How to Tailor Your Holiday Campaign to Your Ideal Customer

As the weather turns crisp, consumers start holiday shopping — and business owners start seeing visions of sugar plum profits dancing in their heads. The holiday season is huge for businesses and shoppers alike. The ultimate goal for both? Finding their match. Businesses want the customers most likely to convert and shoppers want the best products for the best deal.

The more you know about who you’re interested in targeting, the better the result. Bringing in more paying customers can make a dramatic difference in your bottom line. Let’s get started.

What is an ICP?

Your ICP, or Ideal Customer Profile, is a profile of your best customer. To find out who that is, you’ll need to answer these questions:

• Who are they?

• What do they like?

• Where will you find them?

• How will you capture their attention?
  

If you’ve never created an ICP before, use our quick template to help you.

Now let’s review the five steps to creating a marketing campaign that’s tailored to your ICP.

1. Segment Your Email List

It’s likely you have more than one ICP. If you’re an online toy retailer, your ICPs may include people who shop for toddlers and others who shop for tweens.

Based on what your customers have bought or looked at in the past, you can segment your email list into those buckets. This allows you to send targeted messaging to individual customer segments, such as sending promotions for stacking wooden blocks to those interested in toddler products and highlighting robotics kits for tween-focused shoppers.

Segmentation helps ensure that you send relevant promotions to your audiences (as tween-focused shoppers will have no use for stacking rings that are safe to chew).

2. Engage on Social Media

Go where your ICPs go! When you’re looking at your ICPs, you’ll want to figure out where they spend time online and meet them there. This will help you choose not only where to serve ads, but also where to post content to engage with your customers and fans.

For example, if you want to engage more with dads on social media, you may want to spend less time on Pinterest, since that platform is more popular with women. Instead, you could shift your focus to Facebook, which has about an equal number of male and female users.

Similarly, if your ICP is between ages 18 and 24, you’d spend more time posting relevant videos on TikTok and YouTube, two popular platforms with that demographic.

3. Tailor Your Messaging

What’s the point of segmenting your audience if you don’t adjust your strategy according to their needs and wants? When crafting your copy and creative, consider that different ICPs respond to different types of messages. 

If you’re targeting grandparents, the images in the ads you’d serve to them might include happy children hugging or playing with grandparent-type figures.

Meanwhile, messaging to parents may focus more on the safety or educational aspects of the products you sell. Tailoring your messaging ensures that what you’re saying resonates with your ICPs and gets them to take action.

4. Focus Your Efforts

As mentioned above, your ICPs help you focus your efforts. Instead of trying to be everything to everyone (which makes you as interesting as cardboard to customers), you can focus on the audience that's most likely to purchase from you.

For example, if one of the concerns of your ICP is environmentalism, build your messaging around how your products are made from sustainable materials. Focusing your marketing efforts toward your ideal customer profile makes more efficient use of your marketing and ad spend, and helps you target your efforts on the people who are most likely to buy.

5. Guide Your Holiday Content

Once you know your ICPs, you can use this information to find the most effective ways to reach them. You’ll better understand what keeps them up at night and can use that to create helpful content that answers their questions and educates them on how your products and services can make their lives better or easier.

To do this effectively, leverage our resources below, to map out all the things you’ll need to consider for your upcoming holiday campaign, such as:

• Different tactics (e.g., blog posts, ads, or social videos).

• Digital channels used to distribute content and ads.

• Launch and publish dates.

You can use these resources to organize your marketing strategy before, during, and after the holidays to keep your customers engaged, your brand top-of-mind, and yourself sane.

Make Your Holidays a Success With AdRoll

No matter what your ICPs are, you can use them to make this holiday season your most profitable. Segmentation, social media, messaging, focus, and seasonality calendars are just five ways to do this. You’ve likely done the first four, so grab your ICPs and create your holiday marketing strategy today to start hitting your holiday targets and keep the relationship burning all winter long.

Last updated on August 8th, 2023.