Marketing confession: I have always struggled with personas. Not so much building them, that part isn’t so hard if you are creative, but making them as useful as they should be. I think part of the reason is my background in CPG market research. Early in my career, I had access to vast quantitative data on my customers and could precisely segment and understand them in a deeply helpful way. Without that data, writing a story about a potential customer seemed like a garbage in, garbage out situation. 

Recently, as I set out to write new personas for a client, I figured there had to be a better way. I dug into research and, low and behold, there is! Among the most helpful information I found were articles from the Buyer Persona Institute and Marketing Profs that helped me sharpen my thinking around exactly what to include to build a persona that is as helpful as possible. 

As is often the case with brilliant advice, it seems more obvious in hindsight. The article recommends focusing less on the common B2B or B2C framework for persona building and instead determining the level of buyer consideration needed to make a purchase. 

The differences between high consideration and low consideration purchases

A high consideration purchase is one that a buyer doesn’t make frequently, is complex and confusing, and involves more risk. It can be tempting to automatically put B2B purchases into the high consideration bucket and B2C in the low consideration camp, but this is a mistake. Selecting a college or buying a house, for example, are consumer choices but are also certainly high consideration. For these types of purchases, you should focus on deeply understanding who is involved in the purchase and what is important to them. 

Conversely, lower consideration purchases are more routine, less risky, and not as confusing for the buyer. In low consideration purchases, it’s often more important to understand the personal attributes that may shape how your product fits into a buyer’s life. Purchases aren’t likely to be as logically and comprehensively thought out so you may need to tap into emotional factors and make sure your brand is in the right place at the right time.

The impact of consideration on crafting personas

For me, this was incredibly helpful in giving myself permission to shift my focus away from the fictional aspects of buyer personas that I had seen creep into B2B, high-consideration personas. As illustrated in an article I’ve referenced in the past by Sam Grover, how do I use the information that “Marketing Mary” is 42 with an MBA from Babson College in my product strategy? The framework from the Buyer Persona Institute points to a structure that feels intuitively more helpful focusing more on the needs of the likely members of a buying committee and less on who they are outside of work.

The Buyer Persona Institute also recommends considering your target’s needs based on where they are in the funnel and point to interviews with customers who have recently completed the journey as a primary reference point. When creating your strategy, you’ll first want to understand what problem led a buyer to begin searching for a solution like yours and what outcomes they hope to achieve. Next, you’ll want to understand their decision criteria and any concerns they may have about your solution — addressing these concerns as they get close to making a decision is critical. Finally, you’ll want to understand what people or sources influence your buyer’s journey so you can consider the most efficient ways to reach them.

Moving forward with consideration-based personas

This shift in thinking about personas through the lens of buyer consideration has already begun to influence how I approach marketing strategy more broadly. For high-consideration purchases, I’m now prioritizing research into buying committee dynamics and decision criteria over demographic details. For lower-consideration purchases, I’m focusing more on understanding emotional triggers and contextual factors that influence purchase timing.

The beauty of this framework is its practical applicability—it provides a clear decision tree for where to invest research time and how to structure persona documentation. Rather than creating elaborate fictional characters, I can build actionable profiles that directly inform content strategy, sales enablement, and campaign targeting. As I continue to refine this approach, I’m curious to see how it impacts conversion rates and campaign effectiveness. The proof, as always, will be in the results.