Kelli S. Burns, Ph.D.

I started the HubSpot Marketing Software certification this summer, but when I realized that I couldn’t actually perform the exercises without a different subscription, I moved onto something else. I did find a free HubSpot course that also covers buyer personas here. The videos I watched in the Marketing Software program were helpful in understanding how to create buyer personas, and I hope to develop an assignment around buyer personas that I could use in my Ad and PR Research course.

A buyer personas is a fictional representation of different groups of buyers. By understanding the motivations, needs, and challenges of your buyers, a marketer has a better idea of how to target them. So we might create buyer personas such as a mom named Betsy who is interested in the best quality food and personal care products for her kids. She reads blogs to learn about ingredients. The same brand might have another persona named Bob who is a bodybuilder and concerned about the products he uses as well. He talks to friends at the gym about the best products, attends trade shows, and frequents vitamin and supplement stores.

One way to create buyer personas is interviewing customers. Keep interviewing until you feel you have met someone from all possible groups. You can also search keywords on social media or ask questions on social media to learn about customers.

To build personas, focus on the motives behind behaviors. Create fictional but realistic personas. Tell each persona’s story including their job and demographics, challenges and pain points, objections to your products/services. Out of all the personas you develop, choose one primary persona to focus on.

HupSpot offers a lot of great resources on this topic, including the buyer persona template.

You can read more from HubSpot about creating buyer personas.

Finally, HubSpot also provides a template for 20 questions to ask in an interview to develop buyer personas.

Other resources to visually build your persona online by answering a set of questions are provided here: https://www.hubspot.com/make-my-persona