How B2B SaaS Marketers Can Keep Up As Their Target ICP Expands

Your mental image of a customer might start out looking like an abstract painting, but by the time you’re out marketing and selling, it better be sharper than a high-res photograph.

B2B SaaS companies that deeply understand their ideal customer profile (ICP) are quicker to recognize emerging pain points and unmet needs.

They learn how to reach out with the right content at the right time to nurture a deal from consideration to close.

A well-honed ICP should lead to connecting with and cultivating a strong community of living, breathing people who not only buy from you but trust your insights and advice.

The problem is that your initial target ICP may not reflect your total addressable market. When that happens, you’ve got to think carefully about your content strategy and how it will live on key channels, especially your website.

Why target ICPs shift and expand

Let’s say you’re a B2B SaaS firm that started out with a powerful application suite that could automate critical processes in large enterprises. Your target ICP probably took the form of an IT decision maker, like a CIO or CTO.

Beyond just considering the job title, the target ICP you develop probably took into account all kinds of demographic, firmographic, and environmental factors. Many of these are spelled out in this classic Gartner ICP framework, but they would include potential annual contract value, vertical market (like financial services, for instance), company size, annual revenue, and common business goals.

Over time, companies can hit a plateau in terms of the enterprises they can approach. Even if that hasn’t happened, your initial target ICP can be going through constraints that make it difficult to achieve quota. Recent research from Bain and Co., for instance, found uncertainty in the macro economy was just one reason 60% of B2B buyers are putting greater scrutiny on tech spending.

At the same time, you may also come to recognize that another potential target ICP exists that could fuel the next wave of growth. Small businesses, for example, may be open to a similar solution to your flagship option that lacks full enterprise-grade capabilities but addresses their needs.

Companies also need to take a second look at their target ICP as they expand geographically or launch entirely new product lines. In both cases they may need to localize content and tailor digital experiences accordingly. 

Whatever triggers market expansion, you only land with your new target ICP by being as thoughtful and coordinated as you were with your existing base. Your new market or segment might also represent an environment with more and diverse competition, as well as a difference in customer expectations.

Adjusting your positioning and differentiators

Expanding or adding to your target ICP means you’re potentially having a very different kind of conversation with prospects. Some core value props may remain the same, but certain features or details may need greater emphasis.

For instance, large enterprises often want custom solutions and security, whereas small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) may look for affordability and ease of use. Your target ICP is likely going to be more complex than that, of course, so take the time to figure out how to tell the most compelling story based on areas such as compliance, simplicity, onboarding, time to deploy, and more.

You may also have to make some hard decisions about who you won’t be pitching. In February, the EUVC podcast featured Ingrid Bonde Akerlind, an investor with the VC Oxx. She described an “ICP bowtie” framework, where the left-side bow was all the research you do before you’ve achieved product-market fit (PMF).

The right-side bow represents the point where you’re done experimenting and are ready to take on a new ICP.

“Of course, to build a giant, giant company, you will have more than one type of customer,” she said. “But the key is to resist the urge and temptation to do that until you have the internal resources and capabilities to truly serve your multiple types of customers well.”

A B2B SaaS content checklist for expanding your target ICP

Those resources and capabilities include all the additional content that will support marketing to a new ICP. Your checklist of deliverables will likely cover:

• New messaging and updated brand voice/tone guidelines hosted on an internal marketing resources hub
• Targeted blog posts, eBooks, and whitepapers
• Case studies and testimonials as new customers are acquired
• New product/solution pages with embedded videos, infographics, and calculators

Depending on the volume of content you’re creating and changes you’re making, you may need to develop a separate editorial calendar, source or commission additional market research, and even set up pages for prospects to attend webinars and in-person events.

Achieving content velocity as a growing B2B SaaS firm

All this affects what we call content velocity—the ability to tell your brand’s story at a speed that keeps pace with your business’s needs.

The foundation for increasing content velocity is a CMS like WordPress VIP that simplifies workflows with reusable content blocks, AI-driven content suggestions and task automation like creating internal links and excerpts.  

Content velocity also requires flexibility, given your site may develop based on a single-stack architecture, a headless architecture, or a hybrid.

If all goes well, you might see a significant increase in traffic to your site. Those new prospects should be welcomed to a digital experience where pages load quickly and reliably, especially when they’re filling out requests for a demo or sales call. Security may also be top of mind for buyers as they share information through your site about their organization and its goals.  

Finally, you’ll win more new business when you can use a platform like Parse.ly to keep a close eye on how site visitors are behaving and engaging with your content. Metrics like engaged time and recirculation rate could indicate whether a prospect has greater buying intent and is ready to convert.

Achieving content velocity with a rock-solid CMS as your starting point positions you to expand your target ICP not just once, but on an ongoing basis. It means more marketing qualified leads (MQLs) that progress to sales qualified leads (SQLs), and more revenue that comes in both inbound and outbound. If you’re going to be creating and hosting more content, make sure it ultimately drives more growth.