Many people don't realize how much clear, effective communication matters in terms of marketing success. Marketing collateral is about more than just selling something to someone - it's about establishing the type of relationship with a potential customer that should benefit both parties for years to come.

To do that, you need to know as much about who you're talking to as possible. You need to make sure that you're speaking (figuratively) the same language and that you're using any opportunity to both show that you understand their concerns and pain points and that you alone can address them.

Many organizations have been using marketing personas to accomplish all of this and more. If you're not already using marketing personas in your inbound and outbound efforts, now would be an excellent time to start for a variety of compelling reasons.

What are Marketing Personas?

The reason why marketing personas are so effective is because they represent your "best" buyers - the ones that hold the most value to your organization in terms of your unique long-term goals. They're buyers that have one or more characteristics like the following:

• They generate the most amount of revenue.
• They're the people who are most likely to be loyal to your brand.
• They're the most prone to up-sell or cross-sell opportunities.
• They're new buyers with a potentially high customer lifetime value.
• They're the people who are most likely to be passionate about what you have to offer.

Every company's definition of a "best buyer" will be different given the context, but marketing personas allow you to stay focused on the people your organization will need to accomplish its own objectives.

Why Marketing Personas Are Important: Facts and Figures

The most important reason why you need to start using marketing personas to guide your marketing isn't just because they work - they work incredibly well across nearly any channel you can think of.

Consider the following statistics:

• According to a study conducted by HubSpot, the use of marketing personas made websites between two and five times more effective and easier to use for targeted users.
• Marketing personas allow you to provide more personalized content like e-mails, something that tends to drive as much as 18 times the amount of traffic as more general content.
• According to ITSMA, buyers are an incredible 48 percent more likely to consider solution providers if their marketing collateral is personalized to address specific business issues in the way that marketing personas allow.

But even going beyond statistics like these, the real reason why you must start developing marketing personas comes down to one simple-yet-critical idea: They make you a better communicator with the people who matter most to what you're trying to do.

If so much of marketing success involves getting the right message out to the right person at precisely the right stage of their customer journey, marketing personas are one of the best ways to guarantee that you do exactly that. They do more than just give you something to write towards - they allow you to be more specific and personal in your marketing efforts, which helps to make sure that every piece of collateral you create hits with maximum impact when it is needed the most.