In this Marketing Over Coffee:

Katie does a tour of Google Gemini writing copy trained on an Ideal Customer Profile (ICP)!

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Using your Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) to improve your storytelling ability

If you want to watch the video on YouTube

Ron Ploof’s StoryHow Pitch Deck

NetSuite is the number one cloud financial system, bringing accounting, financial management, inventory, HR, into ONE platform, and ONE source of truth.

What makes up the ICP

The Trust Insights PARE framework for writing prompts

Examining the ICP to find Pain Points

Starting with the ending in mind

Wix Studio is the web platform that gives agencies and enterprises the end-to-end efficiency to design, develop and deliver exactly the way they want to!

Join John, Chris and Katie on threads, or on LinkedIn: Chris, John, and Katie

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Machine Generated Transcript

00:06

John Wall

This is marketing over coffee with Christopher Penn and John Wall.

00:14

John Wall

Hey, everybody. So between ending vacations and already hitting the road for fall events, we’ve got another week before we get back to our regular shows. But I had something really interesting this week. I was doing a session with Katie Robert, the CEO over at Trust Insights, who I work with, and were showing off how you can train a large language model to act like one of your customers. And the goal was to prove that we could use Google Gemini to create a story for our prospects that would talk to these customers and prospects in their own language and follow all the best practices of storytelling. So it’s really having AI create these rough drafts of your marketing campaigns and stories that you could use to get them to take action.

00:56

John Wall

So this was a live stream, and I will throw in the YouTube link if you want to watch how it all happens. But I mean, if you’re familiar with just entering prompts and getting feedback, you don’t need to actually see, you know, the keyboard flashing. I’ve edited the live stream here down so you can follow it audio only and hear about how were able to come up with these storylines. It gets into some fascinating points on what makes a great story, and I have to give a huge shout out to Ron Plouffe here as we follow his story how framework, which is the best framework out there as far as crafting a story and hitting all the major beats you need to get your story correct.

01:30

John Wall

And I thought you’d be interested in how it turned out when we started pushing Gemini, you know, to come up with the story points and see how accurate it came back. So thanks to Katie for letting us grab this session and throw it in the feed. Also, I’m going to be at marketing prosp b two B in November, as Will Chris and Katie. So give a yell if you’re coming to Boston for that. We would love to see you and catch up with you. And next week, we will be kicking off the fall season and back with the regular show. And so with that, let’s jump right in.

01:56

Katie Robbert

This week, John and I are talking about leveraging your ICP, your ideal customer profile for data storytelling. We’re going to cover which data points your ICP can help with, the tactics to make the most compelling stories and how to check your story for clarity and effectiveness, both in your copy and visuals. Now, data storytelling is one of those things that we think is easy, but it’s actually really challenging because we’re like, oh, the data tells the story, but that’s not really true, because the data, a lot of times, is just a lot of numbers, and you have to pull out the story, but you also need to figure out from your client or whoever you’re working with, what story they need to be told.

02:38

Katie Robbert

And so, John, you and I very likely would want different stories from the same data because of our roles, because of our responsibilities. Where would you like to start today? I always ask Chris, but I’m going to ask you today, where would you like to start?

02:53

John Wall

Where do we want to start? Well, there’s a bunch of stuff. It’s funny, when you came up with this topic, went down a list of, like, okay, what can we talk about? And you said, storytelling and fitting into the data. And I was like, oh, this is perfect. Because I know the framework for this. I’d worked years ago with Ron Plouf, and he has his story how framework. And so the big thing with this is that everybody has these story frameworks. Like, when you go do the research on advisors who do this stuff, everybody has their own framework. But the thing that Ron had done is that he came up with 60 elements. He, as an engineer, broke it down into everything it can be. And so his breakdown is completely comprehensive. So we have a list of everything you need to do.

03:32

John Wall

And I was like, this is going to be fantastic, because you can outline all the stuff that’s going on with the Icpenna, and then we can layer that into these story how points, and it will put together a bulletproof story that can’t miss. Basically, once you’ve covered all the key points, a good place to start is with ICP, as far as bringing people up to speed with that and talk about the kind of data that you pull when you’re getting that together. As you prep to get the story, before you start working on the bones of the story, you’ve got to get all your research and everything in order if you want to dive into that. I think that’s where we need to kick it off.

04:07

Katie Robbert

What we’ve been doing with our methodology for an ICP is we’ve been using minimal data sets, because here’s the thing. We know that the data collection is the thing that holds up a lot of people from moving things forward. The idea that I had was if you could find the minimal amount of easy to access data, then you could build an ideal customer profile, which is basically a proxy for your actual customers, because doing that kind of market research, the focus groups, that’s also a lot of overhead and a lot of resources. And so how could we make something really efficient, really detailed, really on target that didn’t take a lot of time and resources?

04:55

Katie Robbert

And so what we’ve done is we’ve built basically the methodology for creating an ideal customer profile that covers your firmographics, your demographics, your psychographics, your pain points, how people make decisions. And it’s from your standpoint, from you, the end user, what we ask of you is very few things. We want to know who your competitors are. We want to know who you are. Basically just your, we’re basically just asking for some URL’s and maybe a snapshot of your website analytics, if available. It’s a very low bandwidth type of activity. So from there, what we can do is we can then use the ICP in this instance as a proxy stand in for our clients. So the first thing we want to do is set the stage.

05:43

Katie Robbert

And so using the trust insights pair framework, which you can get from our website, trustinsights AI pair, you can start to prime the model. That’s the whole purpose of peer. So what I’ve written in so far is today we are working on data storytelling for our client. We’ll have an ICP to stand in for the client and a lot of data points for review before we get started, what are the best prac