As 2023 comes to a close, we’ve got a fun puzzle to solve for 2024 planning at Mosaic — ICP expansion.

After years of being able to zero in on B2B SaaS with 99% of our content, it’s time to broaden our horizons. And I’ve realized something about content strategy amid these discussions:

If your audience is changing (even in a small way) and you think your content strategy doesn’t have to, you’ve gone wrong somewhere.

Either your existing content strategy is too generic. 

Or, you aren’t thinking about the new audience on a deep enough level.

Your overarching content strategy should encompass any and all audiences your business targets. But within that strategy, there should be subsets of plans to address different segments of the broader audience. Those subsets will look similar because they share core goals and beliefs from the overarching strategy.

But as you build out a plan to create content for a specific ICP, you have to do your homework. 

Here’s how I’m approaching my ICP expansion homework as we plan to broaden our content strategy in 2024.

• Figure out who we’re targeting. I don’t mean by creating some fluffy, theoretical marketing persona. I mean connecting with right-fit prospects, studying their activity on social platforms, talking to them about their software needs, and making inferences about the broader market.

• Outline their pain points. I like my content topic buckets to tie back to customer/audience pain points. What are the core challenges that this target audience deals with on a day-to-day basis? Put yourself entirely in their shoes — don’t think about your product yet.

• Tie pain points to product capabilities. What does the Venn diagram of audience pain points and product features look like? The things that sit in the overlap should make up our set of content topical pillars.

• Determine the best places to get in front of this audience. What are our current distribution channels and how do they align with the new audience’s behavior? Do we need to add a new channel? Can we create segments in our existing channels?

That’s how I’m thinking about getting to know my new ICP. And I’ll be working with everyone from our product marketer to executive leadership and sales to get it all right. 

What am I missing? How would you set a foundation for a content strategy that targets a new ICP?

— Joe Michalowski

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