20 Questions to Ask When Creating Buyer Personas Knowing your customers is a crucial component of successful inbound marketing. Get started with buyer persona questions that can help you understand customers’ mindsets. We’ve gathered 20 questions that can help you identify your audience. After you explore the answers, use this free buyer persona template to share your findings with the rest of your company.  Remember: you'll need a content marketing strategy to reach your buyer personas. Find out how with HubSpot Academy's free content marketing training resource page. Download our free buyer persona template here to learn how to create buyer personas for your business. Download Now Questions About Their Personal Background 1. Describe your personal demographics. Collecting demographic information is a great place to begin drafting your personas. These questions paint a clearer, more personal picture of your customer.  Understand what communities they are a part of, and how those identities impact their interaction with your brand. What to Look for in the Answer Are they married? What's their annual household income? Where do they live? What are their cultural and racial backgrounds? What is their gender identity? How old are they? Do they have children? 2. Describe your career path. Having an idea of your client’s background tells you a lot about the type of information that they consume and the problems that they can face regarding their work. This can be especially helpful if you sell a B2B product.  What to Look for in...

The Top 3 Buyer Persona Myths, and How They Hurt Your Marketing Efforts Meet Elizabeth: a 27-year-old nurse who drives a Honda Civic, enjoys making TikToks, and spends most of her time with her beautiful 9-month-old baby. Elizabeth desperately wants to make more time for herself, but struggles to find the balance between work and home responsibilities. She tries to give herself moments of self-care, but these moments are few and far between. Elizabeth needs a way to recharge, relax, and care for herself. By this description, you know Elizabeth's age, profession, gender, desires, struggles, and pain points. All of this information helps you place her in a category in your mind — but none of that information tells you why she buys your product. Buyer personas typically include descriptions like Elizabeth's, along with other demographics and personality information. In the early days of customer segmentation, this would have been more than enough to inform marketing campaigns and product development. But with growing markets and increased consumer awareness, companies need to go beyond standard buyer personas to reach their audiences. If we can apply what we've learned about how people make decisions, and how we as companies group people together, we'll be able to reach customers like Elizabeth with empathetic solutions that help her, rather than stereotypical cure-alls that are easily overlooked. Here, let's dive into three myths of the buyer persona — and what you can do, instead.  Standard Buyer Personas Aren't Enough The first mention of audience segmentation was...

What is Technographic Data? (And Why It Matters) Digital transformation is more than just a buzzword — as noted by Forbes, 70% of companies have already deployed a strategy to improve digital service and solution uptake or are actively working on one. And, in 2019 alone, enterprises spent more than 2 trillion dollars worldwide to help drive digital adoption and improve overall organizational performance. For product and service providers in the technology industry, this presents an opportunity: If B2B sales teams can determine where enterprises are struggling with digital transformation initiatives, they can improve targeted marketing efforts and boost total sales. But how do they bridge the gap between potential conversions and practical insight? Technographic data. In this piece, we'll break down what technographic is (and isn't), how companies can collect this data at scale, and why this data is important to help enhance B2B sales efforts. Let's get started. What is Technographic Data? Technographics is a portmanteau of the words “technology” and “demographics”, and refers to information that describes the use of technology solutions, their adoption rates, and the potential challenges they present for organizations. The challenge? This technographics definition isn't terribly useful without context. First, let's talk about what technographics isn't: Demographic data Demographic data focuses on information about people — how many people are employed by a specific organization? What points of contact exist? How have companies' sizes and staff configurations changed over time, and what's on the horizon. This information is critical to help identify potential...

The Complete Guide to Firmographic Data Companies are still struggling to improve the reach and reliability of personalized data about potential clients and customers. Part of the problem is supply — bigger data volumes offer greater insight around B2B and B2C buying preferences both immediately and over time. But variety also plays a role. While information about individuals at a company (demographics) and the technology they use (technographics) can help enhance marketing and sales outcomes, there's also a place for firmographics, which are datasets that help businesses effectively segment organizations into meaningful categories. The challenge? Although this is a great high-level definition, it doesn't offer much in the way of specifics or actionable strategies. In this complete guide to firmographics, we'll define firmographic data with a look at key forms and functions, explore how it's used for segmentation, and dig into the types of questions that can help your company locate — and leverage — firmographic data. What is firmographic data? Demographic data focuses on information tied to individuals. Data such as contact names and customer purchase preferences are examples of demographic assets that can be used to drive targeted marketing campaigns. Firmographic data shifts the focus to organizations — or firms — to collect and analyze key information about the operation of enterprises themselves. Common firmographic data examples include: Industry type — From manufacturing or logistics organizations to financial, professional or legal service firms, industry type is a key vector for segmentation. Worth noting? Many companies...

8 Modern Tips for Marketing to Millennials You've seen the articles lamenting the death of certain industries and changing consumer attitudes, all paying tribute (negatively or positively) to a certain generation born in the 80s and 90s. It seems that journalists love to write about Millennials and marketers love to analyze them. Why, though?  Boomers hold 57% of the wealth in the U.S. and are at peak buying power. With that in mind, is there a reason we never seem to stop hearing about Millennials? Why Millennials Are Important to Marketers As Millennials enter their 30s and 40s, often with student loans or young children, they haven't yet reached their full buying power compared to GenXers or Boomers. Nonetheless, there are multiple reasons to pay attention to this generation:  1. Millennials are the most lucrative market. Even though as a group, they haven't reached their full buying power yet, their buying power eclipses that of other generations. They make up 25% of the population, and with an estimated annual buying power of over a trillion dollars, they are the most lucrative market. Plain and simple: Nearly every marketer today is making Generation Y a priority – or at least working to understand what drives and delights this instrumental group. 2. Millennials switch brands.  Millennial market research performed by Daymon Worldwide suggests that only 29% of Millennials will buy the same brand, which is a much lower brand loyalty score compared to previous generations.  This indicates that brands must...

Content Mapping 101: The Template You Need to Personalize Your Marketing What is a Content Map? A content map is a plan to deliver the right content, to the right people, at the right time. Content mapping takes into account the characteristics of the person who will be consuming the content and their lifecycle stage. Marketers hear it all the time: The content you create needs to be personalized. It needs to be aligned with the wants and needs of your customers (and prospective customers). It needs to resonate with them. It needs to feel like it was created just for them. On its surface, this sounds like great advice. Personalization, giving people content that they're actually interested in ... it makes perfect sense. But coming up with the actual topics that make for a highly targeted content strategy isn't that easy. To help you brainstorm and map out content ideas for targeting specific segments of your audience, we've created a new free template resource: Content Mapping Template: Using Buyer Personas & Lifecycle Stages to Create Targeted Content. I'll talk more about how you can use this template in a bit. But first, let’s take a look at how this whole "content mapping" business works. And when think you've got this concept down, you'll want to check out HubSpot Academy's free content marketing training resource page to learn how to map a content strategy for your business. What Is Content Mapping? When it comes...