Building a Mock Buyer Persona for DSW

As reviewed in my previous post Creating a Buyer Persona, we went over what a buyer persona is and how a company might want to go around building personas for its products and services. As a quick recap, a buyer persona is much like selecting a target market for your product or service. You'll need to know as many things as possible about your audience in order to know how to serve them better. All of these characteristics are combined into a made up persona that will, hopefully, help all departments in your company to make educated decisions as to how they are better able to reach that market segment.

HubSpot has a free tool for marketers to use to create and save buyer personas. In this post, we will go through their process and create a mock buyer persona for DSW. To follow along and create your own personas, follow this link: https://www.hubspot.com/make-my-persona.

To begin the process, select the Build My Persona option on the menu. If you would like a refresher as to what buyer personas are, select the "Learn More" option.

Once you are in the buyer persona generator, you will be prompted to follow a series of 7 steps that will help you set up your persona. The first step is to create a name and choose an avatar for your buyer persona. It is recommended to use alliteration to make a memorable name that will be easy to remember and recognize. The same should be done for the avatar of your persona. Both the name and avatar should remind you instantly of your buyer persona. For this example of a mock DSW buyer persona, I will name my persona "Real Estate Ruth." The name alone already tells us some important information as to what industry my buyer persona is in. Choose an avatar to represent your buyer persona.

The next step is to establish certain demographics for your buyer persona. In my case, Real Estate Ruth is between 25 to 34 years of age and her highest degree or level of education is a Bachelor's degree since most real estate brokers need only a high school diploma and real estate training program or equivalent. So Real Estate Ruth is fairly new to the field and eager to make a name for herself.

For step 3, you will establish what industry they belong to and the size of their organization. Real Estate Ruth works in real estate (as clearly stated by her buyer persona) and works for a small company of only 11-50 people. This gives us an insight as to how much money Real Estate Ruth makes and helps us separate her needs from other retail estate agents that might work for larger companies.

Step 4 dives a little deeper into your buyer persona's career: their job title, how their performance is measured, and who they report to. Again, this gives you, the company trying to sell your products, a better insight as to what the needs are for this market segment. In our example, Real Estate Ruth is a real estate agent that measures success by the number of properties she has helped to sell and reports back to her manager, a real estate broker.

The following step gets more into detail with the characteristics of your persona's job. This step will be especially beneficial if you are a B2B company. In this step, add your persona's objectives or career goals, their biggest challenges, and job responsibilities. Real Estate Ruth wants to generate viable leads that she can turn into sales. Her biggest challenges are navigating client relationships and communications, employee morale, professional development, and maintaining her daily presentation of herself fresh. Because the options given by HubSpot can be a bit narrow, you also have the option to add more specific challenges your persona might face. Her job responsibilities include contacting potential clients, scheduling open houses, overseeing the buying process, negotiating prices, serving as the middle man between buyer and seller.

The second to last step is to learn how your persona works. What type of tools do they use at work? What communication mediums do they prefer to use? This information will give you an insight as to what would be the best way to reach your persona. Real Estate Ruth uses CRM software to keep track of her customers; content management systems to stay updated with all the housing sales and leasing information; cloud-based storage and file sharing applications to share important documents with coworkers and clients; and word processing programs to draft contracts and create simple flyers. Real Estate Ruth also uses phone, email, text messaging, social media, and face-to-face mediums to communicate with her clients and other partners.

The last step to finish off your buyer persona is to add their consumption habits and what social networks they belong to. In this case, Real Estate Ruth gains information about her job by completing online training and renewing her certifications. She belongs to Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest, and Google+. This is a great resource for marketers to know when and where to release digital ads about DSW.

Once your buyer persona is complete, it will look something similar to this:

You have the option to save your buyer persona to your HubSpot account or to download it as a PDF. You can also rearrange the organization of the report by moving around the categories as they best suit your needs. Remember that this will be the template your team and other departments will use to make decisions concerning your buyer persona. Making it as detailed as possible with relevant information from all departments is vital for the success of your buying persona at identifying and catering to your target markets. If this were a real-life scenario, DSW would use Real Estate Ruth's profile to target specifically the segment market she represents.