What do you get when you cross a case study and an ICP?

*** A quick note: I put together a Guide to Content Marketing for Emerging Technical Niches that summarizes what I’ve been writing about on this newsletter. If you’re ready to start helping your target customers understand their big, looming problems, you can request a copy here. ***

In last week’s post, I claimed that you can tell stories to your target customers without explicitly writing stories in your social posts, blog posts, etc. The idea is to write about different parts of the story you want to tell, from different angles, so that your readers will piece them together in their minds. You want them to form a single story that helps them understand what to do and sets them up to use your software to do it. But as good as this plan may sound, there’s still a big question: How do you ensure that all your content defines a consistent, coherent story. So this week, I’m going to start digging into the mechanics of how you actually do this.

The approach that I’ve found most effective revolves around what I call core stories, which are a cross between an Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) and a cases study.

An ICP is a description of an abstracted, idealized customer, covering the kind of company they work for, their role in the company, etc. In some cases, it can go deeper into their goals and pain points, but either way its focus is on the person and their perspective. The key aspects are 1) An ICP is for internal use only - you use it to help guide your marketing/sales/product, and 2) It’s not about a specific, actual customer - it’s an amalgam of selected customers and design partners, or it could just be what you expect/want your future customers to look like.

A case study is a story about an actual customer or design partner that starts with their goals and pain points, explains how they used your software to address them, then describes the outcomes that they saw as a result. Unlike an ICP, 1) A case study is for external use - it’s typically either published somewhere or given to the sales team to tell to customers and 2) It’s about an actual, specific customer/design partner so it has to conform to a single reality rather than an idealized amalgam. Plus, you can’t create one until you have a customer who has had tangible success AND agrees to let you write about them.

The reason that software companies really like case studies is that the narrative form makes it very tangible and compelling. It’s a story. The drawbacks are that a case study takes a lot of work, you’re constrained to what a single customer did, you can’t write one until you have a successful customer, and it only gets you a single piece of content.

A core story is designed to give you the best of both an ICP and a case study by extending the ICP to cover the entire narrative from goals and pain points to impacts. Like an ICP, it’s for internal use only - your core stories are meant to be the source for all your marketing content. By making sure this content fits within the universe of your core stories, you ensure that your readers will form a clear and consistent story in their minds. (In fact, I think core stories should also help shape sales conversations and even product strategy, but those are topics for another day.)

I’ve found that starting from core stories makes it easier to outline and write content because instead of starting from a blank page, you get to just point to a part of a core story and think about how to best illustrate it. And because you understand the mechanics behind each piece of content, it’s easier to interpret and understand why certain things work or don’t work.

And to be clear, using core stories shouldn’t top you from also doing case studies. In fact, a core story can help you write a case study by clarifying which aspects of the narrative to focus on and how to frame it.

In my next few posts, I’ll go deeper into the mechanics of my process for developing and then leveraging core stories. No post next week because it’s Thanksgiving in the US, but the week after that I’ll jump back in with the five parts of a core story. Stay tuned!

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Thanks for reading Viral Esoterica! In addition to writing this newsletter, my company, Merelogic, helps SaaS teams in emerging technical niches develop targeted and consistent messaging to give prospective buyers conviction that you will reliably solve that looming problem they don’t yet know the words for. Schedule a discovery call to learn more.