For a long time, leaders in user experience have heavily promoted design using personas—fictional characters who represent audiences segmented by motivations, goals, and behaviors. While traditional audience segments rely on demographics such as age, gender, or race, UX designers have long said that truly meaningful audience variation lies beneath these superficial boundaries and in psychographic segments instead. Personas have become a common and well-regarded part of user experience best practices.

However, in the endless battle for budget and timeline, product owners often find themselves having to justify the actual ROI of building personas to their stakeholders. The process is a significant undertaking, involving interviews with a large representative sample of audience members about their perceptions, personal goals, past experience, and product usage. The qualitative data has to be crunched and analyzed by experts in order to produce the profiles. Then, crafting experiences based on those personas is a whole undertaking unto itself, involving content strategy, visual design, and potentially a number of other disciplines. The total amount of time and effort can vary depending on the project’s needs, but doing it right can be challenging—one of our most effective brand targeting projects lasted three months, involved 227 interviews, and spanned 36 countries! As a result, product owners and brands often wonder: are personas really worth the effort and budget?

Fortunately, advocates can now answer this question with hard evidence from trusted industry experts. A comprehensive analysis by Forrester found that digital redesigns using personas provide a return of up to four times more in KPIs than a digital redesign without them. It turns out that when brand experiences speak more personally to audiences in a language that is meaningful to them, the benefits are very real for the bottom line, and stakeholders can rest assured that the ROI will be tangible and impactful.¹

A comprehensive analysis by Forrester found that digital redesigns using personas provide a return of up to four times more in KPIs than a digital redesign without them.

Personas have traditionally lived in the realm of marketing and sales as “buyer personas.” But recently, savvy HR departments have started using them to move beyond one-size-fits-all employer brand messaging, especially for global brands with dozens of career tracks and diverse workforces. Learn more about how to use personas to make an employer brand resonate on an individual level in our whitepaper below.