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Blog

What Are Buyer Personas?

Monday 9 May 2016

4 minute read

By Sarah Burns

If you're a regular reader of our blogs at Thrive you'll know that we talk a lot about buyer personas (we even offer workshops).

They are a key tool for inbound marketers to develop content and strategy, as they provide an insight into the mind of your ideal customer and, anti-customer, if you will. 

Buyer personas are made up of all the demographical, behavioural and educational information you need to form a realistic view of these two types:

  • Customers (The leads you're really keen to attract because they "fit" your company's requirements)
  • Anti-customers (The leads you don't want to target and attract)

For a more concise description of exactly what they are, we always say:

"Buyer personas are a fictional, generalised representation of your ideal customers."

[Source: Thrive Marketing / How To Create Buyer Personas For Business ebook

Buyer personas help you to understand your customers (and, importantly, your prospective customers) better, making it easier for you to tailor content to specific needs, behaviours and concerns of different groups.

The strongest buyer personas are based on market research, as well as insights that you gather from your actual customer base and internal resources.

Depending upon the type of business you run, you may have as few as one or two personas or as many as 10 or 20 (on average we find that most companies have around 5).

"A top Thrive tip is to also develop an anti-persona, which reflects your "anti-customer". This is a persona which helps you to root out the ‘rotten apples’ or ‘tyre kickers’, reducing costs, resource requirements etc."

If you want more information about producing buyer personas please use our various resources for support.

If you're looking to embark on a website build project, whether it's completely from scratch or a site refresh, our ebook will give you the knowledge to make your project as stress-free as possible.

The Website Design Handbook for Businesses

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