Before beginning a buyer persona project, identify your buyer profile. A buyer profile defines which companies are a good fit for your product or service. Some characteristics you might use in your buyer profile are company size, annual revenue, and industry vertical. Your ideal buyer profile may be a manufacturing company with annual revenues of $20 million with 15 or more employees.
Your personas serve to define the buying patterns of individuals within your buyer profile. For example, you may want to target specific individuals in certain departments or with key responsibilities. Aim for no more than three buyer personas. You may feel there are more, but often those are likely key stakeholders or influencers, rather than actual buyers.
When creating buyer personas, consider factors such as behavioral patterns, demographics, motivations, and goals. To successfully create a buyer persona, you need to interview people within your company, likely sales representatives or account managers, as well as ideal customers you're working with. Questions you should ask to guide the conversation include:
Once you have buyer personas in place in HubSpot, you can determine how to segment your data, where to focus marketing resources, how to prioritize product/service development, and more.
Typically, an SLA outlines what your customer will receive from your service. But to get quality customers, you need sales and marketing working as one unit. That’s why an internal SLA that defines marketing goals and the sales activities that will support your efforts should be created in your organization. Elements that need to be included in your SLA are:
As you detail your SLA, you’ll likely need to define specific marketing and sales terms, so your teams are on the same page. For example, a SQL may have a different meaning to your sales and marketing departments. Similarly, a sales executive will know the meaning of a value proposition and discovery call while the actual description may fall short on marketing.
High-level KPIs can measure the overall performance of a company, while low-level KPIs may focus on measuring a campaign’s impact or other activities in individual departments.
Measuring your KPIs will help you progress toward your business goals—whether it’s to increase revenue, double leads, or triple website visitors. Use the information gathered in your reporting audit (see step one) to inform these target metrics. KPIs provide the visibility you need to ensure that you're making progress toward your overarching goals. Here are some examples of common KPIs to track:
Auditing your portal, creating an excellent conversion pathway, and organizing your offers is valuable but will not be valuable if contacts in your database are not active. If someone hasn’t interacted with your brand for over two years, they’re distorting your data.
Helpful questions to ask that can help clean your database include:
Your marketing strategy is dependent on sending the right content to the right contact at an appropriate time. You don’t want to email your entire list with information that’s only relevant to someone who’s primed to buy. Therefore, it’s only natural to segment your contacts after cleaning up your database.
With HubSpot’s active list functionality, your contacts will join the correct list whenever they meet the right criteria (set by you). Likewise, they’ll be removed if they no longer meet those conditions. You can also create fixed or static lists if you know you need to follow up with specific contacts based on a promotion you’re running. Consider segmenting contacts initially by:
You can get the data you need to fuel CRO efforts by installing various marketing tools like Hotjar, as well as using available tools in HubSpot, to see how your visitors interact with your website. Then, you can adjust elements of the user’s experience accordingly. Most CRO Audits focus on high-value landing page, and other examples include:
Your homepage is an ideal candidate for CRO, as it's the first impression of your company, and usually gets the most traffic. CRO here can include changing the placement of links, updating CTAs, adding next steps along the buyers’ journey, and changing copy on content blocks.
Because your blog houses educational content about your services, CRO can be highly effective here as well. This can include adding CTAs throughout an article, linking back to other helpful blogs, or inviting readers to learn more about a topic by submitting their email address in exchange for an eBook or whitepaper.
CRO is an often overlooked step in creating a solid HubSpot lead funnel. Don’t forget what you learned in middle school science class: only test one variable at a time and wait for statistical significance to draw conclusions and make updates.
Every HubSpot account comes with default reports for your marketing and sales dashboards. They include:
There are four types of custom reports you can use to get the data you need. These reports are valuable to track more specific KPIs, like marketing-attributed revenue. You can segment your reports in the following ways:
