My Guiding Stars

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I’ve been doing more media recently, creating interest for my upcoming book “Build Distribution: Growth and Revenue will Follow” (title pending). During these podcasts and interviews, we talk a lot about simplifying marketing and sales, for the technical founder.

There is an exercise that I share, about how I build “strategy” for clients. It’s really basic but always ensures that our go-to market and campaigns are directionally sound.

On a blank paper, I’ll write out the following:

This is all you need to know about marketing. Who is your audience and what are their intentions? What makes them want to buy? What is the action or need they are attempting to fulfill?

These two principles above are the guiding light when executing any campaign and the metrics we use to track should always look to inform audience and intent, as well as capturing success/failure. If you can accurately understand and describe the audience and intent; and how your current action aligns with them, then you are on the path to aligning a strong relationship with your customer.

I don’t come into this exercise with pre-filled answers, because my recent actions inform my answers. Your existing marketing, particularly your messaging and social listening, should provide increasing clarity on the whom and why people buy.

If you’re doing this for the first time what we are trying to identify is your “Ideal Customer Profile” (Audience) and “Value Propositions”, “Core Function” (Intent).

Ideal Customer Profile

Unlinke Target Customer, Total Area Market (TAM)or Segmented Approachable Market (SAM) the ideal customer profile is my main continual target. Gartner does a great job over complicating what ICP is here but let’s make it really simple.

It is the buyer who absolutely needs your solution, the value props totally align and they fit all off the qualifiers for whom you want to work with.

The last part is key, to find and connect with our ICP we spend a significant amount of time qualifying OUT prospects. Why? My guiding principle is always lifetime value (LTV). Rather than focus on immediate revenue I am looking for customers who I can grow with, will upgrade and increase their commitment to my business and potentially refer in new business.

My ICP is constantly changing, and tightening as my experiences indicate what makes a good customer, and what green and red flags to look out for. Here is today’s version of Grady’s ICP:

Technical (or Functional) Founder who has launched product(s) independently prior. Failure or success doesn’t matter. They should have done launches themselves and understand the value of staffing/spending into growth. They are funded or have created revenue and carry runway for a minimum of $15k monthly marketing spend for nine months. Most importantly they have an execution bias (move to action) and an open desire to accept help/criticism. They are looking for a system to scale their B2B tech product.

Intent

Whereas in audience I always seek my ideal customer in intent I am more broad in my focus. Intent is often my anchor on messaging, where I start on content and the simplified command for each call to action.

Intent generally falls into two buckets, action or emotional response.

Core Function

For most, your core function is a great place to start with intent. It is the action or response that customers are looking to solve. To define core function look at the product you’ve built, what is the most important service or solution that it provides. Many products are bloated with features, so it may take some work to understand what exactly the primary or core function is. Once discovered this is simpler to define the ICP:

My core function is to build communication systems that align brand/product with their ideal users intent.

Using that as a baseline you can use search to guide for broader ways to appeal your user. SEO tools like Keyword planners, SEMRush/Ahref can tell you what your audience is searching for, related to your core function.

I also like to take time regularly to run YouTube, Meta and LinkedIn search to see the conversation and content that surrounds common requests.

Align your core function as a service to the result a user wants.

Then I use platforms like Quora, Reddit and communities (Facebook Groups still thrive) to identify what exactly my audience is looking for beyond just the core action of the search.

Intent is not necessarily a single term, more likely a string or thought.

On social platforms leveraging the comment and reply function is a great way to verify, understand and also win on search.

The most important thing here is to look for easy ways to clarify intent, or identify the emotional response and benefits derived.

Value Proposition

Put simply the value proposition is the resolution, generally an emotional response or secondary effect, that your core function provides customers. We want to build a lot of conversations to capture what these are, as they are unique to customer type and business. Then we can bucket the values and use them within our brand guidelines for both messaging and content creation.

I tend to focus more on function and audience as initial drivers as they are the primary factors, value proposition will help you optimize.

That’s it!

If you can remain hyperfocused on Audience and Intent you will be successful. Not only does it guide your content and messaging strategy, but it also shapes the channels you use, how and where you message, plus the packaging that your content and product takes shape.

We must weekly continue to review and optimize the audience and intent we are speaking towards and measure the success of all of our conversations on how well we are aligning to these core guidelines.

Even if you never optimize or improve anything else in your business, these two compass points will keep you aligned on the path for growth.

Have a great day!

-G

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