Have you seen this woman?

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She's the model for what most companies rely on as a persona or Ideal Customer Profile (ICP). They'll often tell content writers "here's our target audience," expecting us to write something that wins Mary's heart.

While Marketing Mary is not a bad starting point, she's more like a Jane Doe. We know she's an important character, but further investigation is needed.

Because we don't know enough about her business requirements, pain points, and trigger events, we don't know how to position our offer accordingly.

In other words, when your user research stops at something as broad as Marketing Mary, your marketing efforts will lack the relevance necessary to attract customers that bring:

• Higher conversion rates

• Shorter close times

• Less headache (at the start and down the road)

• Higher retention rates

• The ROI needed to expand operations

How to research the kind of leads that will grow your business

Below is a step-by-step guide for how to conduct better user research.

The guiding principle to help orient your thinking is that you must align your positioning and messaging with the clients you help the most.

Your ideal prospects are actively searching for a better solution than what your competitors offer. By going deep into who you are and how you solve their specific problems, you help them recognize you as the right choice.

Step #1: Identify your best customers

Your ideal customers, also known as your ICP, sits at the intersection of your quantitative and qualitative best customers.

Some customers bring in a lot of revenue, but require extra time and energy. Some brighten your day whenever you have the pleasure to speak with them, but don't stick around for as long as you'd hoped.

Your ICP is the best of the best, the all-around winner of every category. You probably already have an idea of who among your clients fits the bill, but start by looking at the data.

Quantitative metrics

Your best quantitative customers are defined by three critical factors:

1. Shortest sales cycle; from first touchpoint to signed contract

2. Highest lifetime value in terms of revenue

3. Longest retention period as an active client

Qualitative characteristics

Another essential dimension to consider is the client's impact across your entire organization. Someone that you personally enjoy working with might be causing hidden strain elsewhere.

What does your sales team have to say about these individuals? Were they difficult to close?

What about customer support? Is this person regularly exhausting or time-consuming to deal with?

There are positive traits to consider as well. Do they:

• Understand the value of your business and maintain realistic expectations

• Actively refer new business and spread positive word-of-mouth

• View your relationship as a partnership and are open to collaborative opportunities

For quantitative metrics, refer to the data. But for a holistic qualitative assessment, interview the individuals in each department that interact with customers.

Cross reference to define your ICP

Once you've identified both your quantitative and qualitative best customers, combine the two to form your ICP. At this stage, your ICP might look a lot like Marketing Mary. That's because this is the stage where most marketing departments call it good enough, and begin the strategy and executions phases.

But for in-depth research, the next step is to gather information directly from your ICP.

While surveys can work, I've found that booking calls is far more effective. Clients tend to drag their feet on filling out surveys, leaving you to follow-up by email again and again. Live conversations allow you to ask follow-up questions that often reveal golden insights about their needs, challenges, and decision-making process.

Here's a questionnaire you can use in the interview or as a survey, as well as the logic behind how the question helps you:

1. What is your current title?

   ↪ Tells you whom you're attracting.

2. What kind of company do you work for?

   ↪Tells you what type of businesses like your content, what type of case studies to create, and what type of content to produce more of.

3. How did you learn about us?

   ↪ Tells you how well your content promotion is working.

4. How would feel if you could no longer use [COMPANY]?

   ↪ Tells you how well your product/service fits market demand.

5. If [COMPANY] were no longer available, what would you use as an alternative?

   ↪ Tells you who your competitors really are.

6. Have you recommended [COMPANY] to anyone? If so, how did you describe it?

   ↪ Tells you if you are being recommended by your clients and gives descriptive messaging to be used in your copy.

7. What type of person do you think would benefit the most from [COMPANY]?

   ↪ Helps you better understand who your ideal client is, and gives use case ideas.

8. What is the most difficult problem you are facing in your role?

   ↪ Tells you what your audience's pain points are.

9. What was the effect of [COMPANY] on your business?

   ↪ Tells you how well you're executing your company's vision.

10. What is the primary advantage of [COMPANY]?

    ↪ Tells you what you're doing that's the most valuable to the client.

11. What distinguishes [COMPANY] from the competition

    ↪ Tells you what your true differentiator is.

12. Which blogs do you read?

    ↪ Tells you where to publish your content.

13. What communities do you belong to?

    ↪ Tells you where to find other prospects.

14. What type of blog content do you wish there was more of?

    ↪ Tells you what type of content your clients will likely engage with.

15. How could [COMPANY] better meet your needs?

    ↪ Tells you how to improve your product and service offerings, reduce churn, and tailor content to overcome potential objections.

Step #2: Explore business pain points

If you've already got a well-rounded ICP, then the next step is to refine their pain points.

Here's a questionnaire to help you do that, you can combine it with the previous one or issue it separately:

1. What’s the biggest challenge you currently face in your role?

2. What are your 3-6 months goals in your role?

3. What’s the biggest stress in your job?

4. What are the biggest obstacles to achieving those goals?

5. What’s your biggest challenge when it comes to [SERVICE] in your industry?

6. What is the primary benefit that you have received from [COMPANY]?

7. What are the top 3 benefits that you get from their service?

8. How would you feel if you could no longer use [COMPANY]? Why?

9. What would you likely use as an alternative to [COMPANY] if it were no longer available?

10. How could we improve [COMPANY] to better meet customer needs?

11. At what point would [COMPANY] service get expensive but still worth it?

12. What problem were you trying to solve when you initially came across [COMPANY] service?

13. What’s holding you back from using [COMPANY] service?

Understanding your ICP's pain points isn't just about listing problems that you can reference in your web copy or blog content—it's about understanding their depth, impact, and relationship to business goals.

Step #3: Categorize pain points by nature and impact

I give every pain point two dimensions: its nature and its impact. Nature identifies the core problem area, while the impact measures how severely it affects the business.

High-impact pain points

These directly affect revenue or critical operations, and also come with a degree of immediacy.

For example, when inefficient marketing funnels and technical setups decrease revenue and engagement, that's a high-impact technical issue.

Similarly, when teams lack an understanding of current digital marketing best practices, it leads to ineffective strategies and wasted resources—a high-impact knowledge gap.

Medium-impact pain points

These impact business performance but don't immediately impact revenue. Think of time-consuming manual processes that slow operations but can be fixed by streamlining operations or setting budget limitations on low-priority endeavors.

These issues need attention but lack urgency and a direct impact on revenue.

Low-impact pain points

These pain points create substantial irritation or daily friction. They're often top-of-mind, they're a drag. But, they don't significantly affect operations or revenue.

Common examples include outdated or buggy tech, lack of interdepartmental communication, or administrative burdens.

Step #4: Map pain points to business requirements, trigger events, and solutions

Understand that business pain points are part of a wider spectrum of factors that influence buyer behavior. There's also emotional pain, business requirements, and the actual events responsible for compelling prospects to seek solutions.

In that same vein, we can start at the top of influential factors.

Business requirements

Business requirements represent what companies must achieve to move forward. These are not lofty goals, these are the requirements to keep their business alive and thriving.

Here's a look at 4 business requirements that are part of a single client's ICP. You can see how pain points stem from each of them:

1. Business requirement: Increase pipeline 2x-3x from current state

   • Pain point: Stalled revenue growth despite having a strong sales team

     • Nature: Strategic challenge

     • Impact: High

   • Pain point: Lack of expertise in comprehensive lead generation campaigns

     • Nature: Skill deficiency

     • Impact: Medium

2. Business requirement: Improve close rates and deal velocity

   • Pain point: Inconsistent processes leading to missed quotas and poor lead quality

     • Nature: Process inefficiency

     • Impact: High

3. Business requirement: Modernize Go-To-Market (GTM) strategies

   • Pain point: Outdated playbooks failing to meet modern B2B buyer expectations

     • Nature: Knowledge gap

     • Impact: Medium

4. Business requirement: Reach and engage sophisticated B2B buyers across multiple channels

   • Pain point: Difficulty in effectively reaching buyers based on detailed qualification criteria

     • Nature: Technical challenge

     • Impact: Low

Trigger events and emotional pain

What happens that makes your prospects conduct Google searches for services like yours?

There is often a trigger event, significant emotional pain, or both that immediately precedes the search for solutions. Here are some examples:

• Pressure from aggressive growth targets

• Fear of competitive disadvantage

• Frustration with poor marketing-sales alignment

• Overwhelm from channel complexity

• Pressure following board meetings or quarterly performance review

Trigger events and emotional pains can be treated the same because these are what kick off the search for solutions. These also tell you where the conversation with your prospects should begin. You can categorize these under pain points, like so.

Business requirement: Increase pipeline 2x-3x from current state

• Pain point: Stalled revenue growth despite having a strong sales team

  • Nature: Strategic challenge

  • Impact: High

  • Trigger event/emotional pain: Pressure following board meetings or quarterly performance review

Solutions

Once you see how business requirements, pain points, and events all influence each other, you can determine where and how your service best fits into it all.

If you're looking at your core offer and not sure where to go from there, a good place to start is with the nature of different pain points. This will give you an idea of the different types of problems you solve. The wider the range, the more valuable your service. From there, you can connect it to trigger events and business requirements.

Next, prioritize by impact level, highest to lowest. This tells you what keywords to target and content ideas to target first.

But before you start creating content, remember what the point of all this research is: to align your offer with your ICP.

Step #5: Align market positioning and messaging

Your positioning and messaging should speak directly to your ICP's specific challenges. Now that you've done thorough research, you can think about how to adjust or optimize your current offer.

Positioning

Position is how you want clients to think of you as a service provider. Here's a simple yet powerful formula to come up with a positioning statement:

"I'm an X, who does Y, without Z."

Where:

• X defines your role or service category

• Y describes what clients are buying

• Z explains your key differentiator

The positioning statement I use for myself is, "I'm a content marketer who generates qualified leads without the hassle of large teams and long production cycles."

However, you may need different positioning statements for different client segments. Here are the more specific positioning statements for my service, Incisive Content Marketing:

• Mid-market B2B Tech businesses: "An SEO content marketing expert who replaces the need for an in-house team or agency."

• Marketing agencies and PR firms lacking a content marketing arm: "A marketing partner who drives targeted leads through SEO content."

• Professional services and IT firms who target enterprise clients: "A strategic SEO content partner who helps establish industry authority and attracts clients that can sign 6-figure contracts."

Your positioning statement is an internal tool that helps you figure out how to pitch yourself to your ICP. It is not how you describe yourself verbally or through web copy. That's what messaging is for.

Messaging

Your messaging should distill your value proposition into a clear, compelling statement. Keep it simple but specific.

For instance, the messaging I use for all types of clients is: "End-to-end SEO content production simplified."

One of the best ways to help you come up with ideas for catchy memorable messaging is to ask your ICP this question in an interview: "How would you describe our service to a friend who's in the same position as you?

More often than not, the answer to that question—or some variation of it—is the first thing prospective clients should see when they visit your home page.

One more thing... use hero case studies to attract your ideal clients

After all the research you've conducted, you'll likely be eager to find your new ICP. A great way to do that is to showcase a current client that fits that description and how you helped them.

The hero case study (template) is uniquely suited to the job. You can think of it like a combination of feature story and case study. It differs from traditional case studies in the following ways:

• The spotlight is on the client, their story, struggle, and accomplishment. Your service is included as a secondary, but essential part of their success.

• Styled as a story, they work throughout the sales funnel, not just at the end.

• Clients say 'yes' much more often when you ask "Would like to be featured in an article on our company blog?" instead of "Can I get a case study?"

Like in-depth customer research, hero case studies are a great way to connect you mentally and emotionally with the people your service benefits most.