What Is an ICP (Ideal Customer Profile)?

ICP vs Buyer Persona

An ICP describes a company. A buyer persona describes a person within that company. Both are useful, but they answer different questions.

The ICP answers: "Which companies should we target?" It defines attributes like industry (e.g., B2B SaaS), company size (50-500 employees), annual revenue (€5M-50M), tech stack (uses Salesforce), and pain point (struggling to reduce churn).

The buyer persona answers: "Who within those companies makes the decision?" It describes the VP of Marketing who reads G2 reviews, cares about CAC, and reports to the CMO. You need the ICP first — then buyer personas bring it to life.

How to Build an ICP

The best ICPs come from analyzing existing customers, not brainstorming in a conference room. Start with your best customers — the ones with the highest LTV, lowest churn, and fastest time-to-value — and work backwards to find what they have in common.

Key attributes to look for:

• Industry and vertical — which sectors get the most value from your product
• Company size — employee count and revenue range that match your pricing and feature set
• Tech stack — what tools they already use that your product integrates with or replaces
• Business model — B2B vs B2C, subscription vs transactional, self-serve vs sales-led
• Pain point and trigger — the specific problem that makes them search for a solution now

Why ICP Matters for BOFU Content

A well-defined ICP shapes every piece of BOFU content you create. It determines which competitors to write comparison pages about, which alternative pages to prioritize, and what use cases to feature.

Without an ICP, BOFU content targets everyone and resonates with no one. A comparison page written for enterprise buyers will miss if your best customers are 20-person startups. The high-intent keywords you target should reflect the language your ICP actually uses when searching — not generic category terms.

ICP-aligned content also improves post-acquisition metrics. Customers who match your ICP adopt faster, expand more, and churn less — improving NRR and LTV while keeping CAC efficient.

ICP and Customer Acquisition Economics

Targeting outside your ICP is expensive. Non-ICP customers cost more to acquire (they need more convincing), take longer to onboard (the product isn't built for them), and churn faster (the fit was never right). Each non-ICP customer inflates CAC and deflates LTV.

Conversely, ICP-fit customers find you through demand capture content because you've written about their specific problems, competitors, and use cases. They convert faster because the content speaks directly to their situation. The economics compound: lower CAC, higher LTV, better ARR growth efficiency.