Mastering Persona Development: The First Step to Effective Asset Management Marketing

In the competitive world of asset management, understanding your audience is crucial. But understanding alone isn’t enough. You’ve got to implement. In other words, your personas should be highly functional, not just well-conceived. 

Developing detailed personas helps you craft targeted marketing strategies and sales messages that resonate with potential clients. Crafting those strategies and messages in HubSpot helps you deliver them at the right time to the right person. In this blog post, we will explore how to master persona development using HubSpot’s robust tools.

The Importance of Personas in Asset Management

Before diving into the how-tos, let’s discuss why personas are vital to sales success. Personas let you:Think of personas as detailed profiles of your ideal clients. Just as your products are tailored to the requirements of advisors, and their investment strategies are tailored to individual investors’ unique financial goals and risk tolerance, marketing strategies need to be tailored to different client personas — or they won’t be relevant, and won’t help those personas progress toward real business with your firm. 

How Do You Begin Using Personas in HubSpot?

The prospect of “using” personas in your business can be daunting. That’s why we’ve broken our approach into a few simple steps: 

Do Your Research

• Internal Interviews: Gather insights from your sales and client service teams first. They interact with your clients daily and can provide valuable information about common client characteristics and needs. Ask what questions they’re asked by educated advisors vs. those who aren’t as in the know. Ask how product conversations differ by firm size and client type. Ask how their best and worst conversations go, and who they’re typically with. 
• Client Surveys: Go directly to the source. Conduct surveys to get direct feedback from your existing clients about their preferences, challenges, and goals, and about your ability to help them meet those needs. 
• Market Research: Stay on top of what others are doing. Analyze industry reports and study your competitors’ messaging, channels, and products. Understanding the broader market landscape can help you identify market segments that represent opportunities. 

Create Persona Profiles in HubSpot

• Use HubSpot’s Persona Tool: HubSpot offers a user-friendly tool to create and manage your personas. Not only can you centralize information about personas here, but you can also use that information to segment your contacts automatically.
• Include The Correct Information: Ensure your personas are comprehensive, but carefully constructed. Remember, your personas should be highly functional, so whatever you enter into the tool should be information you expect both marketing and sales to use. Delve deep into job roles, challenges, goals, and preferred communication channels, as well as product expectations and decision-making tendencies.
  
  
  

Use Personas for Segmentation

• Create a Persona-Forward Content Strategy: Align your content strategy with the specific pain points and goals of each persona. For example, an RIA who works with investors with higher risk tolerance might value different insights than one accustomed to clients who seek extreme diversification. 
• Segment and Personalize: Use HubSpot to segment your audience based on personas. You can include automation such as: “When someone tells us on a form that their biggest challenge is portfolio diversification, mark them as RIA Ryan.” Then, you can send personalized emails, tailored blog posts, and targeted social media content to every RIA Ryan in HubSpot to significantly increase engagement.

HubSpot and Contextual Marketing: The Right Message at the Right Time

HubSpot is purpose-built for contextual marketing — a fancy way to say that you understand your contacts and respond to their needs and interests, ensuring you deliver the right message to the right person at the right time. Imagine you’re at a networking event. Would you approach a potential client with a generic sales pitch? Or would you tailor your conversation based on what you know about their interests and needs?

HubSpot’s tools let you understand that information upfront so you can start the conversation with the correct message. Here’s how: 

• Behavioral Tracking: HubSpot tracks how visitors interact with your website and content. This data helps you understand what content they’re interested in, and even what products may appeal to them. It can also tell you how close to allocation or recommending your products they are. 
• Smart Content: HubSpot’s smart content feature can dynamically change the content on your website based on the segments you set. For example, a first-time visitor might see an introductory guide, while a returning visitor might see an in-depth case study. Or, a person in a specific region may see market updates about that region, but not others. You can also create lists from your personas, and feature smart content based on those lists. 
• Automated Workflows: Create automated email workflows that deliver targeted content based on what a lead does or what they say about themselves. If a prospect downloads a whitepaper on sustainable investment recommendations, you can automatically send them related articles and follow-up emails. If a prospect tells you their biggest goal is to serve their clients better, you can use an automated workflow to send them specific advice that helps meet that goal. (Don’t forget to include scenarios like this in your content planning!)

Best Practices for Ongoing Persona Use

• Schedule Regular Updates: Continuously refine personas based on new data and feedback. Just as markets change, so do the needs and behaviors of your clients, especially relative to your products or services. Don’t let personas get stale — update every six months if needed. 
• Collaborate Across Departments: Alignment is a critical aspect of successful persona use. Sales and marketing teams should always be aligned on persona definitions. What level of alignment are we talking about? If marketing passes a contact to sales, sales should be able to look at the persona label and know exactly what content to use to speak with them. Regular meetings and shared insights between these teams can help maintain consistency.
• Use HubSpot Analytics: A great marketing campaign is one you optimize. This goes for persona-focused campaigns too: Analyze what’s working and make data-driven adjustments to improve your tactics. 

Bringing It All Together: The Power of Persona-Driven Marketing

Mastering persona development is the foundation of effective asset management marketing. By leveraging HubSpot’s tools, you can create detailed and dynamic personas that enhance your marketing efforts and drive better, more qualified, more addressable leads to sales. 

Ready to refine your marketing strategy? Download our comprehensive ebook, "8 Steps to Win Investors with Content" and start transforming your marketing today.