30. What is a Buyer Persona?
Semi- fictional representations of your ideal
customer based on real data and some select
educated speculation about customer
demographics, behavior patterns, motivations,
and goals.
31. MARKETING MARY
• Professional marketer (VP, Director, Manager)
• Mid-sized company (25-200 employees)
• Small marketing team (1-5 people)
• BComm (BU), MBA (Babson)
• 42, Married, 2 Kids (10 and 6)
Goals:
• Support sales with collateral and leads
• Manage company communications
• Build awareness
Challenges:
Loves HubSpot because:
• Too much to do
• Easy to use tools that make her life
• Not sure how to get there easier
• Marketing tool and channel mess • Learn inbound marketing best practices
• Easier reporting to sales and CEO
This is our inbound marketing methodology. You can find it at the link below and it describes the hubspot approach to inbound marketing.A lot of companies think inbound marketing is just about putting out content to help try attract people to your siteThat’s part of it, but inbound marketing is really all about persona driven marketing, helping you engage with your dream customers in the channels their most comfortable with.It’s not just about generating traffic at the top of the funnel, it’s about generating that traffic, and creating a personalised experience through the funnel so they convert into leads, customers and then hopefully promoters for your brand.
So just how do your customers buy today
Most purchase decisions still start with a needDifference is, when we start with that need today, the first place we go is Google to do some research
Most purchase decisions still start with a needDifference is, when we start with that need today, the first place we go is Google to do some research
Once done some initial research, we might start reaching out to friends in our social networks. Asking for recommendations around brands
Once done some initial research, we might start reaching out to friends in our social networks. Asking for recommendations around brands
- It’s important to keep in mind, if your in B2B, these buyers like to educate themselves, through different content mediums. They contact sales a lot later in the buying processNeed to make sure you have lots of content in different formats to account for this
and after all that research, they convert. How they convert very much depends on how well you’ve structured your landing page to fulfill their needs.
Your buyers are in control of the whole buying cycleThey choose when and where to engage with your brands
We need to figure out how to be what Dave consumes, rather than interrupting what he consumes
- Tailored for the way your customers buy today
At hubspot we really believe that approaching marketing in this way helps to create marketing your prospects and customers will love because it’s mapped to their needs, goals and challenges, so it’s something that’s adding real value, rather than being something that pisses them off.Inbound Marketing consists of two key components and that’s content and context.
Let’s talk about content first.
When we talk about the content component, that’s really about creating marketing assets that you own and add real value to your business.We are going to go into a lot more detail on this later in the presentation. But it’s really important that you are creating lots of marketing assets in different formats that are helping to grow your audience, and turn you into a brand that people actually love and want to spend time with.
Think like a publisher for your audienceHow can you produce assets that will provide long term benefit in the form of traffic, leads and sales for your companyEffects how you plan budget, recruit, type of activities you doAm I going to spend that 20k on a Trade Show where I will sit at a booth waiting for people to visit me, maybe I will hire some booth babes to get people into my book so I can swipe their cards or am I going to spend it on developing an amazing marketing asset that people will actually want to use because it’s answering their needs.
The stats show that adding the right kind of content to your site and blog has a dramatic effect on the number of leads you generate. These stats are from a benchmark report we did on 7000 of our customers.http://offers.hubspot.com/marketing-benchmarks-from-7000-businesses
Context is really about personalizing the experience a person has with your brand based on the data we have about them. If you think about platforms like Amazon, Spotify or NetFlix, they use the data they have about you to help make recommendations on what products you probably want to buy.
Now we know what inbound marketing is and how Hubspot do inbound marketing, I want to discuss some of core super powers and good inbound marketer has.
At the heart of any successful inbound marketing strategy is a well thought out & understood buyer persona. A great inbound marketer should be able to figure out who their different buying personas are, what type of goals they have, their different pain points, what are their challenges so they can use this to better market to them.
The reason we create these buying personas is to really understand who we are creating content for, so we know what is going to attract them into our site. We also want to know why they will buy from us, so we can personalize each of our inbound marketing lifecycle stages around their needs.
So what is a buyer persona?I’ve talked a lot about buyer personas and how they are a crucial part of a successful inbound marketing strategy, so I just want to take a step back and think about what buyer personas really are.
This is how Buyer Personas are defined.Buyer personas are Semi- fictional representations of your ideal customer based on real data and select educated speculation about customer demographics, behavior patterns, motivations, and goals.What does that really mean? It’s a pretty wordy definition The best way to visualize what a buyer persona actually is, is by looking at what a real, live buyer persona actually looks like.
This is a real persona that Hubspot sell to. We call her Marketing Mary. We’ve made her as realistic as possible with information about her Job title, the type of company she works in, the size of her marketing team and information on her Goals and Challenges.We’ve also put down some information on why she would buy Hubspot. This is going to help us figure out how to attract Marketing Mary to our site and move her along in the funnel.So here are some important attributes of a buyer persona
Buyer personas encompass common behavioral patterns shared among your customers.
All the members of a certain buyer persona have shared pain points- These are the things that all members of this persona struggle with or obstacles they face
Buyer personas also encompass shared goals, wishes, and dreams of our customers.
We also want to include demographic and biographic information about our personas. One of the really important parts of a persona is painting a picture of who this person is. What their concerns are, what their day to day life is like. By doing this we start to get an idea of what this person's motives are, what their root interests are.
I want to stress that this isn’t just fluff! Your buyer personas are not only an essential component of your inbound marketing strategy,
Our inbound marketing strategy should be tailored for your buyer personas. This will allow us to:Create content these people actually want, because we know what they care about, their goals & challengesPersonas help us attract the RIGHT types of visitors, convert the right type of leads, and close those leads into customers at a higher rate because we’ve taken time to really understand who they are. We are not just targeting anyone, but we are targeting the people who are most likely to become successful, happy customers.
Ok, we’ve gone over why personas are a really important part of your inbound marketing strategy, now let’s go over some of the ways you can start to research and create your persona.The reality of persona modeling is, a lot of this is still going to be based on assumptions made around external data. There is no one data source that gives you a 100% accurate reflection of your different buyer personas. But knowing where to get some good external data, use your gut instinct as a marketer and keep on testing, will get you pretty far.
The first important part of this is obviously knowing what to ask. Understanding what information you are looking for is going to play a crucial role in getting an accurate picture of your different personas.
Here are typically some of the best questions to ask when doing persona research--If you can answer these questions, you’re probably ahead of 99% of the marketers out there and I guarantee your life will be easier.Things like, understanding your personas goals, what success looks like in their roles, what are their different Watering Holes, and what are some of their biggest challenges will really help you to start to tailor your inbound marketing strategy for the right sort of people.
The second part of this is knowing who to ask
Actually Interview your current customers! Set up meetings with them, phone interviews, whatever you need to—but actually sit down and have conversations with some of your current customers. Ask them some of these questions we just looked over!People love talking about themselves so this is actually a pretty easy option. If you can, actually go out and meet your customers face-to-face. We want to try and do this if we can, because we can actually get a lot more out of going there in person and seeing them. It lets us put a face to that name, you get to see their office and the environment they live their day-to-day life in, things like that.
Another way to get some great data on our different buyer personas is through researching our customers using things like surveys. So, for example, if we take the different persona questions we had in our previous slide, we can package these up into a survey and using something like surveymoney, and send out to our customers, it’s going to get us a lot of great data
Another way Hubspot gathers information on our different buyer personas is to use our own tool to look at the type of interactions each person has had with us. We create a timeline of a persons activity with Hubspot from the first conversion event until they become a customer. This let’s us understand how different personas find Hubspot, what type of content first attracted them to our site, what type of content really pushed them towards becoming a qualified lead and then onto a customer.Remember, personas are all about behaviors and any data that’s going to help us figure out those common behaviors for groups of people who belong to certain personas is going to really help us understand that persona
Another way we gather information on our different buyer personas is the types of questions we ask in the forms.The things you ask in these forms – questions like what is your company name? what is your role in the company? Are you a b2b or b2c? How BIG is your company? We can actually use peoples’ Reponses to these questions as data for our persona research!
The last technique is to Talk to Sales, actually, I would go one further and say the best persona brainstorm session will be a cross functional one with marketing, sales, and customer service (go into same speech as ICT Valley part).There some of the ways that you can start to research and create your own buying personas
The next thing a great inbound marketer does is create marketing assets for their target personas, they create things those people want to consume and interact with, because they are mapped to their needs.
Traditionally marketing teams are just seen as a bit of a black hole when it comes to budget and ROI. They get a budget at the start of the year and by the end of the year it’s gone and no one really knows what they got in return.Inbound marketers want to produce assets that actually make the business more valuable
- Great news is this stuff works. We’ve done studies to prove it. This is based on benchmark report we did with 7000 companies that show the more quality content you produce, the more inbound leads you can attract to your site.
- Great news is this stuff works. We’ve done studies to prove it. This is based on benchmark report we did with 7000 companies that show the more quality content you produce, the more inbound leads you can attract to your site.
You need to tailor around your buyer personas and think what type of assets you need at each stage of the buying cycle.When you understand your personas, it’s going to change how you market to them.Give the example of enterprise vs VSB
For example, at the attract stage, we are producing non product / salesy content for our different personas. For Enterprise Erin, we may produce a post around why the Enterprise Should Take a Lead, Process-Based Approach to Marketing, where as for VSB we have a post all about how Google is making it harder for SMBs to do marketing on Google.
Blog converts at between 10% - 20%
The last super power is being able to use data to measure what you are doing more effectively and also to help make strategic decisions. As we’ve already discussed, the most common issue that comes up with marketing is being able to measure it’s ROI effectively. As an inbound marketer, you not only want to be able to report on the performance of your strategy across the funnel, but also to use the right data to help you make decisions on what is working and what’s not.
For example, when you are measuring the performance of the content you have tailored for the different buyer personas, you want to consider how those metrics will change for each of the different stages of the inbound marketing life cycle.At the attract stage, we want to measure things like the number of visits our content is attracting and the % of people who take a next step. For hubspot we have clear call to actions on the content in our attract stage, that links people across to content in our convert stage. We want to know how well these are performing so we can tweak them to get the maximum conversion rate possible.It also helps us figure out what call to actions work best with what topics and personas.
In our convert stage we want to know how many people are downloading the content (submissions), what’s the conversion rate and what % of these are new contacts vs people we already have in our database. Finally we want to know how many new opportunities this content has created, which means a sales person has qualified the lead and established it has a potential sales opportunity.All this data along with the metrics in the attract phase, helps us figure out, what content is working at each phase & what call to actions are performing best. It also helps us figure out what content topics perform best with what call to actions, for example, we may discover a particular topic performs best with a Free Trial offer, or maybe a demo. All of this helps us optimise our whole funnel.
Lastly we want to measure our NPS score to ensure we are delighting our customers and turning them into promoters for our brand.