topic Re: Creating Personas For Higher Education in Tips, Tricks & Best Practices

Creating Personas For Higher Education

SMinhas — Thu, 25 Feb 2021 19:03:13 GMT

Hello everyone,

I work for a post-secondary institution and want to start using personas for sending customized/targeted emails to our prospects. My idea is to bucket people together using their pain points into different personas. For example: Parents with kids could be a persona. Any thoughts on this? Any tips/tricks regarding best practices for creating personas are welcome!

Regards,

Sableen

Re: Creating Personas For Higher Education

karstenkoehler — Fri, 26 Feb 2021 05:54:03 GMT

Hi @SMinhas,

Developing marketing personas is a great way to structure thoughts around your goals and omissions. As a general tip: Don't go overboard. It's easy to come up with a long list of personas and overengineer everything. Focus on a few personas that are most relevant to your goals.

For higher educations, I've found some detailed posts that also feature persona examples. This should be a good starting point for you:

Marketing Personas for Higher Education

Do You Know Your Audience? Designing Higher Education Buyer Personas

The Case For and Against Generalization in Higher Ed Marketing

Once you've got a good idea about the personas you want to focus on, HubSpot has a nice tool that guides you through persona creation: https://www.hubspot.com/make-my-persona (not linked to your HubSpot portal)

If you're using HubSpot, this knowledge base article explains how you can set them up in the tool: https://knowledge.hubspot.com/contacts/create-and-edit-personas

Best regards!

Re: Creating Personas For Higher Education

webdew — Fri, 26 Feb 2021 10:36:34 GMT

Hi @SMinhas

Firstly, kudos to your decision of using personas. Creating personas is a really effective marketing strategy as it allows you to quickly and easily craft content that is targeted specifically at your audience. With different personas, you’ll know what each group requires and you can plan your strategy accordingly.

In your case, you can have multiple personas, like

Student persona (this can further be broken down into transfer student, second-career student, learning parent, working student, international students, etc.)
Influencers (Parents, siblings, guidance counselors, teachers, seniors, peers, etc.)
Others (alumni, donors, grantmakers, etc.)

You can follow these simple tips,

Take the time to create great higher education buyer personas to see some amazing results.
Create your personas, keeping the demographics, traits, and motivation in mind. That way you’ll get a better understanding of your prospects.
Brainstorm with your team, talk to the students, parents, and other stakeholders, and figure out what are their pain points, or suggestions.

This way you will surely create the kind of buyer personas that will set your campaigns up for success.

Also, I found this really useful article that will help you create personas.

https://blog.hubspot.com/marketing/buyer-persona-research

Hope this helps!

Good-luck!