Tips, Tricks & Best Practices

SMinhas
Participant

Creating Personas For Higher Education

SOLVE

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

2 Accepted solutions
karstenkoehler
Solution
Hall of Famer | Partner
Hall of Famer | Partner

Creating Personas For Higher Education

SOLVE

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!

Karsten Köhler
HubSpot Freelancer | RevOps & CRM Consultant | Community Hall of Famer

Beratungstermin mit Karsten vereinbaren

 

Did my post help answer your query? Help the community by marking it as a solution.

View solution in original post

webdew
Solution
Guide | Diamond Partner
Guide | Diamond Partner

Creating Personas For Higher Education

SOLVE

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!

View solution in original post

2 Replies 2
webdew
Solution
Guide | Diamond Partner
Guide | Diamond Partner

Creating Personas For Higher Education

SOLVE

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!

karstenkoehler
Solution
Hall of Famer | Partner
Hall of Famer | Partner

Creating Personas For Higher Education

SOLVE

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!

Karsten Köhler
HubSpot Freelancer | RevOps & CRM Consultant | Community Hall of Famer

Beratungstermin mit Karsten vereinbaren

 

Did my post help answer your query? Help the community by marking it as a solution.