Are you attracting customers or just collecting contacts?

By Danny Shepherd, CEO of Intero Digital

Let’s call out the elephant in the martech stack: We’ve become hoarders. Not of knick-knacks or Beanie Babies (though, respect), but of leads. Namely, the wrong ones.

Dun & Bradstreet says that lead contact data’s accuracy erodes by 2.5% each month, which pencils out to about 30% per year.

So that dusty CRM of yours? It’s not a goldmine. It’s a digital junk drawer stuffed with contacts that ghosted your drip campaign after the second email.

In the age of bloated email lists and scattershot targeting, many marketers are still stuck in a “more is more” mindset. But more isn’t better if you’re wasting budget nurturing leads that were never a fit in the first place.

It’s time to stop trying to speak to everyone and start speaking directly to your ideal customer persona (ICP): the people who actually want to convert.

The Fallout of Quantity-First Marketing

Marketers have fallen into the trap of chasing metrics that look impressive but don’t move the needle. At the end of the day only one thing matters: How many leads did you actually convert into new customers?

Big subscriber lists, sky-high impressions, and surface-level engagement might boost dashboards, but they rarely translate to real business impact on their own. Behind the scenes, this obsession leads to misaligned strategies, frustrated sales teams, and wasted spend on platforms where your ideal customer hasn’t shown up in years.

It’s a cycle of activity without traction, and it’s costing more than just budget.

When brands chase the wrong leads, it erodes credibility. Every misaligned message chips away at trust, and once trust is gone, even your best pitch becomes background noise.

Laser Focus Beats Loud Noise: The ICP Advantage

Building a strategy around your ICP isn’t just best practice; it’s survival in a saturated market.

Your ICP isn’t just your “target audience” in a demographic sense. It’s a behavioral and psychographic profile of the customers who:

• Have a specific pain point you solve better than anyone else.
• Are ready (not just willing) to buy and can afford to do so.
• Will stick around long enough to impact your customer lifetime value.

An ICP-driven strategy helps you create marketing that’s not only personalized, but also relevant. And in 2025, relevance is the new currency.

Case in point? MrBeast Feastables.

MrBeast didn’t chase “snackers” for its candy bar brand. It laser-targeted YouTube superfans and digital-native Gen Zers with its chaotic energy, its YouTube collabs, and its emphasis on organic ingredients and ethically sourced coca.

The result?

Presence in several big-name retailers, including Walmart and Target, and $251 million in sales in 2024 alone.

How to Attract (and Keep) the Right Customers

Now, let’s talk execution. Here’s how smart brands are shifting from the “catch all” chaos to ICP-first clarity:

1. Go beyond surface-level personas.

Basic buyer personas are fine if you’re selling toothpaste. But for most of us? You need more than “CMO, midsize SaaS, likes dogs.”

Dig deeper. Use zero-party data (what people give you) and behavioral intel (what they do) to map out real motivations, friction points, and objections.

Look at your historical data to determine what attributes your best customers have. Who is the main person that makes decisions for them? It could be someone at the C-suite level, a VP, a director, or someone in the organization that manages or uses what you sell. There can also be differences in location, business size, industry, employee count, customer income, education, time zone, or preference types. The list goes on and on. Every attribute that you can correlate to a good customer that doesn’t correlate to a customer that isn’t ideal is a big win.

Home in on this historical data to help build an ICP that will help you close sales faster and spend more time on leads that need and want what you’re selling.

2. Audit your messaging ruthlessly.

Ask yourself, “Would this campaign stop my ICP mid-scroll?” If not, rewrite it. A hundred times if you have to.

Instead of vague promises like “revolutionize your workflow,” speak to specific pain. Are they drowning in reporting dashboards? Losing sleep over retention? Say that. Be blunt, be clear, and for the love of brand equity, be relevant.

Remember when Liquid Death made water punk-rock? That was ICP alignment. It didn’t target health-conscious Millennials. It targeted misfits who want to be healthier but still feel cool doing it. That specificity in its messaging made Liquid Death a $1.4 billion brand.

3. Show up where they actually are.

If your best leads are in niche Discord servers and you’re still pumping dollars into Facebook Ads, we need to talk.

Use tools like SparkToro or even just a little social listening to figure out where your ICP actually spends time, and shift your spend accordingly. It’s not about being everywhere; it’s about being unmissable in the right places.

In 2025, demand creation is what wins. That means building brand affinity before someone fills out your form. If your ICP doesn’t know you, trust you, or like you yet, no lead magnet in the world will fix that.

The smartest brands in the game? They’re playing the long game by investing in content, community, and brand experiences that resonate deeply with the right people.

Don’t just collect contacts. Attract customers.

About the Author

Danny Shepherd, CEO of Intero Digital, has spent over 20 years driving innovation in performance marketing through cutting-edge technology and AI. He holds multiple patents for proprietary tools, including InteroBOT®, a search engine spider that has transformed how digital strategies are executed. Leading a team of more than 400 experts, he is focused on building the most future-forward digital marketing agency in the industry. He’s also passionate about mentoring visionary talent and uncovering new opportunities for growth.