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Data Report

Your Ideal Customer Profile Report: Insights from 300+ Marketers on Defining ICPs

We surveyed marketers to understand how brands define, develop, and refine their ideal customer profile (ICP). Discover when businesses build their ICP, how often teams refine their positioning, and what customer data marketers actually have access to.

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Most marketing teams think they know who they're targeting. But there's a big difference between having an idea and having a documented ICP that your whole team can actually rely on.

We wanted to dig into this, so we surveyed over 300 marketing professionals. We asked about everything from their ICP development processes to their challenges.

Plus, we looked at macro data from our larger report to get a clear picture of where most brands stand.

Keep reading to discover what we found.

Chapter One

What Marketers Know (and Don't Know) About Their Ideal Customer

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Our survey tells a clear story: Marketers are almost evenly split when it comes to having a documented ICP.

53% of marketers say their ICP is not formally documented, while 48% say it is.

Among marketers with an ICP, most (93%) report feeling confident that their profile accurately represents their most valuable customers. But what information does the profile even include?

According to our report, the top five pieces of data include:

  • 65% have basic demographic information (name, gender, location)
  • 50% track purchase history from their own company
  • 40% know what products audiences are potentially interested in buying
  • 38% understand customer experience preferences and expectations
  • 37% track shopping habits across channels
  • 33% know interests and hobbies

Customer behavior like shopping preferences and CX expectations fall in that middle layer while the top blind spots are as follows.

Blind Spots in ICP Data

  • Only 20%

    understand audience pain points and challenges.

Takeaway: Most brands have built their ICPs on demographic and transactional foundations without extending into the behavioral, contextual, and emotional layers.

Chapter Two

How Most Marketers Approach Building Their ICP

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We asked marketers to walk us through their ICP development process, and one clear pattern emerged: 50% of businesses create their ICP early on.

To get more specific, 33% do so during the early growth stage when they’re building market share while 17% do so at the pre-launch/startup phase.

Here’s where the rest of marketers fall:

  • 13%

    create their ICP during maturity stage, once they have an established market position.

Now onto the methods brands use to collect ICP data. 

Successful brands rarely rely on a single input, rather combining several to build a full profile. 

  • engage-1

    55% conduct customer research (interviews, reviews analysis, feedback collection)

The #1 method marketers report using is conducting customer research. This can look like collecting survey feedback, analyzing product reviews, and running focus group interviews.

Only 19% of marketers hold workshops with cross-departmental stakeholders during ICP development, which could point to a missed opportunity.

Lastly, documentation is not a priority for most brands – only about a third of marketers (31%) create formal documentation as part of ICP development, such as:

Brand voice guides
Word banks for messaging consistency

Action step: If your ICP development has relied on just one or two inputs, consider which additional perspectives could strengthen your targeting precision.

Chapter Three

When to Validate and Maintain Your ICP

Building an ICP is just the starting point. The brands with highest confidence have established ongoing validation systems for their ICPs and brand identity.

When asked how they do so for their brand positioning, here what marketers had to say, according our 2026 State of Marketing Report.

  • 61% use customer surveys for direct feedback

    These are key in confirming whether your ICP assumptions match actual customer experience — the problems you're solving, the language you're using, and the positioning you're claiming.

As for their visual identity, 32% of marketers surveyed in that report say they do so every 1-2 years while 12% evolve it continuously.

The same approach should apply to your ICP. 

Chapter Four

The Three Biggest ICP Challenges — and How to Navigate Them

Building an ICP isn’t foolproof - there are still some challenges that can arise, and we asked marketers to dig into them.

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Balancing specificity with market opportunity

Marketers struggle with creating ICP parameters that are specific enough to serve their user segments but general enough to not leave potential customers out of the picture.

This is particularly a concern for smaller brands, who worry about over-targeting.

Here's another perspective: Having an ICP doesn't mean you only serve one type of customer, it means you prioritize one in your positioning and go-to-market strategy. Going too broad puts you at too great of a risk to resonate with no one. 

 

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Getting the right data for the job

Marketers also struggle with getting reliable data to inform their ICP. Survey responses can suffer from selection bias, purchase behavior can diverge from preferences, and small survey sizes can skew results. 

Potential Solution: Prioritize primary research over assumptions -- even a handful of in-depth customer interviews will surface valuable insights.

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Keeping up with change

Lastly, marketers are concerned about building ICPs that are stable enough to guide strategy but flexible enough to adapt when economic conditions change and technology shifts.

Action item: Not every trend requires ICP revision. Not every competitive move demands repositioning. The art is distinguishing between surface-level fluctuations and fundamental changes. Have quarterly check-ins designed to review factors that might affect your ICP and decide from there.

Conclusion

From Channel Chaos to Coordinated Engine

The path toward a clear and documented ICP isn’t exactly easy, but it’s doable – with the right mix of data and cross-functional alignment.

The brands with the strongest ICPs:

  • Combine inputs from several sources.

  • Revisit and re-validate their assumptions regularly. 

  • Document their findings and share across their orgs.

Keeping these tips in mind will help close that gap faster than you can say ICP.