What’s it like to crank out branding collateral without defining your audience? It’s a bit like Eliza Doolittle in My Fair Lady. In this story, a flower girl from the streets of London is taught to speak with flawless grammar and upper-crust pronunciation. But when she opens her mouth, her message still doesn’t land with the high society. Her words are technically correct – poetic even – but the room doesn’t respond because what she says is still unmistakably working-class.
That’s what happens when tech firms try to speak without an ideal customer profile in mind. They don’t know who they’re actually talking to. You can dress your messaging up in all the right language, but if it’s not tuned to the right prospects, it won’t connect. Language goes beyond elegance. It’s more about context and knowing your intended audience.
Ideal customer profile: Tech firms’ eternal headache
Most developers start out thinking their app will work like a vending machine. Customers will push a few buttons and out will come a seamless result. No jams, no complaints, and no angry users kicking the machine. Customers wish it were that simple. So do the tech marketers. Sometimes, the more you learn about software, the less sure you are of what you’re solving and for whom. In post-production, it can hum along like Sunday traffic until one bug causes a jam for everyone. In some cases, the vending machine developers hoped to build starts looking more like a slot machine where users aren’t sure what’ll come out, if anything at all.
Software isn’t a jar of pickles you can slap a tidy label on; it’s an intangible, evolving service shaped by complex user behaviors like unpredictable usage patterns, diverse skill levels, and varying goals. Then there are the unpredictable variables such as changing device types, network conditions, and third-party integrations. That’s why understanding your ideal customer profile and their needs is often – forgive me for the cliché – a moving target.
Dear tech firms: Your intended audience isn’t “everyone”
When it comes to selling intangibles, product creators like tech leaders often lack a target market for their software. Not every product or service appeals to everyone and you won’t attract everyone. Create a detailed buyer profile – also known as a customer avatar – to clearly define who your ideal audience is. When promoting your offering, focus all your efforts on reaching and engaging that specific group.
Organizations that put the customer at the center of everything they do – their leadership, strategy, and operations – outperform by a factor of up to 2.5. Forrester calls it customer obsession. And yet, almost 60% of tech firms are stuck at the “traditional” level with a focus that’s rigid, service driven, and standardized with little input from customers or other stakeholders.
Great product, wrong crowd
A startup I learned about during my MBA had built a brilliant workflow tool but spent months targeting HR, then sales, then ops. The product never changed. Just their best guess at who’d actually need it. That’s a software struggle in its purest form. Speed dating in the dark feels like the best way to describe it; you just hope someone eventually swipes right. Unlike packaged products, software often solves intangible problems like efficiency, automation, and user experience. It’s more challenging to identify who needs it and why. For this reason, software vendors find it harder than other companies to know their customers.
When you’re selling something even you can’t pin down
Because software’s value isn’t always tangible or instant it can feel like selling air. The real perks sneak up over time, as users figure out how to fit it into their workflows. For example, a team buys project management software, but it’s only after a few months of customizing dashboards and automating task flows that they realize it’s cut their status meetings in half. The slow-burn payoff makes it tricky to pinpoint who truly needs it and why, forcing vendors to dig deeper to define their intended audience. Plus, no software out there solves 100% of a user’s problems – think closer to 70%, with the rest left to duct tape (and a bit of good luck). Software vendors often have to play detective on their customer’s evolving needs.
Marketing for tech: Abstract value proposition
Here’s why tech firms find it hard to define their ideal customer profile:
Multiple stakeholders
Any product marketer and sales person will tell you that a software “customer” is rarely just one person. According to Gartner, “An average of 11 individual stakeholders are involved in a B2B purchase; that number can occasionally flex up to nearly 20.”
The challenge lies in managing group dysfunction among a diverse set of people. There’s the user who needs it to work, the buyer who controls the budget, the influencer/consultant from IT or legal with opinions, and the gatekeeper in procurement. Each has their own priorities and it’s hard to account for all of them. A bit like pitching to everyone with no one catching the ball. That’s the juggling act at the heart of marketing for tech. The trick is knowing who really matters in each deal.
Wide use cases
A single product can veer off in too many directions. A single tool might work for HR, ops, and customer success across different industries but that doesn’t mean your branding collateral should. Broad utility creates decision paralysis. Who do you speak to first? If you try targeting everyone at once, you’ll end up with vague, forgettable copy. This is why you must know your customers before writing your branding collateral. Choose one entry point. Speak clearly. Customize as you go. Expand later.
Frequent product evolution
You built your tool for ops teams; next month, new features make it a fit for sales. That’s great for innovation but it’s brutal for marketing. That’s because software release frequency has sped up significantly with Agile practices. In the past, updates came every 6 to 18 months. The rise of continuous integration and delivery and cloud tools enabled weekly or even daily releases. Now, many teams aim for near real-time updates using automation and AI.
I worked for an AI startup that built sensor tech for everything from pools to zoos. Eventually, only one use case stuck which was a big-name retail chain. It took traction and one major client to finally lock in their ideal customer profile. When the product keeps evolving, your ideal customer profile does too. Unless you keep pace, your efforts go stale. What worked six weeks ago might miss the mark now.
Trial users ≠ paying customers
Freemium and trial models lure a ton of users, but most won’t pay up. It’s easy to get fooled by flashy user numbers that don’t convert into revenue. It’s wrong to call these users clients, they’re only prospects at this stage. If you don’t separate the browsers from the buyers, your marketing ends up chasing phantoms. Focus on who’s actually opening their wallet – that’s the only group that matters when you’re defining your intended audience.
Data abundance, insight scarcity
Tech firms swim in data. Today, 64% of organizations handle at least one petabyte of data, while 41% have over 500 petabytes, findings of the AI & Information Management Report from data management and data governance company AvePoint have shown. What’s more an average company pulls data from no less than 400 sources. But it’s hard to tell what data is important. As enterprises continue to gather data, it becomes more and more challenging for their teams to understand what they have, how it equates to risk, and even to derive value from it. They get all these user stats, clicks, and downloads, but often none of it reveals who’s paying or why. Without a way to filter the fluff, you won’t sketch your ideal customer profile. The real win when you’re marketing for tech is spotting the signals that matter. These signals are prospects who are opening their wallets. Otherwise, you’re just guessing who your intended audience is.
Know your customers. Actually know them.
How do brands attract their customers? For tech firms it starts with defining their ideal customer profile first. It usually happens at several key stages, but the most crucial moments are during product development and the go-to-market phases.
During product development, understanding who the customers are helps shape the features, design, and overall user experience – ensuring the product isn’t a generic solution but solves real problems for an intended audience. Then, during the go-to-market phase, defining the customer becomes essential for crafting targeted marketing messages, sales strategies, and customer support approaches. This is when the company sharpens its focus on who to reach, how to communicate value, and where to invest resources to gain traction.
Here’s how product developers and marketers can define – or define better – their customers for sharper products and brand collateral that actually works.
Start with the problem
Take a step back and describe in plain words what your software actually solves. Are you cutting busywork? Replacing manual spreadsheets? Reducing risk? Now flip the question: who’s losing time, money, or credibility because of this problem? Find these people. Interview the loyal fans, the ones who ghosted you, and even the ones who churned. Patterns will start to show and that’s where customer clarity begins.
Job titles are a start, but real insight lives in the messy, human problems people face every day. What tasks slow them down? What gets them searching for a tool like yours? Who logs in first? Who complains the most? Their behavior tells you what matters and what doesn’t. That’s how you build proto-personas based on truth, not assumptions.
Add business context
Now layer in the firmographic data: industry, company size, tech stack, region, and budget. These give you the commercial backdrop for each customer segment. Are they a 50-person SaaS startup or a 5,000-person enterprise? Are they Series A or post-IPO? Their context shapes what pain they feel most and how urgent it is to solve.
Map the purchasing decision
Making a purchasing decision is rarely a solo act. Who signs off? Who influences? Who implements? The CTO needs the numbers, the ops lead is looking for simplicity, and the team on the ground just wants the tool not to suck. Your messaging should show each of them you understand their angle and what you’re solving.
Understand triggers
What kicked off their buying journey? A security scare? Rapid growth? New leadership? Knowing whether they’re buying proactively or reactively changes everything. It tells you whether to speak to ambition or damage control. This knowledge will help you time your brand collateral with precision and – that timing is where marketing for tech often wins or fails.
Track how they buy
Where do they go when researching tools? G2? Reddit? Slack groups? How long do they linger in the funnel? Do they want a trial or a slick demo? Understand how they make their purchasing decision so you can show up where it matters with content that builds trust, not noise. Think case studies, explainer videos, technical deep dives.
Define what success looks like
What’s their version of a win? Hitting KPIs? Impressing a boss? Automating a process they’ve always hated? You’re selling software but you’re also helping them look good, save face, or win back time. Your messaging should tap into that, and speak directly to what makes them feel like they made the right call.
Been there, wrote that: Insights from the front lines
These tech firms initially struggled to define who their real customers were—but ultimately succeeded by evolving their product positioning and marketing strategy as their business matured.
- Slack began as a gaming company but pivoted when its internal communication tool resonated more with corporate teams. They shifted focus to businesses wanting better team collaboration.
- Dropbox started targeting tech-savvy users but expanded to non-technical consumers and businesses by rethinking messaging and customer profiles.
- YouTube began as a dating site, struggled to gain traction, then pivoted to general video sharing, ultimately redefining its audience and thriving.
Conclusion: Defining your ideal customer profile is non-negotiable
Defining your customer is the foundation for all marketing exercises you design. Without it, even your best branding collateral will miss the mark, like Eliza Doolittle speaking the right words to the wrong crowd.
How do brands attract customers? First, they understand them.
Marketing for tech comes with its own set of curveballs: abstract value, shifting features, diverse users, and data overload. But clarity isn’t out of reach. Start by grounding your brand collateral in real problems, real people, and real context. Narrow your focus before you broaden it. Companies like Slack, Dropbox, and YouTube didn’t succeed because they guessed right from day one. They paid attention, adjusted, and found the people who truly needed them.
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