What are Buyer Personas?
User or Buyer Personas are the various avatars that represent your customers or any other individuals who will be interacting with your product. By creating a well-defined user persona, you can determine what the important characteristics of your customers are and how they make their purchasing decisions. Buyer Personas are also helpful when developing a marketing campaign, focusing on bringing the right offer to the right customer.
Why are Buyer Personas important in Inbound Marketing?
With inbound marketing one of your goals is to attract visitors to your website with remarkable, authentic, and helpful content. But how do you know what kind of content to create? Buyer personas help identify what your visitors (and potential leads) are looking for, giving you the opportunity to tailor your content specifically to them.
Buyer personas are also useful for segmenting your database to drive tailored marketing to your different subsets (or personas). When you’ve identified and created strong buyer personas you can create specific messaging as well as specific content that will better meet the needs of your visitors.
How to Create a Buyer Persona
Creating your buyer personas should be one of the fun parts of your inbound marketing plan. This process provides the opportunity to really dig into the avatar of your ideal customer and imagine what their daily life is like.
A starting place for buyer personas is answering basic questions about your ideal customer.
- How old are they?
- What do they do for a living?
- Where do they live?
- Do they have children? Pets?
- Where do they go for information?
- What sources to they turn to for news?
- What are their daily pain points?
- What are their goals?
You might know some of these answers, but you might also need to reach out to your current users or clients to see what insight they can provide to you. This could be as simple as sending a brief survey to your email list, or scheduling short Skype calls to ask them questions and understand their needs.
HubSpot provides a number of amazing (and free!) resources that can help you create your buyer personas such as these 20 questions and this buyer persona template.
Integrating and Using Buyer Personas in HubSpot
Buyer personas (or avatars, user personas, ideal clients) are integral to any business and can be created as a Word document. Even the act of creating your buyer personas can help you figure out what your clients are looking for. If you use HubSpot, then the power of your buyer personas can be amplified through lists and segmentation. If you associate each new lead with a buyer persona based on how they entered your site (what form they filled out, for example) you’ll have an easy to use list that you can use with segmentation to market to that specific group. For the contacts you already have in your database you can easily go back and assign a buyer persona to each contact.
Buyer personas can be assigned to contacts in HubSpot using three different methods:
- Manually assign a personal to each contact
- Import a list and assign a buyer persona during the import process
- Create a workflow that assigns a buyer persona when a user meets specific criteria
