Who are you talking to? Target audience, ICP and persona, explained

When I ask owners who their website is for, the most common answer is “everyone who needs what we do”. I understand why: nobody wants to turn work away. But a site written for everyone ends up with copy so general that nobody recognises themselves in it.

Three terms get thrown around for fixing this: target audience, ideal customer profile (ICP) and persona. They are often used as if they meant the same thing. They don’t, and each one helps your website in a different way.

Target audience: the wide circle

Your target audience is the broad group of people who could buy from you. “Small businesses in hospitality.” “Parents of children learning a second language.” It tells you where to look and what kind of language to use. It doesn’t yet tell you what to put on your homepage.

ICP: the clients you want more of

Your ideal customer profile is the part of that audience you most want to work with. Usually that means the clients who get the best results from you, value what you do, pay fairly and are pleasant to work with. Look at your best past clients and ask what they have in common: size, sector, budget, the situation they were in when they called you.

For a website, the ICP decides priorities. It tells you which services to lead with, which case studies to show first, and what to leave out.

Persona: one person you can picture

A persona turns the ICP into one specific person. Not demographics for their own sake, but the things that shape a decision:

• what situation makes them start looking for someone like you;
• what they’ve already tried, and why it didn’t work;
• what they’re worried about, especially about hiring the wrong person;
• the words they use to describe the problem;
• what they need to see before they get in touch.

A persona is what you write to. When you draft a headline, you can ask: would she stop scrolling for this?

How to write one in an afternoon

1. List your three best clients from the last couple of years.
2. For each one, write down what was going on when they first contacted you, and the exact words they used, if you still have the email.
3. Note what made them choose you, and what almost stopped them.
4. Combine the patterns into one short description. Give it a name if that helps you remember it.
5. Check it against reality: does it sound like someone you’d recognise in a meeting?

Keep it on one page. A persona nobody reads is worse than none.

What changes on your website

Once you know who you’re talking to, a lot of decisions make themselves:

• the headline describes their situation, not your company;
• the first section answers the question they arrive with;
• case studies show clients they’ll recognise as similar to them;
• the objections they have get answered before they need to ask.

You’ll still get enquiries from people outside the description. That’s fine. Writing for one clear person doesn’t push others away; it makes the site sound sure of itself, and that is attractive to everyone.

The next step is making sure the site actually talks to that person instead of about you. That’s the subject of why company-first websites don’t convert.