Create Buyer Personas – the HubSpot Way

Buyer personas are not just another marketing buzzword. Personas are the heart and soul of inbound marketing.

In fact, 3 to 4 buyer personas account for more than 90% of a company’s sales.

As marketers, you know the ABCs of your products, services, competitors, and you probably have a decent understanding of your customers’ basic data but for new-age marketing that’s just not enough.

When it comes to creating targeted inbound marketing that works left, right, and center, you have to dig deeper. This is where buyer personas come in.

In this article, we’ll discuss how you can create personas in HubSpot to improve your conversion rates in a dramatic way. Let’s begin.

What are buyer personas?

According to HubSpot, the buyer persona you create is a semi-fictional representation of your ‘ideal’ customer that is based on market research and the data of your existing customers.

How can buyer personas be used in marketing?

Buyer personas help you understand what kind of content makes your customer tick and click. Here’s how personas can guide the flow of all your inbound efforts:

• They help your marketing team personalize campaigns for different segments of your target audience.
• They back your sales team to build a strong rapport with potential customers.
• They assist your customer support teams to serve your customers better.

How can you create buyer personas?

To create personas, you have to find the answers to who they are, what they want, why they want certain things, and how you can craft the right message to reach them. Here’s how:

1. Know the ‘who’: To get personas right, you need to know your target audience like the back of your hand. Ask yourself, “Who are my ideal customers?”. Conduct a mix of research, surveys, and interviews with your existing customers, prospects, and employees in your organization who interact with customers regularly.

Find answers to your persona’s basic demographic information like:

• what is their age?
• what is their educational background?
• what is their job title, role, etc?

You must consider a negative persona too to sort the weak leads out of your way. These could be buyers who:

• are difficult to get to
• belong to an irrelevant industry
• are expensive to support

This way your focus will be narrowed down on the right leads.

2. Understand the ‘what’: To build a solid persona, you need to ask questions like:

• what tools do they use to do their job?
• what are their business goals?
• how do they prioritize their goals?
• what challenges are they facing?
• what solutions do they need for their challenges?
• how can you help them achieve those goals?

Once you have insights about who they are and what they want, you can determine the gaps in their processes and provide a solution to fill those gaps.

3. Delve into the ‘why’: To uncover more about your customers, understand what drives their goals, motivations, behaviors, values, and challenges. Find answers to questions like:

• why are some specific goals important to them?
• what are their deeper motivations?
• what results do they expect to achieve by choosing your solution?
• what were some other solutions that they considered for their problem?
• what objections they might have about your product or services?

Share these insights with your sales team so that they can answer any potential objections a customer might have and showcase how your solution can address and resolve their challenges and add value to their business.

4. Unravel ‘how’ to craft the right message: When you understand your customer’s needs and wants, you can craft effective and targeted messaging that speaks directly to those personas. Additionally, you need to know what type of content they enjoy consuming – videos, podcasts, infographics?

Couple these insights with your services or products and you’ll have a solid foundation to create content for every stage of their journey.

To promote your content the right way, you can ask questions like:

• what social media platforms do they spend their time on?
• what is their preferred channel of communication?

This ensures that your content copy reaches your audience across the channels where they spend most of their time.
Now that you know the basics about creating personas, let’s get into how you can create them in your HubSpot account.

HubSpot’s got all kinds of cool stuff up its sleeve, one of which is its buyer persona template that allows you to make personas easily. If you are a newbie, you can use HubSpot’s persona generator to create a basic buyer persona profile. It won’t be as in-depth but is a good starting point.

Let’s understand how you can kickstart your persona journey in HubSpot.

How can you create buyer personas in HubSpot?

You can create personas in your HubSpot account to target and categorize your contacts. Here’s how you can create a new persona or edit an existing one:

• Go to your HubSpot account, click the settings icon.

• Hover on Properties and enter Persona.
• Click on the Persona property. You can also edit the property if you want.
• To edit a persona, click on Edit and if you want to create a new persona, select Add another persona.

• Enter all the necessary information into the fields about your persona. When you’re done, just click Save and voila! You’re done.

Here’s how you can delete a persona:

• In your HubSpot account, select the settings and navigate to Properties.

• Enter Persona in the Search for a property field.
• Select the Persona property.
• To delete, click on Delete.
• If any of your existing contacts are assigned the particular persona you wish to delete, then Choose a persona from the drop-down menu to select another persona for these contacts.
• Click on Update contacts and then delete the persona.

• If there are no existing contacts, simply click on Delete persona.

Follow these steps, to create awesome personas and deliver exceptional experiences to your buyers.
Buyer personas are your holy grail to gain a competitive edge by understanding your customers better. Be sure to refine them on a regular basis to make sure they fit your ever-evolving customers. If you wish to hit the persona ball out the park, HubSpot is the way to go!

Need help getting started with buyer personas in your HubSpot? Fret not, feel free to drop us a line at [email protected], and we’ll take it from there!