In today’s marketing world, personalized marketing has quickly become the gold standard. Studies show that 81% of consumers are looking for brands that understand them and know when and how to approach them.
This means a one-size-fits-all marketing strategy no longer works – which is where buyer personas come into play.
If you’re like the 44% of marketers using buyer personas, you’ve followed the steps to put them together, only for you to hang them on the fridge (metaphorically speaking) and never think about them again.
Contrary to the bad habits most marketers fall into, buyer personas are more than just a one-time exercise. That’s why today, we’re breaking down how to create buyer personas in HubSpot – and actually put them to use – to help you generate leads and covert more customers.
Creating a Buyer Persona in HubSpot
The HubSpot buyer persona tool is all about helping you deliver the right message to the right person at the right time.
First, let’s take a closer look at how to create your personas in HubSpot:
- Navigate to the HubSpot buyer persona tool. (You can find this in either your “Top Personas” dashboard block or by navigating to Settings > Properties > and then typing “persona” into the “Search for a Property” bar.)
- Click “Add a Persona.”
- Give your persona a name and description.
- Fill out any internal notes about their roles, goals and challenges.
- Write their story. (This helps give a little context and life to this person you’ll be spending a lot of time creating marketing strategies for.)
- Click “Save.”
Once you’ve created your HubSpot buyer personas, let’s walk through how to put them to use in your CRM.
How to Use Your Buyer Personas in HubSpot
HubSpot provides the tools and resources that help you use your personas to determine where to focus your time, guide product development and allow for alignment across the organization.
To help get your wheels turning, we’re sharing some of our favorite ways to use buyer personas in HubSpot to drive results:
- Connect Forms to Buyer Personas: With HubSpot’s forms tool, you can create questions that will help you get to know your buyer personas better. For example, asking “What challenges do you face today?” will help you to narrow down your customer pain points so you can nail your messaging. You can also associate form responses to a specific buyer persona. Let’s say your contact form includes a drop-down that asks, “What industry do you work in?” You can set up your forms in a way that assigns leads to each buyer persona, depending on the chosen answer.
- Segment Email Lists: Once you associate your contacts to a specific HubSpot buyer personas, you can segment your contacts by creating lists. These lists then allows you to create very specific email campaigns targeting a specific audience.
- Create Content Targeting Each Persona: Buyer personas give you an enhanced knowledge of what your ideal customers like and respond to, as well as what they struggle with. Using those insights, you can create, for example, a targeted eBook that solves a common problem – or answers a common question – that a particular persona has. And if you’ve segmented your contacts list by buyer persona, guess what? You can easily share that eBook with just the group of contacts who you know will be interested in it.
- Create Buyer Persona-Specific Marketing Campaigns: Once you’ve created persona centric blogs, emails, workflows, lists and forms, you can then run unique marketing campaigns targeting each segment of your target audience. Simply navigate to the Campaigns tab in HubSpot (under the marketing menu), click create campaign, add your campaign assets and you’re off.
Keep Tabs on Their Activity
HubSpot gives you all the data you need to make sure your marketing efforts are doing their job. The platform works out what percentage of your contacts fit into each persona, so you can differentiate your bigger groups from your smaller to help prioritize your marketing efforts. For example, you might choose to focus most of your marketing efforts on your largest persona, then create some quick-win strategies to cater to your smaller personas. Once you’ve decided your plan of action, you can start monitoring the activity.
So, how can you tell which campaigns are successes, and which need some refining?
To give you an example, here’s a look at a standard buyer persona we built for a recruiting services company, “CHRO Helen”:
Let’s say your portal shows you that CHRO Helen leads are engaging with your different channels like this:
After a while, you realize that some things you’re doing are consistently not working for your persona. For example, your CHRO Helen persona is only opening your links through email, but you’ve got it written in your persona that this contact is typically LinkedIn obsessed. That means you’ve got a problem.
But don’t worry. Thanks to these campaign tracking tools in HubSpot, you’re armed with loads of data so you can easily define these patterns and draw the right conclusions. This insight not only allows you to tweak your future content, but voilà – you can also revisit your persona and update their story so that they are now more accurate for everyone across your business.
Getting Started
Personas are a long-term project and for some people, a frustrating one as keeping up with your audiences’ ever-changing needs and challenges can feel like a full-time job. But regularly putting them to use, checking how each is getting along in your portal and updating them as needed will help you to successfully generate higher-quality leads and convert them into customers.
Interested in getting more out of your buyer personas in HubSpot? Our team of marketing experts can help! Contact us today to get started.
