Use Make My Persona to define your audience
Use Make My Persona to define your audience
1. Conduct audience research to gather qualitative and quantitative data about your prospects’ and customers’ demographics, goals, challenges, and behaviors.
With detailed buyer personas, you can segment your audience to create more valuable and effective content, messaging, products, services, and business solutions to better attract qualified leads, increase conversions, and improve ROI. To conduct audience research: Consider the questions in HubSpot’s Make My Persona Tool to identify what questions you will need to answer. Add some of these questions, like how big is your company and what is your job title, to forms when collecting information about leads or customers. Create lead generation opportunities, like a free trial or content offer, to collect more lead or customer information. Conduct customer and prospect interviews to ask questions about goals, challenges, personal backgrounds, and shopping and consumption behaviors. Email audience surveys to email subscribers, or include a survey on your website. Use focus groups. Look at the Audiences report on Google Analytics. Look at audience insights in social media platforms’ analytics, like YouTube or Facebook. Analyze yours and competitors’ audiences using market research tools, like SEMrush’s Competitive Research Toolkit, Similarweb, or Alexa Market Research Tool Set.
2. Analyze audience and market research to find patterns that indicate that there’s a specific audience segment with similar goals, demographics, behaviors, and challenges.
Use available audience research, which will vary depending on how much research your brand has conducted. For example, look at CRM data, interview transcripts, survey results, and market research notes. Look for similarities and patterns, like many people listing a job title that’s within the marketing field. Remember that buyer personas are semi-fictional generalizations, so you will not find people with the exact same answers across all questions. It can be useful to create a spreadsheet or mind map to collect notes on patterns you notice. If you already know who your buyer persona is but want to turn the information into a deliverable, gather your notes and go straight to the Make My Persona tool.
3. In Make My Persona, enter a fictional nickname that quickly describes one persona, and select an avatar based on your demographic research.
This buyer persona generator works best for B2B buyer personas because it focuses on career information, but it can work for B2C if you input your own options and add additional sections at the end. One common persona naming formula is to use a descriptive identifier plus a fictional name to humanize and differentiate the avatar from other personas. The descriptive identifier can be an industry-specific term, job title, or any adjective that helps identify the segment of your audience the buyer persona will represent. Examples include: Advertising Executive Alex. Investor Ian. Construction Engineer Connie. Bodybuilder Ben. Shopper Shawn. Foodie Farrah. Use basic demographic information to choose an avatar that resembles your persona’s typical age and gender.
4. Complete Their Demographic Traits using demographic information collected in forms, surveys, and in Google Analytics.
Answer How Old Are They and What is the highest degree or level of school your persona has completed based on the most common answers or best approximation for these questions throughout your audience research.
5. Complete Their Business and Their Career by finding trends in career information in your audience research.
Answer What Industry Do They Work In, What’s the Size of Their Organization, What Is Their Job Title, How Is Their Job Measured, and Who Do They Report To based on interview answers, survey answers, market research, and more. If answers vary greatly, choose an answer that fits most of the persona, and consider revisiting this question after collecting more information from your audience. You will be able to adjust answers and add sections later.
6. Complete The Characteristics of Their Job based on customer and prospect interviews and surveys about their career goals and challenges.
For this persona, answer: What Are Their Goals or Objectives. What Are Their Biggest Challenges. What Are Their Job Responsibilities. For example, your persona’s goals may be to generate more leads, and their challenges may be poor communication and lack of resources. Focus on their defining goals and challenges instead of ticking every box because they could have that issue too. Look for insights about how they know they have a problem, how they attempt to reach their goals or solve their problems, and what solutions they’ve tried before. You can also choose to answer these questions in your customer’s own words by including a direct quote in the text input field.
7. Complete How They Work and Their Consumption Habits based on social listening analysis, interview answers, and analytics.
Answer: What tools do they use or need to do their job? How do they prefer to communicate with vendors or other businesses? How do they gain information for their job? What social networks do they belong to? Use a social listening or audience analysis tool like Alexa’s Target Audience Analysis tools, to learn more about your audience’s digital consumption habits. Ask questions about their preferred tools and platforms during interviews and surveys.
8. Complete the buyer persona profile by choosing a color palette, adding any additional sections if needed, and exporting it as a PDF.
To add a new section, scroll to the bottom of the page and click Add New Section. Additional sections may include Persona Quotes that share actual or hypothetical things your persona might say, Why They Buy From Us, What They Don’t Want in Their Solution, or an industry-specific section that highlights additional industry experience and information, like comfort level with coding their own website. If you want others to review, edit, or add to the persona before using it further, click Download/Export > Copy in the Share Your Persona section to share a collaborative link with team members who can make their own edits.
9. Share your buyer persona profile, its purpose, and ways that people can use it. Create an introduction presentation and make sure it's easily findable for staff who need it.
Use slide deck templates from PowerPoint or Canva to create a presentation. Include the buyer persona profile made in the Make My Persona tool, reasons why it matters, and ideas for how to use this information to help your company grow and succeed. Present it to team members, sales, customer success, or stakeholders. Tailor information to fit your audience. For example, when talking to your sales team, share ways that the sales team can use this information to improve their sales pitches. When talking to executives and stakeholders, share more information about why this information matters and specifically how it will add value to the company. Include the persona profile in your brand bible or brand style guide. Print out copies and displaying them in your company workspace. Email the persona to team members or the entire company with context.