Target Audience & Buyer Personas
The old marketing term “target audience” has been refined over the years. If you’ve been looking into inbound marketing, you may have heard of “buyer personas”. Your buyer personas are basically segments of your target audience. They are more than just demographics, so it may be helpful to view each buyer persona as an actual person. Doing so allows you to think about more than just the person’s demographics – what are their interests? What are the steps they take before making a purchase? What challenges do they face? What are their goals? These are just a few questions you may want to consider, but depending on your product or service, you’ll want to take a deeper dive into building your buyer personas so that they match your offerings.
As a HubSpot partner agency, we’ve set up a lot of CRMs – some within HubSpot and some on other platforms. Regardless of what platform it’s on or whether you’re starting with a fresh CRM or migrating contacts from an existing database, how you choose to segment your CRM will play a huge role in the effectiveness of your future campaigns.
What types of segments should I create?
It may help to start with demographic information first. What is your target age group? Males, females, or both? Who would be most receptive (and efficient) for getting your product or service implemented into their company? What is their role? Have they purchased from you previously? When were they last active with your company? What content have they engaged with? How large is their company? What is the company’s annual revenue? Asking yourself these types of questions will help you get a better idea of how to segment your database. Put yourself in your customer’s shoes and really try to figure out what your motivations are for buying, as well as what you value in a product, service, or brand.
Of course, depending on what your product or service actually is, your segments will vary. Here’s an example. Let’s say your company offers video production services for companies looking to market their products. Who would be most interested in your services? You’d probably have the best luck reaching out to Chief Marketing Officers or Marketing Directors. However, since higher-level employees are usually harder to get ahold of, creating a segment of lower-level marketing employees can be useful for getting your foot in the door.
As the lifecycle of your leads and customers mature, you will come to the eventual realization that your CRM contains a lot of contacts that may have aged out or become inactive. Creating a segment for these types of contacts can be hugely beneficial when you decide to run reengagement and retargeting campaigns. These types of campaigns can be crucial for reconverting old customers and reengaging old ones. You can also use retargeting campaigns to promote the products or services that would be most beneficial to whatever was originally purchased.
What’s the point?
Taking the time to properly segment your contacts database is a vital step in turning HubSpot into your digital marketing machine. Once you segment your database, the idea is to launch different types of campaigns that will appeal to each one of your segments.
The effectiveness of your future marketing campaigns heavily relies on the way you segment your contacts because if you send irrelevant content, you’re much less likely to convert them. Therefore, understanding the behavior and personality traits of each of your buyer personas allows you to develop campaigns that are specifically geared towards each of your segments, providing personal and hyper-relatable content based on what they are looking for at that point in time.
How can I evaluate whether my segments are effective?
You’ll quickly find out whether you’ve effectively segmented your contacts based on the resulting numbers. Did your conversion rates increase? Are people more engaged with your content? As you begin to hone in on the right content for your segments, you’ll begin to notice that your numbers begin to improve.
Just remember, there is such a thing as getting TOO granular with your segments. Creating segment-specific campaigns can be time consuming, so finding a balance that allows you to run effective, relevant, and personal campaigns to as many people as possible will save you lots of time and money!
Sometimes, when working within a new system and learning all of the tools and features you have available, it can be difficult to see the bigger picture that you’re working towards. That’s why we recommend partnering up with a HubSpot partner agency like Tobe! We’ve done all of this before, so we know how to keep our eyes on the prize.
Have questions? Start a conversation!
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