Find your agency’s niche
Before reaching out to potential clients, you need a clear vision of who you serve and why they benefit from your agency’s expertise. An Ideal Client Profile (ICP) ensures you’re targeting businesses that align with your goals and offer the greatest opportunity for success.
As you define your ICP, consider the following:
- Does your agency serve a particular niche market (e.g., industry, business size, etc.)?
- Are you looking to step into a new market by working with a specific type of brand?
- What is your agency looking to achieve in the next year, and what kinds of clients can get you there?
For instance, ABC agency is expanding into the food and beverage industry. They specialize in working with small to medium size businesses (SMB). As they seek out new clients, Beantown Coffee Co. is on their radar. Below are a few key considerations that they make, and that you should too, as they research Beantown.
Industry
Many agencies find their niche in a particular industry, as they fine tune their strategy and market themselves as an industry expert. Common industries include: beauty, apparel, toys and hobbies, food and beverage, home and garden, etc.
Key considerations:
- Compliance: different industries require careful marketing strategies to stay in compliance. For instance, alcohol brands must be extra careful to enable age-gating before sending SMS to customers.
Beantown example:
Beantown Coffee Co. is a great brand for ABC Agency to work with as they start to break into the food and beverage space. Beantown serves local customers near their brick and mortar location, but also across regions within their online storefront, which sells a variety of coffee beans and blends.
Business size
Do you tend to support a specific size of business? For example: new entrepreneurs just starting out, small to medium-sized business (SMB), or large, enterprise companies?
Key considerations:
How you engage with these teams will differ accordingly, as you need to ensure you know:
- Who key decision makers are.
- What their team’s budget allows for.
- How their marketing efforts support company goals.
Beantown example:
Because Beantown falls into the SMB space, ABC Agency knows they are a great fit. They make sure their Director of Marketing is on the call to approve any decisions and sales as they are the final decision maker to close the deal.
Customer demographics
Another core aspect of a business is their location and customer demographics. Why? There are many regional laws and specific nuances that can affect how you market to a brand’s customer-base.
Key considerations:
- Regional laws: Make sure to familiarize yourself with regional laws of any place your clients and their customers are located.
- Customer demographics: who are customers within this industry? Do they tend to share certain attributes, ages, genders, values, geographic location, etc.? Consider how your agency can add value to this customer profile specifically. As proof, ask yourself: Does my agency already work with brands that share a similar “voice” that will resonate with this customer base?
Beantown example:
Beantown Coffee is based in the US, but also sells to customers in Canada, so ABC Agency makes sure to reference Canadian sending laws as well. Beantown's customer base is largely young professionals that resonate well with neutral colors, bold fonts, and encouraging messaging. ABC agency builds a mood board of what they envision as an ideal brand voice for Beantown; they intend to expand upon this during the discovery phase as they prepare a larger proposal for Beantown.
Tech stack
One last topic to consider is the prospect's tech stack requirements. What tools and platforms do you and your team work with that this client can benefit from? What tools do you not work with and/or what services do you not provide that are associated with these tools?
Key considerations:
- Your team's area of expertise.
- Your team's bandwidth to learn new tools or tasks.
Beantown example:
Beantown hosts their website on WooCommerce and intends to use a variety of tools outside of Klaviyo, such as Google and Facebook Ads to advertise their business online, Gorgias to provide customers with support if questions arise, and Typeform to collect customer feedback via surveys. ABC Agency feels very comfortable with these platforms and is thus open to continuing the conversation to help support these efforts: making edits to their web design, constructing a holistic marketing plan by integrating these tools with Klaviyo, and designing ads that convert.
Target customers for core Klaviyo products
On top of defining your ideal client profile, you should also consider: what clients are best suited for each individual marketing strategy, and as a result, Klaviyo product features? In particular, let’s dive into the target profiles for Klaviyo Email, SMS, Mobile push, Reviews, and CDP.
Klaviyo Marketing: Email, text messaging, or push
Look for businesses that:
- Are in the following industries: apparel and accessories, health and beauty, jewelry, food and beverage, sporting goods, electronics, houseware & home goods, restaurants, health & wellness, hotels, etc.
- Use an ecommerce platform that integrates with Klaviyo (e.g., Shopify, WooCommerce, BigCommerce, Magento, etc.)
- Use an ESP that is easy to migrate to Klaviyo (e.g., MailChimp, Omnisend, ActiveCampaign, Constant Contact, Campaign Monitor, DotDigital, HubSpot, Yotpo, or Listrak).
- Use an SMS solution that is easy to migrate to Klaviyo (Attentive, SMSBump, Postscript or Emotive).
- Sell direct to consumer (D2C).
- Use third-party tools (loyalty, shipping, etc.) that already integrate with Klaviyo.
- Use separate SMS and mobile push solutions. This way, you can easily pitch tech consolidation.
Meanwhile, business that may not be a good fit are those that:
- Have an unappealing website (unless you offer website services).
Customer profiles to reach out to in the SMB space:
- Co-founder/CEO
- Marketing Manager
- Marketing Executive
Customers to reach out to in the mid-market to enterprise space:
- VP of Marketing
- Director of Lifecycle
- Director of Marketing Ops
- Director of Marketing Analytics/Data Science
- Email Marketing Manager
- Marketing Ops/Tech Platforms
- Vendor Management
Klaviyo Marketing: Reviews
Look for SMB businesses using Shopify/Shopify Plus who:
- Are happy with Klaviyo.
- Are interested in Klaviyo.
- Want to simplify their tech stack.
Customer profiles to reach out to:
- Retention marketer.
- eCommerce marketer/manager.
- Marketing manager.
- Marketing Executive or CEO.
If you are unfamiliar with whether we integrate with a specific tool, first check our partner integrations. If the tool is not on this list, simply search [Tool Name + Klaviyo] to see if the other tool hosts the integration.
Klaviyo Analytics: Marketing Analytics
Look for existing SMB ($5 - $20m revenue) and midmarket ($20m-400m revenue) customers who are:
The decision-maker you work with for Klaviyo Email or SMS will also determine investment in Klaviyo Marketing Analytics. We typically target a marketing user, which might be an owner (downmarket) or a marketing manager (upmarket). The customers/prospects who meet the following criteria are good candidates for marketing analytics:
- Ecommerce/retail brands globally.
- [Greenfield] Entrepreneur/Small and Medium Businesses (SMB) brands who want to start leveraging data to optimize marketing strategy.
- [Rip and replace] SMB+ brands who are unhappy with their existing point solutions or not seeing enough return on investment (ROI) from them.
- [Complementary] Mid-market plus (MM+) brands where marketers are unable to access or move quickly with Business Intelligence (BI) tools/data science resources.
- SMB+ brands who want to better leverage their data for analysis to optimize their marketing strategy in order to target when and with what content and what channel.
- SMB+ brands who are leveraging a point solution for analytics and unhappy with it.
Customer profiles to reach out to:
- Director Marketing, Retention, Ecommerce, or Performance.
- Head of Growth, or generalist Marketing Managers.
- CMO (budget approval).
Klaviyo Data Platform (KDP): Advanced KDP
Look for businesses between $30m - $500m in revenue who are:
- Existing MM+ customers looking to better understand their customers and do more with their customer data to improve marketing engagement and drive incremental revenue.
- New MM prospects interested in Klaviyo, attracted to our ability to serve as their CDP in addition to their marketing automation platform.
Customer profiles to reach out to:
- Director of CRM.
- Director/Head of Personalization.
- Director of Marketing Technology.
- Director of Digital Marketing.
- Director of Marketing Analytics.
- Product Owner (Martech).
- Director of Digital Product Management.
- Director of Product Management - Data.
Klaviyo service: Customer Hub
Look for entrepreneur/lower SMB brands who are:
- Existing Klaviyo customers.
- English-language brands.
- Looking to own customer relationships across the entire lifecycle.
- Looking to empower customers to self-serve and reduce the strain on the support team.
- Are Shopify/Shopify plus customers.
Customer profiles to reach out to:
- Head of Marketing.
- Head of CRM.
- Head of eCommerce.
In closing
Once you have nailed down the exact type of profile you should seek out as an ideal prospect to reach out to, it’s time to do your research and find those leads. In the next lesson, we will dive into how to do just that!