ICP & Buyer Personas
Mikayla Lee, 9/14/2026
In my last Digital Media lecture, we focused on understanding an ideal customer profile (ICP) and buyer personas and what each of them is used for. We also spent a lot of time discussing the differences between target audiences, target markets, and an ICP. The differences between these three are crucial to the audience segmentation process and are important for getting the brand/product in front of the right eyes.
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A target markets is the broad group of people who could need or want your product. This audience is established at the beginning of segmentation, and once the broader, possible group of customers is established, target audiences can be formed. The target audience is a focused, smaller segment within the target market that groups together potential customers based on their demo and psychographics. (Hubspot). These steps are extremely important for brands to be precise about because this helps decide the rest of the process. Creative, video, copy; all of it relies on who the brand is trying to get in front of. If the audience is defines as parents of young children, young children, and grandparents, you don’t want to have a really serious or scary ad. Audience also matters when deciding where to put the ads, how often, and how long they will run. Audience segmentation and definition kickstarts the rest of the process of creating the advertisement. Without defining an audience, the brand also doesn’t know who they’re speaking to. Money is wasted on broad groups of people, the messaging is extremely generic because it lacks direction and personality.
Once the target audience is identified, buyer personas can be created. A buyer persona is a single representation of a possible customer of the brand/product. It should include who the person is, what they like to do, what their lifestyle is like, and what behaviors invoke a feeling. These are important for brands to define in order to further refine who their specific target is. (Adobe Business) An ICP or ideal customer profile is the specific customer that brands create on the business level to decide what customers hold the most value and brand loyalty given time and budget. Creating an ICP is a priority. This helps brands decide if this customer is worth advertising to, and helps ensure profit and how likely the customer is to stick around with the brand.
I’ll use Hubspot as an example since I’ve already used their website as a source. Hubspot could define their ICP as small to midsize businesses that are looking to grow their marketing in-house. This allows them to look at customers from a sales perspective. They could define their buyer persona as a male marketing manager for a medical sales company with 30 employees who needs to improve his teams efficiency and effectiveness. This persona allows Hubspot to put a “face” to the idea of the customer. These two aspects work together to complete a full picture of who the brand wants to sell to specifically.
All in all, everything I wrote about in this post is crucial to brands getting their products and advertisements in front of consumers. The ICP defines who is worth pursing and the persona decides how the brand commuicates once the product is in front of the customer. Both are necessary for a brand to reach the people it wants to reach.
