays, this is crucial) by identifying key features that profitable customers share.
