Episode Transcript
[00:00:01] Are you struggling to keep potential home buyers engaged through the long sales process? In the competitive world of home building, generic marketing messages just don't cut it anymore.
[00:00:12] Imagine if you could tailor the communication to each prospect's needs and desires from the first point of conversion on your website right through until the time they stick the key in the front door of their new home. That's the power of properly identified buyer Personas. And today I'm revealing a HubSpot trick that will supercharge your lead nurturing program. In this episode of HubSpot Hacks Builders Edition, you'll learn how to set up self identifying Persona properties that will add rocket fuel to your marketing. By allowing leads to tell you exactly who they are, you'll unlock the ability to deliver perfectly matched marketing messages at every stage of the buying journey. Whether you're nurturing first time homebuyers or luxury custom home buyers, this simple hack will allow you to keep your prospects excited and engaged throughout the entire sales cycle. Get ready to transform your marketing strategy and watch your conversion rates soar in a way that's tailor made just for the home building industry. Hey folks, it's Jeff and welcome to another episode of the Home Builder Marketing and Growth show. In this HubSpot Hacks Builders Edition, we're going to be talking about buyer Personas. Now I'm going to get more into how to utilize buyer Personas inside of HubSpot and I'll just kind of summarize and touch on how to actually put together and build an effective buyer Persona. If you're still at that stage where you're looking to build your buyer Personas out, check out the last episode on the show where we went in depth on how to create and find the data that you need in order to build really effective buyer Personas. So, a quick introduction to buyer Personas. What are they? So a buyer Persona is a fictional representation of your target customer. It's who you want to sell a home to. The reason why these are so important is that it helps you to focus your marketing efforts. It helps you improve messaging in a way that's really going to have an impact on who is the best fit to buy your homes. But one of the biggest benefits of implementing buyer Personas is that it can drastically increase your conversion rates and slash your marketing costs. When we focus our marketing efforts around a specific buyer Persona, we increase our efficiency, our effectiveness of the marketing that we're doing, of the content that we're publishing. Buyer Personas really help us improve our ability to do Lead generation and lead nurturing, which is a very important part of the marketing cycle. And when you really nail that, it allows you to fill up your sales pipeline and ultimately hand off more sales leads to your online sales concierge or to your salespeople. And when we have well documented buyer Personas, it allows us to generate content that specifically speaks to that Persona's interests and pain points. So your marketing messaging becomes more relevant to that buyer Persona. This also gives us the ability to highly personalize our email marketing. So rather than sending out E blasts like lots of marketers like to refer to them as, we can send out highly customized and laser focused marketing emails that go to specific audiences and that ultimately is going to be way more effective than sending out a massive blast or a mass broadcast to all of the contacts on your list. And lastly, utilizing buyer Personas in our marketing allows us to do better ad targeting, which is going to increase our marketing ROI on our ad spend. So buyer Personas are really powerful to implement in your marketing and you shouldn't overlook them. Okay, let's do a quick review on how to create an effective buyer Persona. So there's a number of key elements that are included in a buyer Persona. Number one is their stage of life and or their product focus. So stage of life is basically are they a first time buyer? Are they a move up buyer? Are they a downsizer? That's the stage of life that they're in. Another option can be product focus. So are they looking for a duplex or a single family home? Or maybe they're getting ready to build a luxury custom home. Another thing that we want to include in our buyer Personas are demographic information. So this is things like age range, family status, education level, relationship status, ethnicity, and information like that that allows us to get a clear idea of who we want to sell homes to. Another key piece of information is psychographic info. So this is things like goals, challenges, interests, fears, values, lifestyle information. It's digging into the mindset of that particular buyer Persona. Another key component is behavioral patterns. So what are their preferred forms of communication? What's their decision making process look like? And then lastly, what are their potential objections?
[00:05:12] Understanding. When it comes to looking at purchasing a new home, what are some of the things that they're scared of? What are some of the things that they're worried about? What are some things that they might potentially object to in a sales situation? So in the last episode we talked about different research methods that you can use to gather the data that you need in order to Build out really accurate buyer Personas. And I won't go into a lot of that here, but again, just to summarize, some of the top methods that you want to lean on are, first and foremost, getting the insights from your sales team. So the most effective buyer Persona is going to be somebody that's actually a buyer or a highly qualified lead. And the people that are going to have the best insight on the demographics and psychographics for that buyer Persona is going to be your frontline salespeople and your OSCs. They're the ones that are having conversations with these people. So lean on them to capture the data that helps you round out those buyer Personas during those different sales scenarios that they're encountering.
[00:06:16] All you need to do is make sure that you have properties set up in your CRM system so that your salespeople can record that information inside of your CRM. And in HubSpot, that's really easy to do. We've got another episode coming soon that we're going to dive into how exactly to do that. Now, another way that you can capture psychographic information beyond just having your salespeople ask questions and enter information into the CRM is by utilizing a quiz funnel or a personality quiz. These can be really fun to put together. You basically create some different categories of what you're new home personality type is, and then you create a bunch of questions that help to narrow that person down and put them into one of these fun little buckets. Quizzes are interactive, they're easy to put together, and people really like to take these little personality quizzes to find out more about themselves. So you can create a what is your new home personality lifestyle quiz and put that on your website. Now, if you're using HubSpot and you utilize something like Scorecard app or Outgrow or Typeform, you can set it up so that all of the questions in that quiz actually store in the contact record in HubSpot. So it will help you to kind of collect and manage that data on Autopilot with the right integration setup.
[00:07:44] And another effective way for gathering this data is doing customer interviews and surveys. And HubSpot's got survey tools built right into it. So you can utilize those. You can create a landing page and have a web form on there if you want, have people fill it out that way. Or you can actually have people reach out and contact your prospects or your customers directly and ask these questions. All right, for those of you that are just listening right now and not watching the video, we're going to dive into HubSpot and walk through how to go through these next steps. So I strongly encourage you to check out this podcast episode on one of the platforms that does show the video side of it. I'll do my best as we go to explain what it is that I'm doing, but definitely you'll get more value out of watching it. All right, let's dive in. Okay, so you'll see me here inside of my demo account. And the first thing that we want to do is that we are going to go into our settings. So we want to find our buyer Personas inside of HubSpot. So we just go up here to the cognitive and click on that and wait a second for it to load up and we will be in our settings section. I'm going to scroll down and underneath data management in the left sidebar, I'm going to click on Properties.
[00:08:58] As our properties are loaded up, I am going to do a search for Persona. So just a quick heads up, obviously this is my demo portal. We do a lot of tinkering, a lot of exploring and a lot of inventing inside of our HubSpot demo account. So you're going to see a whole bunch of properties and fields in here that you won't see in your HubSpot install. And that's totally okay. So I've searched for Persona and it is a dropdown select. I'm going to click on Edit Property and that's going to bring up our Persona field. Now keep in mind, depending on when you watch this episode, HubSpot's always updating their software. So things might look a little bit different when you go in, but the process is the same. So on the left sidebar I'm going to click on field type and this is going to give me a list of all of our different Personas. Now you'll see here in my portal I have my Personas based on stage of life or type of purchase, product type. So we like to give all of our buyer Personas fun little names. It just makes them really easy to remember. And when we refer to a buyer Persona by that name, everybody on our team knows exactly who it is that we're talking about. So you'll see we have a list of different buyer Personas here. We have first time buyer Brenda move up, Maggie downsizing, Don Infill, Isaac Custom Carla build on your lot, Bob Vacation Val investor Ian, Realtor, Rhonda. And then we have other. Now you can build out as many Personas as you want, but I would caution you to limit your buyer Personas as much as possible.
[00:10:36] And the reason for that is in order to build effective lead generation and lead nurturing, you want to create content and use marketing tactics that are highly focused on your buyer Persona. Because those tactics and that content is going to resonate at a higher level when it's really focused on the needs and desires of a buyer Persona.
[00:11:00] So I'm going to go into one of the ones that we've set up first and we'll take a look at that. So let's go here into first time buyer Brenda and I'm just going to click on the edit button and that's going to bring up this buyer Persona.
[00:11:17] Now if you look inside of HubSpot, there's a lot of different pieces and components that you can put in here. You can add a photo of your Persona, you can give them a name, a description. Then you can put in some other internal notes, things like roles, goals, challenges. We have demographics, what's the age, what's the income range, education, where is this person located? And then we have a section at the bottom for story where you can add details about this Persona. You know, where do they go for information, what do they do in their free time, et cetera, et cetera.
[00:11:49] Now if you look, the only two required fields inside of a buyer Persona are the name in the description and in the previous episode where we dove into buyer Personas, you can absolutely fill in the rest of this information inside of HubSpot or you can create, you know, PDFs like a character sheet kind of idea buyer Persona template that you can distribute to your team and that can be really effective so that everybody knows who the buyer Persona is that you're focusing on for your marketing tasks or your sales tasks or even your product development team. So there's only two fields that are required by HubSpot in order to create a buyer Persona. And that is your first name and your description. And so if you look at the description, I've written it in the second person point of view. So I'm writing it as if I was first time buyer Brenda. And so it says I'm looking to buy my first home.
[00:12:45] That's really simple description. There's not a lot of information in there. And then we've done it that way on purpose. And this leads us into our next topic which is talking about how do we create self identifying Personas that we can put on our web forms. And the reason why this is so powerful is because it allows a prospect to Say this is me. This is the segment or the con or the bucket that I belong in. And once we've got that information, that opens up a whole bunch of doors to creating really valuable and matched marketing messaging. Okay, so I'm going to exit out of this Persona. We're back on our main Persona screen here. So again, when you go to create a buyer Persona, you just need to give it a name that's memorable so that everybody on your team will know exactly which Persona it is that you're talking about. And you just need to fill in that description as you go through the process of rounding out and building out your buyer Personas. Absolutely. You should put that information in here so that you have it all in one place. And that other information is key to be aware of because it's going to help you really dial in your marketing messaging so that it really speaks to that buyer Persona. However, you don't need all of that information in order to start using Personas. The only thing that you need in order to start using Personas in your marketing that name, which I always recommend. Like I said, stage of life, product type, focus and a description. And that description just needs to be written in second person point of view. As another quick example, if I look at Move up Maggie, her description is I currently own and I'm looking to move into a new home. Okay, let's dive into self identifying Persona fields on forms because this is really exciting. So I'm going to exit out of my Persona field and I'm going to just hop over into my web forms. We're going to create a new web form. We'll create an embedded form for this one and I'm just going to start with a blank template. So for this example, we're going to create a simple newsletter subscription form. Since a newsletter subscription is at the very highest level of the awareness stage and we know next to nothing about this particular type of contact, we want to keep the number of fields in the form to an absolute minimum. So the minimum that you need to create a form in HubSpot is an email address.
[00:15:13] One of the things that you can try doing, and this is something I like to do, is I like to add in the first name.
[00:15:19] So I'll put the first name field in there. If you want to make this field required, you can you just click on the edit icon, the little pencil icon, and that'll open up in the sidebar on the left and then we just toggle the switch to say make this field required.
[00:15:36] I like to add in the first name, just because it allows me to personalize my emails rather than just getting right into it. I can say hey John or hey, Mary, and I can address them on a first name basis. Makes so the emails will feel a little bit more personalized. Okay, so now what we want to do is we want to add in our Persona field. So I'm going to go over on the left into the Search for properties box and I'm going to search for Persona and then I'm just going to drag that property down onto my form below my email address. Okay, so if we're looking at our form now, we have Persona listed and we have our dropdown there. Now the problem that we have currently is that Persona doesn't mean anything to a potential home buyer. Unless you're in marketing, you don't really know what a Persona is. So we need to update the label of that particular property so that it makes sense to the person that's going to be submitting this form or seeing it on our website. So I'm going to click on the pencil icon on edit, we're going to open that up.
[00:16:35] And first of all, what I want to do is I want to make sure that this field is required. I don't want anybody to be able to enter into my database until they go into one of those main buckets.
[00:16:50] So I've made this field required. Now what I want to do is I want to update the label to something that makes sense to the person that's viewing this form online. So I'm just going to scroll down to label and I'm going to remove Persona and give it my own label. Okay, so I've changed it to what best describes you. Now, the last thing that I would do for this particular newsletter subscription form is I'm going to change the button. Label Submit is like the worst converting call to action ever. Nobody wants to submit to anything and we want to do things freely. So I'm going to change my label just to say subscribe now. Okay, I've got my button text updated and that's basically all we need for an email newsletter subscription form. So I'm going to go to the top right and click on update.
[00:17:38] And in the slide in window, I'm going to click on Publish. All right, so our form has been published now, and now we can go and preview it. Let's do that.
[00:17:50] Okay, so obviously this is just a quick demo, so we don't have any styling or anything on this form. But we've got the basics here. To show you this tactic. So we have our first name, we have our email address, and then we have this property that says what best describes you and you can click on the drop down there.
[00:18:07] And now we see our options.
[00:18:09] So the options say, I'm looking to buy my first home. I currently own and I'm looking to move into a new home, I'm looking to downsize my home, I'm looking to build an infill home, I want to build a custom home, I want to build on my own land, I want to build a vacation home. I'm a real estate investor, I'm a realtor. And the last one, this is important is I'm a contractor, mortgage broker or other industry related professional. So if somebody is contacting you about being a potential vendor for you or about services or we don't want them to end up in one of these other marketing segments. So we have this kind of catch all buyer Persona that we call other. So the person's filling up this form can look at this and go, well, I'm actually looking to build a custom home. And then they can click on subscribe now. So what we've done is we've just had that contact, that prospect self identify their buyer Persona. And so now they're in a bucket. And this really is how easy it is in order to segment your contacts into these main buckets. This is why I'm such an advocate of using your main segmentation of what is the stage of life that they're in or what's their product focus or product type that they want to purchase. Too many times I see builders trying to use their main segmentation of lifestyle and I mentioned this in the buyer Persona episode, that the reason why that doesn't work or why it doesn't make sense to me is because you can have two buyers that are looking for different types of product or are in different stages of life where they share the same lifestyle ideals or the same psych psychographics. So as an example, if, if both people identify as like, I'm an entertainer, I love to have people over to my house, I love to entertain. It's not a good Persona segment because the information needs of somebody that's buying their very first home as compared to somebody that's already purchased a home in the past, they have very different information needs. So we want to make sure that we are putting people into segment that makes sense so that the information that we drip on them in our lead nurturing is relevant to where they are and what their needs are. So that's why I don't like to use psychographics for your main Personas. I think stage of life and product focus is the best.
[00:20:35] All right, so that is how you set up the buyer Persona Property inside of HubSpot to be able to allow your prospects to self identify who they are and put themselves in a bucket or a segmentation. That makes sense. Now this is a really powerful tactic because like we've said before, it allows you to be able to create content and send those leads, information that's really relevant to who they are and where they are in life and what their purchase path looks like, their buying journey. Inside of HubSpot, you also have the ability to utilize what's called dynamic content. And so basically, if you have an email that you've written as a follow up, you can select different options or paragraph of text in an email based on somebody's list membership. And so if you create a list for each and every one of your buyer Personas, then you can change the content that's in that email that goes to that prospect. So when it sends that email to that prospect, it's first going to look at what is their buyer Persona as per, what list are they a member of, and then it's going to send them a highly personalized email. So it allows you again to send a single email, but you can tailor that email to each individual Persona that you're sending it to. And where we really like to utilize these buyer Personas is in long term lead nurturing. And so rather than using dynamic content in an email, we create a series of emails and we create a series of blog posts that we deliver to these prospects that touches on all the major decision points that we know that these Personas have to make or learn about in order to make a good decision during their buying journey. And so that allows you to send out these drip campaigns, maybe you send out one email a week to those different buyer Personas, talking about like, hey, you know, the next thing that you're probably looking into is like what amenities are in this community, you know, or what's the best home layout for your lifestyle. So that's where buyer Personas really amplify the effectiveness of your marketing. All right, so I hope you enjoyed that HubSpot hack. This is probably one of our favorite tactics that we like to use for building out long term lead nurturing programs. If you enjoyed the episode, please subscribe to the podcast. Let a colleague know. Share it up. We are in the early stages of building up the show, and we're trying to build an audience. So any help that we can get from you guys to spread the word and let people know, it's really appreciated. So thanks again for tuning in. Love, you guys. Have a great weekend.
