My company didn't create personas - now what?

[RLemieux]

The company I just started working at has a fairly large database, and I was brought on as a content manager. I'd like to create buyer personas as we have 4 or 5 main purchasers. I haven't done this before, but I do it in my word document and remember this when I create content. However, since we're very integrated in hubpot, and this company is more well-established than others that I've used, I suppose it would help me to create these personas.  My questions are 1) is there a way to go in and bulk edit to add personas to current contacts, or is this a one-by-one thing that needs to just be implemented going forward. 

2) what are the actual benefits of adding this? If I want to do it, my boss wants to know why and what are we going to get out this. As the content manager, I feel it will make my trying to understand and create content easier, but may not show any instant results. 

3) Can we attribute a persona to a user by an action (IE: they downloaded this brochure) ? or does it have to be manual or by a form they filled out. 

Thanks! 

[karstenkoehler · Accepted solution]

Hi @RLemieux,

No problem at all, you can backfill the persona information for all contacts in your database. The process is called bulk-editing. In your Contacts home, you can set certain filters, select all contacts and assign the correct persona to these contacts.

Going forward there are a few options to automatically assign the persona to a contact: https://blog.hubspot.com/customers/tag-contacts-with-their-persona Regarding your example of a contact downloading a brochure: This could be done with a workflow or a form.

In a workflow (available in Professional and Enterprise licenses), you'd enroll contacts who viewed the link of the brochure or filled out the form to access the brochure. You might want to exclude contacts from that workflow who have already been assigned a persona.

You could also create a form specifically for this brochure and add a hidden field as explained in HubSpot's blog post above.

I find personas useful for three reasons:

First of all, they help you focus and structure your throughts around your marketing efforts (a step that you already completed).

Next, you can use personas for segmenting your email marketing campaigns. Once you have persona lists, you could send one variation of a marketing campaign to persona A, another variation tailored for persona B and so on.

Lastly, they allow you to discover patterns in your HubSpot portal more easily. With lists or custom reports, you can see how your database breaks down; how many contacts in your CRM are persona A, B, C or D. With a few clicks, you'll also know whether your lead generation in the past quarter generated mostly contacts who fit the criteria of your primary persona – or whether a lot of contacts end up in your CRM although they are considered exclusion personas. You can also create reports to explore whether your most primary persona is interacting with the content that you're creating specifically for them. If they don't, that's a valuable learning.

In the end, personas are just a set of criteria which you could also define in lists or properties. They're really helpful for discovering patterns and telling stories in your reports.

Hope this helps!

[KTownsend · Accepted solution]

Hi! 

We have just done a similar thing at our company in terms of adding personas. To save you doing it manually, it might be worth creating a workflow where you can assign a persona based on contact properties, such as job title. So for example, if their job title contains any of 'marketing' or 'seo', you could then set their persona to 'Marketing'. This can be done by creating an if/then branch and adding each of your personas as options. 

In terms of the benefits of creating personas, they are extremely useful for data segmentation purposes. You'll be able to create content tailored to specific personas, which can increase its relevance for your contacts. You can also use them when sending out emails, for example, by creating a list for each persona you have and sending your emails to different lists. It's a great way to personalise content. 

For your third question, i'd say the best way to do this is to include a form for them to be able to download content. In the form, you can ask them something like "which of these best describes you?" with your personas as options. Alternatively, you can create a workflow with the enrolment criteria as the contact filling out a form on a specific page, with the action being to set their persona to whichever option you like. 

Hope this helps!

[Dtyler]

One more question. If I set this up,,, as it's in marketing. Assuming I don't touch any other workflows, would I disturb anything anyone else has set up?

[KTownsend · Accepted solution]

Hi! 

We have just done a similar thing at our company in terms of adding personas. To save you doing it manually, it might be worth creating a workflow where you can assign a persona based on contact properties, such as job title. So for example, if their job title contains any of 'marketing' or 'seo', you could then set their persona to 'Marketing'. This can be done by creating an if/then branch and adding each of your personas as options. 

In terms of the benefits of creating personas, they are extremely useful for data segmentation purposes. You'll be able to create content tailored to specific personas, which can increase its relevance for your contacts. You can also use them when sending out emails, for example, by creating a list for each persona you have and sending your emails to different lists. It's a great way to personalise content. 

For your third question, i'd say the best way to do this is to include a form for them to be able to download content. In the form, you can ask them something like "which of these best describes you?" with your personas as options. Alternatively, you can create a workflow with the enrolment criteria as the contact filling out a form on a specific page, with the action being to set their persona to whichever option you like. 

Hope this helps!

[RLemieux]

I appreciate your response. I couldn't really find this information anywhere! Do you mind sharing where the if/then branch is located? Like where can I go set that up? 

[KTownsend · Accepted solution]

Hi, 

Yes of course! I'll use the example of setting personas based on job title, but you can set a persona based on any contact property. 

When you create a workflow, you can set the contact enrollment trigger as 'job title is known'. Then, when you add an action after this, scroll down to if/then branch (this should appear on the right-hand side of your screen). Now, you'll be able to add your different persona options. So, you might have a persona for 'Marketing', and you can add this in as the branch name. Under this, you can add a rule to say something like 'job title contains any of' and add in your options. For marketing, this might be 'marketing', 'seo', 'demand generation' or 'cmo'. Here is a screenshot:

Then, repeat this for all of your other persona options as the other branch names, along with the criteria for each persona. Choose save, and you should see something a bit like this with branches for each of your persona options:

Now, you can add an action under each branch to 'set contact property value', as you can see in the above screenshot. Choose the correct persona for each one based on which branch it is, and you should be good to go! 

Hope this makes sense!

Katie

 

[RLemieux]

One more question. If I set this up, as it's in marketing. Assuming I don't touch any other workflows, would I disturb anything anyone else has set up? 

[KTownsend]

No problem! As long as you don't alter any other workflows and you don't currently have any workflows switched on involving the persona property (although it doesn't sound like you do), this should be fine - but it might be worth checking with your team before you switch your new workflow on!

[RLemieux]

Thank you so much for this! I don't think I would have gotten this otherwise! 

[karstenkoehler · Accepted solution]

Hi @RLemieux,

No problem at all, you can backfill the persona information for all contacts in your database. The process is called bulk-editing. In your Contacts home, you can set certain filters, select all contacts and assign the correct persona to these contacts.

Going forward there are a few options to automatically assign the persona to a contact: https://blog.hubspot.com/customers/tag-contacts-with-their-persona Regarding your example of a contact downloading a brochure: This could be done with a workflow or a form.

In a workflow (available in Professional and Enterprise licenses), you'd enroll contacts who viewed the link of the brochure or filled out the form to access the brochure. You might want to exclude contacts from that workflow who have already been assigned a persona.

You could also create a form specifically for this brochure and add a hidden field as explained in HubSpot's blog post above.

I find personas useful for three reasons:

First of all, they help you focus and structure your throughts around your marketing efforts (a step that you already completed).

Next, you can use personas for segmenting your email marketing campaigns. Once you have persona lists, you could send one variation of a marketing campaign to persona A, another variation tailored for persona B and so on.

Lastly, they allow you to discover patterns in your HubSpot portal more easily. With lists or custom reports, you can see how your database breaks down; how many contacts in your CRM are persona A, B, C or D. With a few clicks, you'll also know whether your lead generation in the past quarter generated mostly contacts who fit the criteria of your primary persona – or whether a lot of contacts end up in your CRM although they are considered exclusion personas. You can also create reports to explore whether your most primary persona is interacting with the content that you're creating specifically for them. If they don't, that's a valuable learning.

In the end, personas are just a set of criteria which you could also define in lists or properties. They're really helpful for discovering patterns and telling stories in your reports.

Hope this helps!

[RLemieux]

Thanks so much for your detailed response. Very helpful!