Get to Know Your Customers With HubSpot’s [Free] Make My Persona Tool

What is the single most important element of your digital marketing campaign? No, it’s not your budget, nor the channels you choose. Yep, you guessed it – it’s your customers. Creating insightful personas helps you delve deep inside your customer’s psyche – getting to grips with their needs, desires, wants, motivations and behaviors.

HubSpot's free tool helps digital marketers create well-defined and fully-fleshed-out personas. We take you through the Make My Persona tool in a step-by-step process (although its super intuitive to use anyway) and provide some additional tips on how to gather and use your newly formed personas to power insight-driven campaigns.

Oh and don’t miss out on HubSpot’s EMEA Content Strategist, Lisa Toner’s advice on how to use your personas for your own digital marketing success.

What Do Personas Matter So Much Anyway?

Gaining a clear understanding of what makes your customers tick and click is an essential component of any digital marketing campaign. Personas can significantly enhance your digital marketing tactics by:

• Allowing you to keep focused on your audience’s needs and wants.
• Enriching the emotional impact of your content and campaign creative.
• Informing your overall digital marketing strategy and digital channel selection.
• Enabling you to create a superior user experience for your website design, navigation and copy.
• Helping you to personalize and tailor your content and email campaigns.
• Enabling you to look at (and solve) problems from your audience’s perspective.

How to Gather Persona Information:

• Interview your customers and brand advocates to gain an insight into why they love your product.
• Use surveys to discover the key challenges your customers face in their day-to-day lives.
• Derive demographic and behavioural information from Google Analytics and social media insights.
• Ask your sales team for feedback on what gets their favourite customers excited and makes them frustrated.
• HubSpot has created this handy guide on how to ‘Create Buyer Personas for Your Business’ - well worth a download.

How to Use HubSpot’s Make My Persona Tool:

HubSpot’s Make My Persona tool allows you to quickly and easily fill out a ready-made question template. Upon completion you’ll receive a visually appealing Word Doc displaying the key characteristics of your target persona, sent straight to your inbox.

Step 1 – Name It

Give your persona a unique name that resonates with your target audience.

Step 2 – Picture It

Choose a fitting picture for your persona that matches your persona’s demographics and energy.

Step 3 – Answer It

Answer a series of insightful questions that include everything from your persona’s job and interests to their motivations and key day-to-day challenges.

Step 4 – Download It

Step 5 – Get It

How You Can Use Your Personas:

Lisa Toner, EMEA Content Strategist at HubSpot says, “Researching and developing your buyer personas is like gathering the ingredients for your favorite meal; if you don’t put in the work to actually cook the meal, you’re still going to be hungry.” Here’s Lisa’s advice:

Content Strategy

“Once you have identified whom your buyer personas are, you can’t stop there. Your business will only see the benefits once you implement them into your marketing strategy. You need to look at your content strategy and ensure that the messaging in every asset you create resonates with that persona’s needs and challenges as well as where they are at in the buying cycle.”

Introduce Your Personas to Your Organisation

“You also need to introduce your personas to the entire organisation so that everyone from sales to customer support understands the needs and challenges your customers face in order to serve them better.”

Revisit Regularly

“It’s important to remember that the goal of creating buyer personas is to help us create marketing that attracts the right people to our business and turn them into happy and loyal customers. Therefore, it should not be viewed as a tactic or something on your to-do list, but an ongoing strategy that your business adopts to ensure its growth and long-term success.”

Lisa offers more great tips on how to use your newly created personas in her blog post, ‘How to Quickly & Easily Create a Buyer Persona [Free Tool].’

Additional Tips for Using Personas:

• Form your digital marketing plan/strategy based on the needs and desires of your personas.
• Use your persona insights when creating campaign concepts/ideas and taglines.
• Consult your personas when crafting your content calendar and before creating each post.
• Take your personas with you into brainstorming meetings and ask yourself what would Jane (insert name of your persona) do or need in this situation?
• Introduce them to your sales team to help them understand who they are selling to and what they need to hear.
• Segment buyer personas and tailor your emails with a relevant message that appeals to their interests.
• Pin your freshly crafted HubSpot personas to your office wall to remind you of whom you are marketing to.

So there you have it – a shiny new (and free) tool that creates your persona template and questions for you. No more scratching your head trying to think of what to ask and how to display your information. No more excuses for not having every element of your digital marketing strategy targeted towards the needs, wants and desires of your ideal target audience. Happy creating!

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