Why Buyer Personas Matter: 4 Compelling Reasons [Video]

We've all heard and used the adage "client is king." No matter what sort of business you're running, you likely understand the sentiment behind that phrase. What the client wants and needs drives the majority of the work you do. So, do you know your client? You probably wouldn't hesitate to say "yes." But think about it again. Do you truly know your client? Have you taken the time to research who they are, what their needs are, and how you can best reach them? For start-ups and established businesses alike, it can be a challenge to designate time and resources for creating buyer personas, but doing so is critical.

First, let's establish a clear definition. A buyer persona is a semi-fictional representation of your ideal customer based on market research and real data about your existing customers. This definition, adapted from HubSpot, is foundational to understanding their value. Creating a buyer persona provides several compelling benefits:

• You learn how to talk to your prospective clients.
• Your marketing efforts become more focused and successful.
• You avoid confusion within your organization.
• You discover new insights about your business and its solutions.

You'll learn how to talk to your prospective clients.

Defining your ideal audience by researching their demographics, age, habits, likes, and dislikes will go a long way in ensuring you can communicate with these individuals successfully. Creating a buyer persona is a critical element of your marketing strategy. An article published by Forbes titled “Finding Your Audience: The Importance of Developing a Buyer Persona" makes a strong point:

“A persona can have a great impact on your marketing strategy. For instance, if you’re targeting an older demographic, you may want to spend less time and money on social media than if you’re targeting millennials.

A persona can tell you where your demographic spends time online, what resources they trust and what pain points they’re facing. This makes the persona development process crucial to your marketing success.”

In other words, when you truly know the people you aim to reach, you can figure out how to connect with them most effectively. Don't annoy potential customers (or miss out on reaching them altogether) with marketing strategies that don't resonate. Having an accurate and well-researched buyer persona will help you prioritize content in your marketing strategy, meet your audience where they are, and speak to them in a way they appreciate.

Your efforts are more focused and more successful.

It makes sense that if you know your target audience, thanks to a solid buyer persona, you'll also know what they want. Doing the work upfront to create a detailed buyer persona will save you time later. Why? Because once you have that ideal client particularized, you can focus on those particulars and how to deliver what your target customers want.

When you know what needs your attention, time spent on marketing and customer service will be time well spent. You won't get lost working on projects that drain your resources and prove ineffective. The role of a buyer persona is to provide this customer blueprint, and if all your efforts align with it, you'll be on your way to greater success with more contacts, leads, and customers.

You'll avoid confusion within your organization.

A surefire way to turn off potential customers is for your business to look disorganized, where the right hand doesn't know what the left hand is doing. Not only does this come across as unprofessional, but it's also terribly inefficient and costly.

Creating a clear buyer persona and ensuring that every member of your organization understands and works with it in mind allows you to avoid this confusion. If everyone is on the same page, your external communication efforts will align with your overall marketing strategy, which in turn aligns with product development, and so on.

You'll learn about your business and its solutions.

Some businesses dismiss creating a buyer persona, arguing that they already know their buyer and that creating a hypothetical profile is redundant.

On the contrary, another huge benefit of the buyer persona process is that it will likely help you learn something new about your business as it relates to your ideal customer. This process helps you see gaps between what your target market currently has and what they want. In many cases, your company can figure out how to fill those gaps by developing a product or service to satisfy the need. This allows you to become essential to your ideal customer, who will return to you repeatedly because you've proven you understand what they want and know how to deliver it.