40+ buyer persona statistics that showcase their effectiveness

Buyer persona is the secret weapon to boost your sales and increase your return on investment (ROI). Discover the impact of buyer personas on organizations that use them with 40+ stats listed below.

But before we dive into stats related to buyer personas, let’s make sure to understand what they are. Simply put, buyer personas are examples or models of actual buyers based on various factors. They enable marketers to develop effective strategies to promote products and services to people who might buy them.

Buyer personas play a crucial role in developing a firm understanding of your customers. In today’s world, they not only help businesses achieve exponentially better results but also allow buyers to get personalized and delightful services/experiences. That said, if you don’t have a deep understanding of your buyers, their goals and challenges, you and your company are losing out in a big way.

Interest in buyer personas

Many companies already incorporate personas into their marketing strategies and the interest in personas is definitely growing. Creating and using buyer personas is the new normal for people who are expanding their business and building a good rapport with their buyers. If you are still hesitant to adopt buyer personas, the following stats will definitely convince you otherwise!

• As per a study by ITSMA, 44% of marketers use buyer personas for their businesses and an additional 29% will use them in the next 12 months.

• Google trends for “buyer persona” search term over the past 15+ years shows increasing interest in buyer personas, with current interest being at an all-time high.

Boost company performance

High performing companies use personas to understand their buyers better, maintain those personas regularly and put them to use within their organizations.

• Customer centric companies are 60% more profitable than companies that are not customer centric.
• Companies that use personalization reduce marketing and sales costs by 10-20%.
• 71% of companies that surpass revenue targets have formally documented personas in place.
• Further, such companies are 7X more likely to maintain and update their personas.

Increase leads/conversions to generate more business

• As per the ITSMA study, companies using personas have acquired more leads (24%), with higher quality (56%), and reduced sales cycles (36%).
• High performing companies are also 2.4x times more likely to use buyer personas for demand generation.

Improve customer centricity

• 90% of companies that use personas have been able to create a better understanding of their buyers.
• Buyer personas have helped 82% of companies create an improved value proposition.
• Persona driven websites are 2-5x times more effective and easier to use by their targeted audiences.
• 75% of B2B buyers say that the winning vendor’s content has a significant impact on their buying decisions.
• Positive customer experiences yield 20% higher customer satisfaction rates and 10-15% boost in sales conversion rates.
• High performing companies are ~2x times more likely to include the buying preferences of their buyer personas, research their drivers/motivations, and understand their fears/challenges.
• 48% of buyers are more likely to choose solution providers who market to their specific needs.

Use for personalization

Since buyers usually complete 70% of their decision making process using information found online before ever engaging a sales representative, it becomes important for companies to personalize their content. It is only natural that customers will choose a company that gives them a good buyer experience. Your customers won’t just love such customer centric products but will also promote it.

Here are some insights into why personalization goes a long way in securing new buyers and retaining the old ones.

• 64% buyers expect personalized engagements based on past interactions.
• As per Epsilon research, 80% of buyers are more likely to purchase from a company that offers personalized experiences.
• 77% of customers have selected, recommended, or paid more for a company that provides personalized experiences. On the other hand, 74% of buyers feel frustrated when website content is not personalized.
• 84% of buyers say that customer experience is just as important as products/services.
• 63% of customers are more likely to engage and respond to personalized messaging than static messaging.

Increase user engagement

• As per a MarketingSherpa case study, using buyer personas had a dramatic impact on marketing success - 100% increase in web page visits, 900% increase in length of visits, and 171% increase in marketing generated revenue.
• Persona based content increased customer engagement by 6x times when cold leads are targeted.

Improve customer segmentation

• Buyer persona is one of the most popular criteria for segmenting content, with 40% of B2B marketers segmenting content by buyer persona.
• High performing companies map more than 90% of their customer database by persona.

Boost effectiveness of campaigns

• According to B2B Content Writing Spotlight Report, 58% of content marketers consider ‘audience relevance’ as the most important factor in determining the effectiveness of content marketing campaigns.
• Using buyer personas in emails increases click-through rates by 14% and conversion rates by 10%, thereby driving 18x times more revenues than broadcast emails.

Case studies

To back up these high level stats, we also refer to a few case studies. Many successful companies have used persona centric marketing campaigns to generate more business and increase their customer outreach. As can be seen, they have been open to trying and adopting buyer personas for a variety of use-cases such as messaging, design, demand generation, sales training, and have derived many benefits.

Check out how these powerhouse companies used buyer personas to their advantage.

Pega

Publicly traded as Pega, Pegasystems is a company that develops software solutions for customer relationship management (CRM), digital process automation, and business process management (BPM). Pega develops and refines its buyer personas in order to engage its buyers earlier and more effectively. Using personas, the company instils a sense of understanding between its marketing, sales, and product teams in order to improve sales productivity.

Pega dedicated months to analyzing data, using a quantitative as well as qualitative approach for persona analysis. It adopted the best practice approaches for persona creation, going as far as enlisting a third party agency for additional expertise.

The end results that the company achieved from the use of personas are by no means ordinary. These stats definitely validate the success of Pega’s new and improved marketing strategies.

• Number of interactions with target accounts increased by more than 20%
• Number of marketing generated leads into the pipeline increased by more than 10%
• Number of opportunities in the pipeline and value of pipeline increased by more than 10%
• Conversion rate of marketing generated leads to opportunities increased from 32% to more than 40%.
• Number of marketing sourced opportunities in the active pipeline increased by 20%

Skytap

Skytap, founded by Hank Levy, is a self-service provider of cloud automation solutions. For its content marketing campaigns aimed at creating and converting more leads, Skytap's marketing team creates engaging content by studying potential customers and existing buyers.

Though it required investment of significant resources to understand Skytap’s buyers and build buyer personas, Skytap saw immediate results after incorporating buyer personas into its content marketing campaigns. A case study by Adam Sutton on Skytap’s marketing strategy reveals the following statistics:

• Website traffic increased by 210%
• Organic search traffic increased by 55%
• The number of leads generated by online marketing increased by 97%
• Leads generated by both online and offline campaigns increased by 24%
• The number of opportunities generated by online marketing increased by 73%

Conclusion

As evidenced by the mind-blowing stats above, adoption, updates and consistent use of buyer personas can really help grow your business. Personas not only increase sales and profits, but also improve customer centricity and user engagement.

With increased interest and usage by businesses, including competition, it can no longer be a secondary thought for marketers. It has become imperative for all organizations to use buyer personas as a foundational piece of modern marketing.

Regardless of what product or service you sell, you must learn the ins and outs of building, updating and using buyer personas. Learn more about how Persona by Delve AI can help do the job for you!