Guide + Templates

Buyer Personas

Easily organize your audience segments, make your marketing stronger

Did you know HubSpot also has free AI-powered marketing software?
Get started free Get a demo

What are Buyer Personas?

Buyer Personas are fictional, generalized representations of your ideal customers. They help you understand your customers (and prospective customers) better, and  make it easier for you to tailor content to the specific needs, behaviors, and concerns of different groups.

The strongest buyer personas are based on market research as well as on insights you gather from your actual customer base (through surveys, interviews, customer data, etc.). Depending on your business, you could have a few personas or a lot of specialized personas — you can always develop more later if needed.

How to Use Buyer Personas in Marketing, Sales, and Customer Service

At the most basic level, personas allow you to personalize or target your marketing for  different  segments of your audience. For example, instead of sending the same lead nurturing emails to everyone in your database, you can segment by buyer persona and tailor your messaging according to what you  know about those different personas. When utilized  correctly, buyer personas can allow you to produce  highly targeted content that leads to a higher influx of new and repeat customers who are pre-qualified  by data.

Research from Single Grain showed that companies who used buyer personas saw:

  • Websites were 2-5x more effective
  • Personalized emails had a 14% higher click-through rate (CTR)
  • Conversion rates were 10% higher

The first step is to craft your persona by asking specific questions  about your ideal customer to find out as much as you can about who they are and how they interact with your organization, in order to pinpoint how to make them a customer.

Questions such as:

  • What is their profession?
  • What does a typical day in their life look like?
  • Where do they go for information?
  • How do they prefer to obtain goods and services?
  • What is important to them when choosing a vendor?
  • What do they value most?
  • What are their goals?

Creating a buyer persona offers you insights into the customer that you otherwise  wouldn’t be privy to. Once you have your persona, share it with the marketing, sales, and customer service team to ensure that your entire organization has the same view of your ideal customer.
Marketing_Illustrations_Color_LightBG

Buyer Personas for Marketing

Also known as “marketing personas,” it comes as no surprise that the focus of buyer personas is often your marketing team due in large part to the wide range of insights you can achieve when correctly using a persona for marketing.

Uses for buyer personas for your marketing team include:

  • Building effective content marketing strategies by focusing keyword research efforts.
  • Identify and prioritize the most relevant promotional activities.
  • Segment your email list by sending targeted offers to buyers based on their preferences.
  • Time your marketing campaigns for peak engagement rates.
  • Publishing content and advertisements on the channels (email, social media) most frequented by your buyer persona.
  • Align messaging to promote brand unity and increase brand awareness.
  • Personalize your marketing automation efforts.
  • Refining your copywriting to reflect improved
  • SEO strategies.
Meeting Illustration

Buyer Personas for Sales

Knowing your buyer is never more important than when you are selling to them. From the  start of every potential customer interaction to the end of each successful one, the way in  which you sell to a buyer is dependent on what you know about them from their buyer persona.

To operate from a person-driven sales strategy, use your buyer personas to:

  • Craft emails, phone calls, and face-to-face interactions with potential buyers based on their persona.
  • Help build rapport with potential customers.
  • Understand your prospective buyer on a deeper level that allows you to be better prepared to address their concerns.
  • Guide the messaging sales  representatives use with customers.
  • Educate your sales team on each different persona to prepare them to work with any type of buyer.
  • Teach sales representatives to better recognize  the unique pain points of each persona so they can address them effectively.
  • Increase win rates for your sales team.
Service Agent Illustaration

Buyer Personas for Customer Service

Just because you’ve closed a sale doesn’t mean you have finished your relationship with your  buyer. Oftentimes, what transitions a one-time  buyer into a repeat customer is their  interactions with your organization after they  have made a purchase. To set your customer  service team up for success, involve them in the  buyer persona development process so  they can tailor their customer service model to each persona.

To use this persona-driven strategy to improve your customer service experience:

  • Involve your customer service representatives  in the buyer persona creation process to gain their invaluable insights.
  • Gain a deeper understanding of the day to day life of each persona.
  • Reflect on how marketers and sales teams use each persona to create a holistic approach to each new customer.
  • Train on the specific problems your customers  are trying to solve to be better prepared to solve them.
  • Use empathy and compassion to best  support your customers based on their persona.

How to Make Buyer Personas

Now that you know the why behind creating  buyer personas, it’s time for the how. In reality, a buyer persona is the person you think about  when you create content, respond to a support ticket, or try to speak a new prospect’s language. In practice, you can create customized slide decks outlining the motivations and challenges of your deal buyer personas then easily share with all teams in your company.

Make a copy of the templates below to start customizing to your company.

Make a Copy

Buyer personas are a living document that should be continuously reviewed in order to allow it to grow and evolve alongside your company. Creating effective buyer personas takes time and attention. By incorporating your marketing, sales, and customer service teams in the persona development process you will gain a more complete view of each type of buyer you will meet down the road.

Ready to Scale Your Marketing Efforts?

HubSpot has the tools you need to learn more about your target audience and existing customers, giving you actionable insights to grow better.

Explore Marketing Hub
Collaboration_Linear_llustrations_Characters-600x600-950dd6f