Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: Welcome to ten Speed Sessions. We're joined again today by Ryan Sargent, VP of product at Ten Speed. What's up, Ryan?
[00:00:06] Speaker B: Hey, good to be back.
[00:00:07] Speaker A: Yes. Glad to be back in the studio. Today we're going to be talking about the concept of ICP Aligned content.
What that means.
Everyone says it. Does everyone do it? Really? Just kind of pick that apart. And really, in the framework of here's some of the challenges we see with that and then also what we recommend instead, or some advice around that to try to make it a little more tactical so that it isn't just some meaningless thing and we really can kind of make sure that it's being applied to its fullest.
So with that, we are starting with this challenge of icp, meaning ideal customer profile is ultimately an assumption. It's an estimate. It's ideal.
And for many folks that really just kind of gets reduced to demographics or firmographics or whatever.
[00:01:02] Speaker B: Yeah, I think that's like a classic mistake that we talk about Personas entirely around demographics instead of talking about jobs to be done.
That's shifted a lot in the last few years, I think. I think more people are recognizing that demographics don't tell the whole story.
But that's at the heart of why ICP Aligned has become like very generic and not.
I think if you ask 10 different marketers what ICP aligned content means, you'd get 10 different answers. Yeah, it's safe. No one disagrees with it. Right. Like, it's something you can always say that we're working hard on doing and no one, no one can ever be mad at you. Yeah. And then when push comes to shove, it's like, what does that actually look like? And I think the job should be done conversation is at the heart of it.
[00:01:49] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:01:49] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:01:50] Speaker A: Do you want to expand on jobs to be done? Why? That's what's different about that, I guess, versus demographics for graphics.
[00:01:58] Speaker B: I'm trying to remember the whole example now. So Clay Christensen, the guy who, like one of the founders of Jobs To Be Done, often described it as like, he fits a certain demographic profile, but he does the New York Times crossword for a completely different reason than someone else who looks like him or matches his age, location, the reason he's doing the crossword might be totally different. Maybe it's to kill time instead of exercise his brain. Right.
And the demographic piece of that was completely irrelevant to why he was doing the crossword. And that's what a lot of I think Jobs to be Done conversations is.
We're really just interrogating the why.
And if we understand why people want to do something, what they hope to accomplish, often being the reason behind the why.
[00:02:52] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:02:52] Speaker B: Then we get a much better picture of what they actually want, as opposed to just kind of like stating facts about them.
[00:03:00] Speaker A: Yep.
[00:03:00] Speaker C: Where do marketers go wrong when they're, like, trying to build these things? Then, like, how did. Why didn't we not get to the why and focus on the other demographic firmographic stuff?
[00:03:10] Speaker B: In my experience in B2B marketing, we often focus on people's actual job rather than their job to be done. Right. We say Mike, the digital marketer on the big Persona card with the AI generated avatar. Right. And that's great. I love that Mike's a digital marketer. But that doesn't actually describe the job to be done. That describes his job.
And that's another example where we're using a very broad butt brush.
[00:03:38] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:03:38] Speaker B: What does digital marketer mean today?
I don't even see that in people's job titles anymore. That's like a very 2016 job title. And so is he trying to generate pipeline? Is he trying to generate pipeline in a specific channel? Are his priorities going to shift next quarter? Is he worried about that?
[00:03:57] Speaker A: Is he checking a box? Yeah, yeah, he was told to do it.
[00:04:00] Speaker B: So all of that put together means the job title doesn't tell the whole story. And I think that's a common Persona mistake that falls into this, like, demographics category in B2B especially.
[00:04:12] Speaker A: Yeah.
Yeah. And I think even just you think about, like, going through a hiring process, you know, and you could have 50 people who apply who say that they did content marketing manager was their most recent role.
But digging in the nature of what the company is, what they were doing, what they were tasked with, what they were held accountable for, all those things can be wildly different, I guess, to go a layer deeper or poke into that. The second thing that we talked about was a challenge is that the starting point isn't even great. So it's not even just demographics whatever whatever. It's ICP research often just still isn't research. You know, it's maybe an afternoon was spent looking at some existing customers.
Just some assumptions were made. Or, you know, again, the word ideal is what I like, kind of keep getting hung up on is like, you're saying this is our ideal customer. But, like, how, you know, is that. Does that make up 2% of your actual customer base, or is that actually reflective of that? There's just a lot there. And so I think that's just one Challenge of like the research isn't actually research and what it takes to do that extensively and in a way that is reliable I think is out of the reach of a lot of people.
[00:05:42] Speaker B: Honestly, ICP is a very useful concept. I don't want to like, I'm not suggesting we throw that one away.
[00:05:48] Speaker A: Right.
[00:05:49] Speaker B: I do think it's become a little bit of this catch all and for exactly the reason you just described. We're talking about an ideal here as opposed to the real world.
And that's why even more than some of the ideal customer research, talk to your existing customers. These are the people who've already given you money.
Why?
What did they accomplish? Correct.
That's a piece of research that we get rid of a lot of the barriers too.
A lot of people don't do very much customer research or very much ICP research because they feel like they don't have access to the tools or how do I go keep track of every sales call or like there's a lot of potential speed bumps. Your existing customers, especially the ones who are happy, that's a good place to start.
[00:06:36] Speaker C: It's hard work to actually go. It's harder and it's more required to go and do those. The hard work to talk to the client or the customers. I am guilty, I'm sure, as we all are, of putting together that Persona doc with the person's face. Hey, I'm going to get an actual picture. And I looked at customer data titles. It's like I organized everything and found an average.
But like that doesn't actually speak to the actual thing that you're talking about, which is like let's go talk to them and actually find out what their pain points are.
[00:07:07] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah. It's like optimizing an average is not. Yeah.
Is not a great way to start out. And I think so to your point, talking to customers and you mentioned like maybe people don't have. I think more than ever it should be easy to be able to be able to listen to sales calls.
You know, initially it was, you know, gong and some of those could even be cost prohibitive for, for companies. But now with AI note takers, I think it's pretty well democratized. You should be able to listen to anything that's been recorded. And so that is kind of the recommendation that we had here was like if you started a job and you were handed here's our ICP or you're asked to go put together that or do a little of that research and you just don't feel like, it's quite there. Our recommendation is do one of these or both. Listen to sales calls or talk to existing customers. And if you could do both, do both.
Those are the most practical starting points for anyone that doesn't require mapping, finding fake images of this person who's supposedly your ideal customer. All these things that aren't necessarily there. And again, I think we've moved away from Personas and let's put these people up on the wall. This who we're going after. But a lot of the core elements of that I think do exist. They just got rolled into this new concept of icp.
And so I guess stepping back, really a lot of this was your point that you had made was this has kind of become a weasel word like ICP aligned. Like everyone says it. What does it mean? So, yeah, I think that those are some really practical starting points that.
That I think can get you much further into aligned with what people are trying to do.
[00:09:04] Speaker B: I'll go one notch deeper and make it even more practical when you listen to these calls.
And I do think it's important for marketers to listen to at least some of them. Don't just have AI summarize the transcript. Because marketers are ultimately students of human behavior. We're trying to persuade and influence. And so you need to hear the voices not on 2x speed at least a couple times.
You need to understand what, like things about pacing that this is how you dial in voice and tone in your content is. You understand how your customers speak and interact.
When you do that, you're looking for two specific moments.
And these are questions that we ask about when we're onboarding clients for 10 speed. Because this is like the fastest way to the heart of understanding an audience.
You're looking for the moment they realize that they have a problem. Like the struggling moment is what Bob Mahesta calls it.
And when they realize that I don't have to be in this world where I have this pain point, this is worth solving.
We all have countless little moments of annoyance in our lives that aren't worth solving.
And then we realize, oh, no, this one's now bad enough, I gotta do something about it. You're looking for that moment because as marketers, we actually want to highlight that moment. We want to show that moment to more people. And then you're looking for the moment where they decide the way past. This is a particular tool or solution, and we definitely need to influence that one because we need them to choose our tool or solution.
And you're looking for exactly those two moments when you're listening to these calls, when you're doing this research.
None of that is demographics.
[00:10:47] Speaker A: Yes, agree.
We're kind of picking at this phrase ICP aligned.
The second part, we've talked about the ICP and the demographics and whatnot. Second part is aligned is never really defined.
So nobody explains really what alignment means in practice. And I think that it's one of those things that's kind of been watered down to the point where I think for a lot of people it just means, yeah, we're not going to go right about any like a keyword that just has a lot of search volume. I think was in the past was a big issue. Was like, we're just going to go find these things that have a lot of search volume. They don't really have anything to do with your business, but it's going to keep a ton of traffic.
So I think ICP aligned has sort of been to me diluted down to just meaning it's actually relevant to what you do.
I think that's a big part there and we need to talk about how we get around or better understand what aligned means.
[00:11:56] Speaker C: Yeah, I think you should kick this off. I'll add to it.
[00:12:02] Speaker B: Yeah. Aligned is often a weasel word because what does that actually look like? What does that actually sound like? And when we're building content for a particular audience, we need to address one of those moments. And if we're not addressing the moment when they realize they have a problem or the moment they figure out how to solve it, then we can only be so close to the moment where our product enters the conversation.
Not suggesting that we only have to talk about our product. I'm not suggesting. Right. Like, but it needs to be adjacent to these moments.
So thinking of examples from my past. Right. And when I worked in ed tech, like, we produced a lot of content around assessment.
Our product had a gradebook feature. We didn't talk about gradebooks or storing your assessments in the cloud or like it was all product marketing.
We did talk about what constitutes a good assessment. How do you make sure students are progressing, Aligning your in class assessments with state standards, all of that kind of stuff is very much adjacent to this moment of I can't keep doing grade books like it's the 1970s and I have a piece of graph paper and that is an example of what I would consider aligned. Yeah, we're, we're talking about a real problem.
[00:13:27] Speaker C: There are things that you can like add value to someone's day to day in their work that either, like, helps improve something that they're already doing or enlightens them to a new way of doing things or something not that necessarily aren't always found in, like, a keyword selection that would have data around it.
[00:13:44] Speaker A: Right.
[00:13:44] Speaker C: Like it's finding pain points or just again, pushing a concept further to make sure someone can, like, continue to do their job better.
[00:13:58] Speaker A: Yeah. I think one thing, when we had talked about this a little bit before, you had a good.
You had a good example of someone asking for, like, an analogy in plain English as a way to like, break that down a bit and really kind of make sure that it's easy to be understandable and to achieve that alignment.
[00:14:27] Speaker B: That's where the subjectivity piece comes in. I think that a big part of ICP aligned also means being authentic. And authentic has also become a word. Of course we're going to prove it's authentic content. Of course, your audience only wants really deeply authentic content. Another thing we can all say that doesn't actually mean anything anymore.
You drive authenticity often with vocabulary. And how you talk about the problem is a signal to your audience that you understand it.
People have a nose for marketing and sales nobody wants to be sold to.
And so one of the ways around that is before they ever talk to sales, making sure the marketing speaks to them on their own terms. So again, one of the things we always ask is what are the words that we would use in the content that would give away that we might not know what we're talking about? What are the words we use that definitely show we understand truly give us actual specific nouns and verbs that indicate we are part of the club?
And that often looks like asking for analogies in SME interviews that explained difficult, complex problems in plain English. Can we get one of your engineers on camera with an AI note taker talking about how we would explain this to a junior employee or explain this when you're training someone.
This does boil down a little bit to explain, like, I'm five, but there's also always content fuel in there and it turns into the examples you can use over and over again.
[00:16:08] Speaker C: I think, though, that is even more like, we work with a lot of, you know, more technical products and companies, and I think, like, that is a perfect way to sum up how you can connect with that icp like we talk about this is maybe not a great example, but, like, documentation and technical material is really great for getting to that audience.
[00:16:29] Speaker A: Right.
[00:16:30] Speaker C: But the reason it is is because it's like, so specifically speaking to the thing that they are doing and like their language. Ye like for an engineer or developer.
[00:16:38] Speaker A: Right.
[00:16:38] Speaker C: And I feel like it's similar to that in that it's like if you can speak that, that's really authentic because it's really technical and it's like I'm part of it speaks that club thing, which I think is a great way to put it.
[00:16:51] Speaker A: Yeah. I do think like the marketing to developers for a long time has been like notoriously difficult because they want to be marketed to and they, they had ad blockers and you know, but so much of it was just the authenticity. And there were people, you know, over the years who cracked. I'm trying to think of specific products, but I can't right now. But like were able to speak to it in a very direct and relatable way on hacker news or in Reddit or whatever. That was like clear that there was an association. And then yes, to that point, you know, whether it's agency or in house, there are plenty of topics like, you know, in house marketer and agency marketer. They're not a, like, they're not a vet that actually like treats animals. They're not an AI engineer. They are not, you know, like corporate finance and all those different things. You just can't be. And that's the importance of the SME. But to your point, being able to understand the analogy or specifically saying what words gives us away I think is a really big way to level that up. Almost like the trade secret, right?
[00:18:12] Speaker C: The things that you know in your day to day that a person wouldn't know normally that you couldn't find in the actual just research.
[00:18:20] Speaker B: Right.
[00:18:20] Speaker C: This nuance of like, hey, if you
[00:18:22] Speaker A: do this a little bit this way,
[00:18:24] Speaker C: that's how you get that thing done.
[00:18:26] Speaker A: Right.
[00:18:26] Speaker C: Because we have experience doing this thing.
[00:18:28] Speaker B: Right.
[00:18:28] Speaker A: Yeah. And I don't think like, you guys can tell me if you agree, but I don't think there's anything we've mentioned a couple times around like keywords or certain search volume. This is definitely not like an SEO thing. Just to be clear. Like this is any and all content. Like with LLMs, AI search, like none of that changes. If anything, it all becomes that much more important. But it's definitely not like an SEO thing and the ICP aligned is not just an SEO thing. Like this is definitely a broader content marketing and just any and all content that's just fueling your marketing and your brand and really everything there.
[00:19:11] Speaker B: You're choosing the right topic to talk about on your podcast.
Sure.
[00:19:15] Speaker C: You should yeah, throw SEO and all those things away. Like, don't even consider that. Like, it shouldn't, that shouldn't inform it at all. Should just be about, like, what you're providing from a value standpoint and, and lead with that. And then like, hey, if, then you can have the skills to optimize things for all these other sources, then great. But like, yeah, that's just a bonus.
[00:19:37] Speaker A: Yeah. And the, the other thing aligned.
The thing that comes to mind for me is just a few different experiences over the years that I've had of researching something, looking for something, finding an article.
And again, that again, sounds like SEO, because I was using Google Search, but you could find it anywhere. It could be shared on X or Reddit or AI search. And the point is coming to that piece of content, reading through it, and like, it being so good and hitting so perfectly that it wasn't just like, wow, that was great, thank you, you know, company, and then move on. It was like they got so to the core of what I'm living right now. I want to go see what else they've written because they may have more. Like, it just feels like you're finding pieces of gold that if you follow the trail, you might find an entire treasure.
It's like, I have to go dig in and try to find more because it just. So, to me, that's what I think of when I think of alignment. It's just like, it hit so squarely that I had to go see if there was more.
[00:20:56] Speaker B: Well, and does the content answer the next question or lead you logically to the next question? Does. That's not like a funnel thing either. It's like, what would your customers ask after finishing this piece of content, after consuming it?
Do you have the piece of content that answers that question? And is there an internal link? Again, not to make it about SEO,
[00:21:19] Speaker C: but we see how it all plays together that way.
[00:21:22] Speaker A: Yeah. To guide them, though, for sure.
[00:21:25] Speaker B: Another thing we can talk about here is why ICP gets a little, a little lost, I think, is that especially in B2B, there's more than one stakeholder, and so there's often more than one icp.
So, for example, if you're writing a listicle about products, then what's the takeaway for the person who actually reads the listicle? Because the buyer, the executive who makes the B2B purchase decision isn't the person reading the listicle.
So can you provide something in the listicle that fuels the IC's research to take to their manager to inform the purchase Right. Like totally. That kind of value add is what we actually mean by ICP aligned.
[00:22:08] Speaker C: Totally. We have not actually. This is great. We haven't talked about that angle in a long time. And like it's the practitioner who does the research for especially in like a. Not to get so specific around like segment market segments. But like the practitioner who's doing the job that has the tool. But the tool is really expensive. They don't make the decision.
[00:22:27] Speaker A: But. Right.
[00:22:28] Speaker C: Like there's two paths there where like there is actually like multiple ICPs and actually content and things that are serving different purposes.
[00:22:36] Speaker A: Right.
[00:22:36] Speaker C: Like that's where you know like not to get again so specific but like where the, the research reporter, the white paper.
[00:22:42] Speaker A: Right.
[00:22:42] Speaker C: That goes up to the person but like that the decision maker. But that only gets to the person after the practitioner finds the other things that are super helpful because they're like, oh, this company is really good at this thing. That solves this pain point. Right now I need to tell them about how to get.
We need to get this thing.
It's a great point. And it gets complicated. It's hard to optimize for.
[00:23:01] Speaker A: Yeah. I mean I've made six figure annual software purchases before and I can think of at least one that started with we're only going to talk to people who have a real time bi directional sync with Salesforce.
So that is a, you know, like that's a very specific query and you go find that. That doesn't mean the decision's made. It's just that's the, that was a kind of a short list function, you know, and there's a lot of variables that then go into the overall decision.
[00:23:39] Speaker B: So I mean you just absolutely said something that I would mark as we need to use this kind of word.
Right. Bidirectional. Like that is an if you know, you know, piece of vocabulary.
[00:23:53] Speaker A: Yep.
[00:23:53] Speaker B: And that piece of content that supports that lives in the middle of the Venn diagram between sales enablement, product marketing and content marketing.
[00:23:59] Speaker A: Agree.
[00:24:00] Speaker B: And you gotta, you gotta nail that. Like that's, that's a moment when you show authenticity and alignment. Correct.
[00:24:07] Speaker A: Because yeah, if the content is just saying sync with Salesforce.
[00:24:11] Speaker B: Right.
[00:24:12] Speaker A: I am immediately reading the next line, trying to dig in.
A lot of people can say that and then. Oh, turns out you can use Zapier and no, that's not what I need. Yeah. So to your point, there is that subtle point in that language that then makes a really big difference.
Sorry, were you going to say something else?
The other piece that we we felt like was an important aspect of this breaking down and making something more real and what you can actually do with it.
Like the problem can be just like ignoring where your market is for your product or service.
So the challenge being that your content strategy and the way that you're approaching your content isn't accounting for market maturity.
[00:25:07] Speaker B: Yeah, I alluded to this before with like the two moments and immature markets should focus on the first moment and more mature markets should focus on the second one.
In plain English, since we're talking about if you're a category creator, another weasel word term.
But like if you're doing something where people don't know that you exist, that they don't know that this category of tools is available, don't know that their problem can be solved, you need to make them aware that they have the problem.
And if everybody knows that this problem can be solved, you need to focus instead on the moment when they choose which tool, which solution that they decide this is worth solving in this way, not in a different way. And that last bit is important because there are problems I can solve lots of different ways.
What's a good analogy?
[00:25:56] Speaker A: I have one go.
[00:25:57] Speaker B: Yes, perfect.
[00:26:00] Speaker A: So I grew up a small family business doing water softeners, drinking water systems ros and there are multiple solutions to that problem.
Business school would call that an unsought good for a lot of people. The water software in particular.
Or that you can have an in home reverse osmosis drinking system. Not necessarily something everyone knows, but there are multiple solutions. You can fill up a Brita pitcher every night and let that filter. You can get one to put on your tap. You can say forget it, my water in my house or my apartment is too bad, I'm just gonna only have bottled water and jugs of water. You can have water delivered by infinite huge things or you can have a system.
There are a lot of solutions to that same problem.
Or just deal with the water and is what it is and you don't have a filter or anything but that, that is something there. And to that point I also spent time going door to door offering free free water tests to help people understand the problem could be solved because you could show this is what it is. Oh, here's some solution options. That kind of stuff. So that helps as an analogy. Didn't mean to.
[00:27:17] Speaker B: No, that's perfect. I was thinking of the same kind of thing, like a day to day task that everybody knows is worth solving for and that we can solve for in a lot of different ways. There's all sorts of examples. And that's a great one.
[00:27:30] Speaker A: Which it is like not to stay on that for too long. But there were always parts of that too where people would be like, oh, wait, you mean that my glasses come out of the dishwasher a little cloudy, like, that's solvable. I didn't know that. Like, I knew it kind of like tasted funny or my, my shirts would come out of the wash a little stained, a little orange from rust or, you know, whatever. But like, there were things that even knowing the problem, there were parts of it that they didn't also didn't know that could be solved. So, yes, going back to the market thing, we'll stop talking about water.
I do think the market maturity 100% matters. I think it.
There's.
I remember talking over the years a lot about.
I would just talk about like, connecting the dots on like, emerging markets. So, like, there were a lot of things that if your solution was new or what you're trying to do is new, the point was connect the dots to like either the problem more than the solution, which is the obvious part, or a sort of a similar parallel thing that's there. It's like, you know, kind of like the, you know, Uber for X kind of thing or whatever. We're like, I'm gonna take this thing, you know, and I'm gonna, you know, connect it to something that, that you now can kind of understand that or whatever. So I think that's there, but shifting a little bit into like, I guess what we recommend instead, which we wrote down, like, kind of like diagnosing the market first and figuring out kind of where it's at and how to approach and all that is kind of the recommendation that we had.
Yeah.
[00:29:13] Speaker B: And all this gets into product market fit and how you assess where, where to go first to. Right. Like, one product might serve multiple jobs to be done. And so then you have a prioritization layer on top of this. I'm building content for X or Y. And so this is not easy.
This is pretty complicated. And I think making really smart decisions about this is ultimately what marketers are trying to do.
The executing the content has become a well documented process. Now, these kinds of decisions are still tricky.
And some of what we've already covered in terms of things like analyzing these particular moments, particular vocabulary, that kind of research will go a long way.
[00:30:00] Speaker C: Yeah, we talked about too, like, it's, it's the concept of just like meeting that. Meeting people where they're at to some extent.
[00:30:06] Speaker A: Right.
[00:30:06] Speaker C: Like we talked about when we were discussing this previously, just around like researching where you know where your audience is at as a part of it, but also just like that informs what they're looking for and the problems they're solving.
[00:30:19] Speaker A: And just.
[00:30:20] Speaker C: And you can go a bunch of different ways with it. But ultimately like that's how you, I think, get as aligned as possible is just like you're meeting them at where they're at in their journey or their day to day or their pain points and all that. So. Versus like broadly educating on subjects that you know are important to your industry or your product just because you want to build the authority which is like serves a purpose, but like that isn't actually necessarily being super aligned with the person that you're talking about as having a job to be done.
[00:30:49] Speaker B: Yeah. You end up talking about your ICP instead of to your icp.
[00:30:53] Speaker C: Great way to put it.
[00:30:54] Speaker A: Is the absolutely
[00:30:58] Speaker C: great way to put it.
[00:31:00] Speaker B: Yeah. And that to the SEO point from earlier, that worked for a long time. Right. And I. Yeah. Not sad to see it go. No, I think that building. We're building better content or at least that's the, the hope.
[00:31:12] Speaker A: Yep. Yeah. Greed. I think you just made me remember early in consulting was working with someone who like on the finance side had essentially a service to help founders.
I'm gonna help you like prepare for a fundraise, essentially.
And he wanted to create more content, but he was like, I don't want to write any of that 101 crap.
Yeah. I was like, I was like, you know a lot about finance, but what you're trying to help people with, you're like, you're trying to find, they're trying to self educate because they got to figure out how to put together all the financials for a fundraise.
You can explain that and show them, like, let me do it for you.
That's where your expertise comes through. But if you want to go talk about super advanced concepts, that's not, you know, you're not meeting your audience where they're at.
[00:32:14] Speaker C: Right.
[00:32:14] Speaker B: Those people don't need the help.
[00:32:16] Speaker A: Correct. Right. Yeah. They're like, I already have a CFO or whatever. And so.
Yeah, so that always stood out to me too on that, like meeting people where they're at is like, in that case, it's not one on one crap. It's just that's who you're trying to attract is people that have little or no knowledge of the space. And that's what you're trying to help them is go from zero to one.
But in a case of the bidirectional sync that we talked about, that is not standing up marketing ops or something like Super 101 at that point, that's a more advanced, very nuanced thing. And then obviously we talked earlier about developers looking for very specific solutions and that kind of stuff too. Yeah, I think there's a lot there. But yeah, I guess just to run through them again real quick. Like the challenge that we saw, ICP gets reduced to demographics. Our recommendation is use jobs to be done. Focus there.
Most ICP research isn't real research. You start by listening to sales calls, talking to customers.
Nobody really explains what alignment means in practice. And we're saying one of the tips was, you know, ask for plain English analogies and then what are the words that would kind of give it away?
And then content strategy that isn't like taking account the market maturity. And so that's where we're kind of talking about like diagnose where you're at, where your product's at in the market, what the maturity of the market, kind of who they're buying, the product, market fit kind of all that stuff.
So all those we feel, are steps that help you get closer to what you're ultimately trying to achieve and avoiding the situation of maybe saying ICP aligned content over and over and over without it meaning things. So anything else to add to that? Otherwise we'll wrap it up.
[00:34:14] Speaker C: I would say not totally dismiss the process of putting together Personas and stuff, but go further, still do those things, do the research, look at your data, look at your customer data. But then talk to the, talk to the people, listen to the calls and all that stuff. But like, I think there's still value in that like exercise of like trying to triangulate. But it's just, it's, it's just not as.
It's not as simple as just organizing the. The facts.
[00:34:41] Speaker B: Yeah. Framing it around the problem as opposed to around the demographics. It's like.
[00:34:50] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah.
[00:34:51] Speaker B: The way to where to do that.
[00:34:53] Speaker A: Yeah. Cool.
All right, we'll wrap it up.
Be sure to check out newsletter 10 speed IO, that is our substack where it posts monthly plus share the podcast episodes. That's easy way to get those when they come out. And any other podcast listening platforms, be sure to like subscribe. Thank you, Ryan for time and conversation and hopefully we'll have less meaningless ICP aligned content and things that are truly at least a few steps closer to accomplishing it. Yeah.
[00:35:27] Speaker B: Nice.
[00:35:27] Speaker A: Cool. Thanks. Thank you.
