StringCan Interactive, a strategic digital marketing agency, discusses the essential elements in creating strategic marketing buyer personas using HubSpot as a marketing platform.

2. Ready To Define Your Audience?

3. Define Your Audience
Separate the customers who are going to give you the best results
and ROI over those who aren’t.
Every business needs customers, but some are more
valuable to your bottom line than others
To understand that difference, define your target audience.
Your target audience is a grouping of your company’s most ideal
customers.

4. Steps to Defining Your Target Audience
Look internally at the
customers who have
proven to be the most
profitable to your company
Conduct secondary industry
and audience research to
look at common trends of
customers in your industry
Conduct interviews or create
a survey of your current, past,
or potential customer base -
remember to do more
listening than talking

5. Source: HubSpot Academy & Flickr CC @1wozza
Create Personas.
So now you have all this information about your
audience and you think you have a good idea of the
kind of people you want to go for, now what?
Personas are a fictional representation of your
ideal customer based on market research and real
data about your existing customers.

6. Why Are Personas Valuable?
Source: HubSpot Academy
They create alignment
across your organization
(especially between sales
and marketing!)
They provide structure and
insight for your company
They help you better focus
your marketing efforts and
time to the right people
Segment your audience to
deliver targeted, relevant
messages to your contacts
Personalize your content
based on their interests for
higher engagement
Better determine
product/service
development
As a result, you will be able to able to attract the most
valuable visitors, leads, and customers to your
business
Using marketing personas make websites
2-5x more effective
and easier to use by targeted users

7. Source: HubSpot Academy
The Power of Personas
Case Study from The Power of Persona Stats by HubSpot:
Skytap, a self-service provider of cloud automation solutions, launched a tailored
content marketing strategy:
Targeted
personas
lifted sales
124%
97%
increase in
online leads
Results
included a
55% increase
in organic
traffic
10% increase
in North
American site
traffic

8. Four Essential Aspects of Personas
Source: HubSpot Academy
Demographics Behavior Patterns
Motivations Goals
● Who are they? (Only include information that
is applicable to your audience and company.)
● E.g. age, location, career title, income range,
gender
● How do they spend their time online?
● What are their purchasing habits?
● What are their pain points regarding your
industry?
● What kinds of questions do they have that
need to be answered?
● Why should they work with your company?
● How do your products/services solve their
pain points?

9. Ready To Understand How Personas
Relate to Inbound Marketing?

10. What Is Inbound Marketing
What is inbound marketing?
● It’s about creating and sharing
content with the world
● By creating content specifically
designed to appeal to your
target audience, inbound
marketing attracts qualified
prospects to your business and
keeps them coming back for
more
Inbound consists of 4 marketing
actions:
Attract, Convert, Close, and Delight
● Personas should be
incorporated into all stages of
the buyer’s journey
Source: HubSpot - Inbound Marketing Methodology & Flickr CC @ wessual Soluciones Creativas

11. Attract
Source: HubSpot - Inbound Marketing Methodology & Flickr CC @ Mario’s Planet
You don’t want just any traffic to your site, you want the right traffic, the
people who are most likely to become leads turn into customers (aka your
personas)
Personas are the people who are the driving focus behind 5 important
tools to attract the right people to your site.

12. 5 Tools To Attract Your Personas
Source: HubSpot - Inbound Marketing Methodology
Blogging
In order to get found by your
personas, you must create
educational content that
speaks to them and answers
their questions
SEO
You need to strategically
pick keywords, optimize
your pages, create content,
and build links around the
terms that your personas are
searching for
Pages
Optimize your website to
appeal to your personas and
transform your site to entice
the right strangers to visit
your pages
Social Publishing
Put a human face to your brand
and interact on the networks
where your personas are
spending their time
Paid Advertising
What type of ads and keywords will
your audience resonate with the
most? Use clear call-to-action
messaging that caters to your
personas

13. Convert
Source: HubSpot - Inbound Marketing Methodology
Once you’ve attracted website visitors, the next step is to convert those
visitors into leads by gathering their contact information. Some of the most
important tools in converting visitors to leads include: Forms, Calls to Action,
Landing Pages, and Contacts.
Contact information is valuable information for online marketers, so in
order for people to give up this information willingly, you need to offer
something in return!
Provide content like ebooks, whitepapers, or tip
sheets - whatever information would be
interesting and valuable to each of your personas.
Remember to be helpful, not salesy.
Keep track of the leads you’re converting in a
database like HubSpot. This helps you make
sense of all the interactions you’ve had with
your contacts and how to optimize your future
interactions to more effectively attract,
convert, close, and delight your personas.

14. Close
Source: HubSpot - Inbound Marketing Methodology
Some marketing tools you can use to close your leads:
Close: The stage of the process where you’ve attracted
the right visitors and converted the right leads, and
now need to transform those leads into customers
Smarketing
Use CRM systems to
facilitate sales by making
sure you have the right
information available to
better engage with
prospects across every
channel
Email
A strategy used to focus on
relevant and valuable
content to build trust with a
prospect and help them
become ready to buy
Marketing Automation
A process that involves
creating email marketing
and lead nurturing catered
to the needs and lifecycle
state of each lead

15. Delight
The purpose of inbound
marketing is to provide awesome
content to your users, whether
they are visitors, leads or existing
customers.
But the work doesn’t stop there!
Source: HubSpot - Inbound Marketing Methodology
Some tools to delight customers
include:
● Surveys: These show that you are
listening to your customers and
value their feedback
● Social monitoring: Listen to your
customer’s questions, comments,
likes, and dislikes, and reach out
to them with relevant content
● Smart CTAs: These present users
with offers that change based on
buyer persona and lifecycle stages
● Smart text: Provide existing
customers with content tailored
to their interests and challenges.
Help them achieve their goals,
solve their problems, and
introduce new products or
services that might interest them

16. Want To Learn How to Use Personas in HubSpot?

17. How To Use Personas In HubSpot
● Here, you will be able to tailor your marketing efforts toward this new contact based
upon the pain points and goals that they identify with in congruence with your
personas
● You can personalize your content on the website, landing pages, blogs, emails, etc. to
attract your different personas
○ Personalized emails improve click-through rates by 14% and conversion rates by 10%
○ Personalized emails drive 18 times more revenue than broadcast emails
○ Behaviorally-targeted ads are twice as effective as non-targeted ads
Source: HubSpot Academy
After adding your personas into HubSpot, when people fill out forms or give you
their contact information on your site, they will automatically fall under one of
your persona buckets based on their criteria

18. How To Use Personas In HubSpot
Source: HubSpot Academy
1. Once you have your
personas done and
finalized, upload them
into HubSpot
2. Add personas using a
form, so that contacts
can choose the persona
they most strongly
identify with when filling
out the form
3. Import contacts and
easily assign them to
your personas
4. Create workflows to
help you automate and
scale your marketing
interactions, in an effort
to find out more about
your contacts

19. 1. Upload Personas In HubSpot
Source: HubSpot Academy
3. Import contacts and
easily assign them to
your personas
The most important items to include in
your HubSpot personas:
Internal notes: Your persona’s roles, goals,
and challenges for you to differentiate
your personas based on their specific pain
points
Demographics: Details about your
personas such as age, education, location,
and income
Story: Elaborate on where your persona
looks for information in your industry and
what their interests are

20. 2. Add Personas To A Form
Source: HubSpot Academy
3. Import contacts and
easily assign them to
your personas
Create a form field option that answers
the question:
How would you describe yourself?
By creating a form field option, your
contacts can identify with a persona when
they fill out a form
On the flip side, this allows you to easily
segment all your contacts into the
different persona buckets, where you can
then optimize and nurture those leads
based on their specific requirements

21. 3. Import Contacts & Assign To Personas
Source: HubSpot Academy
3. Import contacts and
easily assign them to
your personas
There are two different ways to assign your new contacts to your personas:
1. Assign personas to your contacts manually. This involves going to an individual
contact and setting a property value to the persona field.
○ This is helpful if you only need to assign a persona to a small amount of
contacts that already exist in your HubSpot contact database
2. You can assign personas using the Imports tool. This involves creating a csv file
of all of your contacts with their names and emails and upload the entire file
into HubSpot
○ This is useful if you have a list of contacts that you want to add to your
HubSpot contacts database whose personas you already know

22. 4. Create Workflows
Source: HubSpot Academy
3. Import contacts and
easily assign them to
your personas
HubSpot Workflows can help you
automate and scale the lead nurturing
process.
You can choose which criteria you want
your contacts to enter into your workflow.
By understanding where your contacts are
in their buyer’s journey, you are better
equipped to provide quality and timely
content that speaks to their specific needs
and moves them down the funnel to
become a potential customer.

23. Key Takeaways
Source: HubSpot Infogrpahic
● Personas help you understand your ideal customers and audience better so that
you can create content and marketing strategies to better target them
● By creating personas and implementing them with HubSpot, every time you get a
new contact or email submission, they are automatically segmented in HubSpot
and then you can go to work to convert these leads into potential customers
● Inbound marketing is all about bringing potential customers to you, rather than
having your marketing efforts fight for the right audience
● The most effective way to guide people through the sales funnel is to attract,
convert, close, and then delight customers
● Potential customers want different things at different stages of the sales process,
so aligning your contacts with your personas in HubSpot is a simple way to best
optimize your content for your audience, no matter what stage they are at

24. Downloadable Worksheet
1. A step by step process guide to make sure you build out your personas
correctly in Hubspot
2. A template that will walk you through each important aspect of a persona,
to ensure that when you create each persona they are thorough and
complete
3. Each portion of the persona is categorized exactly the way that Hubspot
has users input information, so nothing will be lost!
Click on slide to download worksheet

25. THANK YOU
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about inbound
marketing?
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marketing problem?
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