Persona Marketing is one of the pillars of Inbound strategy. Widely popularized by HubSpot, it allows you to increase the impact, consistency and effectiveness of your communications by forcing you to draw a semi-fictional psychological and demographic portrait of your ideal customer.
Although in theory, Persona Marketing is a "Must-Have" of any Marketing team, in practice, Personas are often put aside due to their complexity of creation and use.
HubSpot offers to segment our database via Personas, but it is still uncommon to see a company take advantage of this.
In this article we will see how to use HubSpot's "Personas" feature and how it can improve the performance of your marketing campaigns.
Summary
Today, we are not going to focus on how to define a Marketing Persona but how to implement your Personas research on your HubSpot portal.
The HubSpot website offers a free Persona creation tool “Make my Persona” translated into several languages.
This tool takes you step by step by asking you simple questions about your ideal client to help you design your Persona.
The questions are in no way precise enough to determine the psychological portrait of your ideal client and are, in my opinion, not sufficient, as they stand, to be used as an effective marketing tool.
The interest of “Make my Persona” lies in the fact that it will offer you an editing base that you can improve by adding relevant sections thus ensuring a pre-built visual model saving you creation time.
Once done, you can save and/or download your Persona.
As mentioned in the introduction, HubSpot has a “Persona” feature allowing you to segment your database according to psychological portraits common to your contacts.
This feature takes the form of a special “Drop-down menu” property.
By editing this property you will be able to add Personas to your HubSpot Portal by filling in the various fields asked by HubSpot.
As the HubSpot Persona is a property, you will be able to assign them to your different leads. Either manually after a prospecting call for example, or automatically through a workflow depending on the type of interaction your lead has with your content.
Now that you have defined and implemented your Personas on your HubSpot portal, we still have to see how to use them to improve our Marketing performance!
In terms of communication, personalization is king. Your sales email will have much more impact if it uses, for example, the same language than your prospect and responds directly to the objections that the latter will have depending on his situation.
Personas allow you to list this different information and assign a prospect to a particular psychological portrait.
The strength of HubSpot's Persona tool is to offer us this feature as a property. Thus we will be able to manage automations and segment our lists according to these personas.
The first use of personas is the easiest to set up. It will consist in proposing personalized Nurturing emails according to each Personas that we will send automatically using Workflows.
The idea is to create different nurturing paths for each of your personas in order to be able to develop the blocking points or the specific interests of these personas in your communications.
Through a simple If/Then branch using the “Persona” property, you can then automatically redirect your prospects to the communication most suited to your situation.
If you are already juggling a multitude of emails, you don't want to complicate your portal automations and you just want to make minor differences in your communications for each Persona (e.g. changing only one image or video), there is another method using Personas: smart rule emailing!
This HubSpot feature allows you to customize email modules based on HubSpot lists.
In other words, you can offer, for a single email, different content depending on whether a prospect belongs to a list.
As the Persona is a property, you only need to create one list per Persona with the following filter:
So you can use your personas as an email personalization smart rule.
To create a personalized module, go to the email you want to work on, choose a module, click on “More” -> “Add a smart rule”, choose the category “ Contact list membership”, add a rule and select the list relating to your Persona.
To modify the content of this module, click on it, and on the left window, choose the version you want to modify:
Thus, with each send, your email will automatically adapt its content to the Persona corresponding to the recipient.
If you want to develop your HubSpot knowledge and find all the workflows created and presented by HS Simple, do not hesitate to request your free access to the workflow box. A private web page listing all the workflows requested by the community with an explanatory video and a simple action plan in the form of a "to-do list".