Why & How to Use HubSpot Buyer Personas

Buyer personas, ideal buyers, target customers — all of these words talk about pretty much the same thing. Your company's perfect customer. 

It doesn't matter if you're brand new to digital marketing or if you've been doing it for years, you've probably heard about buyer personas. 

Just about any marketing expert will tell you that your buyer personas are the first stop on your trip to a successful, targeted, and cost-effective marketing strategy. 

But, what about HubSpot buyer personas?

Are they different from regular buyer personas? Why should you use HubSpot's buyer personas over what you already have, and how do you even use them in the first place?

If you're new to HubSpot services, or if you're looking to get more out of your existing HubSpot platform, this blog is going to dive into the why and how of HubSpot buyer personas. Let's start with why you really should use them in the first place. 

Why Use HubSpot Buyer Personas?

It's good to know that HubSpot buyer personas are just your existing buyer personas, brought into the HubSpot CRM. Here's a little background on why you should care about them at all:

For your inbound marketing strategy

If I've said it once, I've said it a million times. And so has just about every other inbound marketing expert on the internet. 

Your buyer personas are the building blocks of your inbound marketing strategy. 

It's hard to create a targeted, successful inbound marketing strategy if you don't know who you're marketing to. 

Your buyer personas — semi-fictional representations of your ideal clients — give you the clarity and the focus you need to develop an inbound marketing strategy that draws in the right leads. That means you're only spending money on marketing efforts that produce legitimate, actionable results. Without buyer personas, you're spending a lot on a marketing strategy that may or may not deliver qualified leads. 

HubSpot buyer personas aren't any different than your regular buyer personas. They serve the same purpose of guiding your inbound marketing strategy to draw in the right, qualified leads.

New to buyer personas? Here's a Step-By-Step Guide to Defining Your Buyer Persona.

For more detailed, relevant data in your HubSpot platform

When it comes to using HubSpot buyer personas, the why is data. 

HubSpot buyer personas give you greater insight into how your marketing efforts are performing on a persona-by-persona basis. You can see which buyer personas respond best to your email campaigns, newsletters, specific landing pages, CTAs, and more. 

You can also create entire marketing campaigns around a specific HubSpot buyer persona. Let's say one of your buyer personas is Home Builder Bob. You can create nurturing email workflows, content offers, and more, and tie them all to that specific buyer persona in HubSpot. Using HubSpot buyer personas gives you better data, but it also makes marketing to your target buyer personas a lot easier. 

How to Use HubSpot Buyer Personas

Now that we've got a better idea of the point of HubSpot buyer personas, how do you use them? Let's take a quick look at how you can create your buyer personas in HubSpot, and then what you can do with them once they're created. 

Creating a HubSpot Buyer Persona

HubSpot has a handy tutorial on exactly how to create your HubSpot buyer personas. Check that out, or follow along in the step-by-step below: 

1. 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. 
2. Click "Add a Persona"
3. Give your persona a name and description
4. Fill out any internal notes about their roles, goals, and challenges
5. 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. 
6. Click "Save"

Once you've created your HubSpot buyer personas, you can use them to seriously streamline your marketing tactics within the CRM. 

If this is your first time building out buyer personas, HubSpot has an entire Make My Persona tool dedicated to helping you create excellent buyer personas.  

Using your new HubSpot Buyer Personas

There's a lot you can do with your HubSpot buyer personas. If you're familiar with HubSpot Properties, that's how your HubSpot buyer personas save. So, every contact can be associated with a specific buyer persona. That opens up a lot of possibilities for your marketing strategy. 

• Connect forms to buyer personas. You can associate certain form responses to a specific buyer persona. For example, 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 depending on what answer that lead chooses, they're automatically assigned a buyer person. 

• Create segmented email lists. Since your contacts are associated to specific HubSpot buyer personas, you can create lists of contacts that are segmented by those personas. This allows you to develop email campaigns that are hyper-specific to just that particular persona.

• Create buyer persona-specific marketing campaigns within HubSpot. You can create entire workflows and marketing campaigns that are tied to certain buyer personas within HubSpot. 

Once you have a handle on the HubSpot buyer persona tool, the possibilities are endless. Segment your data by buyer persona, develop highly-targeted email campaigns and workflows, and so much more. 

The Hubspot buyer persona tool is all about helping you deliver the right message to the right person at the right time. And it gives you all the data you need to make sure that's exactly what your marketing efforts are doing!

HubSpot is a robust platform that offers a vast range of tools and features that make your marketing process easier and more effective. All of those tools are helpful, but it can be tough to figure out what you're using and what you're not, especially when you're just starting on HubSpot.

If you'd like one-on-one support getting your HubSpot buyer personas (or any other HubSpot tool!) up and running, Evenbound is here to help. Talk to one of our Certified HubSpot Trainers for personalized support.