3 Ways Demand Gen Marketers Learn About Their ICP
3 effective methods marketers use to improve their understanding of their target audience.
Your ability to understand your target audience can make or break a GTM strategy.
Your competitors are running product marketing campaigns and executing every day:
How do they want to be sold?
What are their pain points?
What content do they want to consume?
How do you go from knowing nothing about your ICP to knowing EVERYTHING about them?
In this week’s Everyday Demand Gen, I am going to go over 3 effective methods marketers use to improve their understanding of their target audience.
SageTap: a tool to scale prospect interviews
Early-stage startups must focus heavily on finding product market fit, which requires large-scale research and time. The problem, however, is that most early-stage companies do not have a ton of customers, and therefore have a tiny dataset to work with.
If you are in the cloud technologies space (think security/developer tools/cloud tools), a company called Sagetap created a platform where companies can mass-scale prospect interviews with targeted companies and titles.
Who is SageTap?
Sagetap is the “world’s first marketplace to create product-market fit”. Basically, you give them parameters of who you want to interview (ie: a list of companies, titles, etc) and they have a long list of “sages” that you can choose from.
The interviews are done anonymously, so all you know about them is:
Job Title
Industry
# of Employees
Answers to a handful of pre-determined questions (by you)
If you decide to talk with them, you get a few different options of how you want to conduct the interview:
Pass it along to a sales rep
Do the interview yourself
Record a video of a demo, your website messaging, etc.
It is a great way to walk through your product and your pitch with experts in the field and potential customers.
What’s the catch?
This platform can help you introduce your tool to all of those prospects that you can’t get in touch with.
It costs money, yes. But so does your time. Depending on your average deal size (the higher the better), it may or may not be worth it or within your acceptable acquisition cost range.
Anonymous interviewers may or may not be the people you want to talk to, but if you are extremely diligent about the questions you ask and with whom you choose, it can be a worthwhile program for marketers to use.
LinkedIn Gift Card Ads
Oh no - not Liam pushing LinkedIn Gift Card Ads again.
I know you all remember my post on LinkedIn about Gift Card ads (that’s why most of you are following this newsletter in the first place).
But LinkedIn Gift Card ads can be more than just another demand capture technique to generate pipeline.
In fact, we used it as a way to determine what audiences we were targeting were more likely to convert to pipeline, and what pipeline velocity looked like between audiences.
For example, in Q1 we targeted an audience who LOVED our technology, and yet it was hard to get those meetings converted to pipeline because:
They had no budget, and…
They had no status in their organization
Regardless of their willingness to champion our product, they were not the right persona for us to target.
In Q2, we switched our focus and our results spoke for themselves (check out that pipeline conversion on fewer meetings completed).
We were able to generate pipeline AND we were able to determine 3 key personas that would champion our product internally and externally.
Kickin’ it old school: do some prospecting
A salesperson’s dream: watching marketers struggle to do outbound prospecting.
I am probably going to piss quite a few marketers off with this one, but prospecting is the best way to do product marketing at scale.
At Bionic, our BDR and Demand teams are joined at the hip, and everything we do as a team is aligned. Why? Because marketing relies on the insights that they gather every day.
Think about it this way. Every week, a BDR does the following:
Researches 250 LinkedIn profiles and companies
Connects with 150 people on LinkedIn
Sends 400 emails
Calls 100 people
Some early-stage companies don’t have a huge sales or BDR team to work with. This is where the fun part comes: do it yourself. It doesn’t take a ton of time to go do a quick LinkedIn search for someone you want to chat with.
If you properly gather and analyze data (both quantitative and qualitative), you should be able to generate tons of:
Product feedback
Information on your ICP/target personas
Information on the companies you target
Messaging/positioning feedback
Or you can do it the old way…
Listen to Gong calls, interview customers, read blogs and stay up-to-date with industry knowledge.
Depending on what stage your company is at, these can all be viable options. But if you need a few ideas to get yourself out there and learn something new about your ICP, the 3 above have worked wonders.