What is the consideration phase?
We are all aware of the three stages that buyers go through, before purchasing a product. You can add more stages after purchase, but we are not going to focus on that today. Quick recap, here they are:
- Awareness. This is the stage where your potential customers are aware “I have a problem”. This is where you publish your content to make them aware of a problem they might have, or where you let them recognize the problem you put out in front of them.
- Consideration. We’ll talk about this in depth more. Short explanation: this is the stage where your potential customers are considering all the different solutions to their problems, to get a deeper understanding of them.
- Decision. Decision time! This is where your customer knows which product will solve their problem, and they’re actually making the decision to buy or not to buy.
Easy, right?
As promised, I’ll elaborate a bit more on the consideration phase here. Now that buyers are aware of their problem, they are starting to research all the potential solutions that are out there. And there are probably a lot. Maybe not all created equal, but they need to figure out somehow which solution fits best to their problem. They are evaluating different brands, to figure out who they trust, and who they don’t trust. But also figuring out different solutions to their problem.
When you have a bad back from all that sitting behind your desk at your home office (awareness), you are starting to research different solutions (consideration). There are different solutions for this: get a standing-desk, or get a more comfortable chair. Or even get both. And there are a lot of different brands for all those options. And all those options come with their own specifications. That chair comes in different colours, materials, sizes, back support, neck support, cushions, you name it.
This always happens in the consideration phase. And that brings me to two of the biggest issues for e-commerce business.
Don’t worry, I’ll also tell you how to overcome those issues.
The problem with the consideration phase
The consideration phase is the worst stage to be in for both buyers and sellers. I’m expecting you to be a seller because you are reading this blog post, but in everyday life you are a buyer as well. So you perfectly relate to buyers in general. The consideration phase is for both parties a dark place. The one needs to do a shitload of research about all the different alternatives and specifications, and the other one needs to be visible, convincing, compelling, clear and trustworthy enough that they actually have the right solution.
That brings me to two of the biggest problems of the consideration stage:
Problem #1: You can’t read minds
To be 100% sure, I quickly asked ChatGPT, and it turns out that we can’t read minds yet.
That will make the consideration phase a whole lot more fun. But up to today, we can’t read minds, and depending on what you sell; you might not even want to.
This also means you don’t know exactly how potential customers think about the problems you solve. How big is the problem for them? How do they feel when thinking about that problem? Would they like to get advice, or would they rather figure it all out on their own? Can they relate it to previous situations in their lives?
Imagine walking into your local handy-man shop. Of course you are very handy, so you know exactly what you need and walk straight to it. But in every aisle you can see someone exploring the products. But you don’t know what’s going on, do you?
They might have an internal panic attack because they are too embarrassed to ask someone. They might be angry at their spouse because she said “No, it has to be in that shop”, and they can’t find it.
All questions that you can’t truly answer, because you just can’t access some information. But the more you know, the better. And I’ve thought about some ideas on how to conquer this problem.
(no not the mind reading problem)
Problem #2: You can’t measure what you can’t measure
Now that we’ve covered that you don’t know exactly what’s going on in the minds of your customers. You also don’t know how they truly behave on the web. That’s simply because of what you can, and what you can’t measure in digital marketing.
The behavior of consumers in the consideration stage is very cross-platform and even cross-device heavy. A buyer might do a Google search to figure out potential solutions to his or her problem. That individual might end up on a couple of web pages on desktop, but the search wasn’t fully satisfying. To get a better understanding of the products, he’s entering a search in YouTube, by phone. After that, he’s retargeted by all the websites that have set their retargeting right, and both on Facebook and on LinkedIn. He decides to send a message to one of his friends to find out more about their latest purchase of the same product.
When you think about such a buying journey, which is in essence a very simplified version of the actual one, answer these questions:
Are you tracking your competitors retargeting ads? No, because you can’t.
Are you tracking your customers phone calls to friends? Let’s not hope so.
Are you tracking their specific youtube searches? I don’t think so.
There are possibilities within digital marketing to get a better understanding of your buyers. But in the end. There’s no way you can actually measure the buying journey of your customers fully. And we haven’t even talked about GDPR and CCPA, which makes it even harder. There are ways to come close to the full buying journeys, with technologies like multi-touch attribution models, marketing automation platforms, etc. But there will always be gaps. Especially when talking about the untracked interactions (phone calls, conversations with friends). And they might be the most important.
But you don’t know, do you?
That was the second problem I wanted to highlight, the gaps in your ability to measure everything a consumer is doing within this consideration stage. You know it’s cross-platform, you know it’s cross-device, you know your buying journey partly, but not everything.
Start winning the consideration stage
Now the question is, are there ways to overcome all of this and make sure you outperform your competition in the consideration stage of your potential buyers?
Yes.
Below, you find practical ideas and tips to make a positive impact on the consideration stage of your potential buyer.
Guide buyers to your product pages
Handy-man shop example again, it can be overwhelming when you sort of have an idea what type of tools and equipment you need to fix that hole in your wall. It can be a daunting task to go about every tool and check all the prices, specifications and utilities they have. Especially, when you yourself are not as handy as you’d like to be.
On the other hand, having an employee straight in your face after the first minute you walk in that starts asking you random questions can also be annoying.
No, you want the environment to speak for itself. You want to be guided without being disturbed or annoyed by chatbots (equals annoying employees). You need visible directions, not pushy employees.
These are the two extremes on webshops: not having any guidance, or having a chatbot in your face every 2 seconds. But there’s a better way, a middle-ground. Just like in this handy-man shop example, visitors need to be guided towards the right product. While still maintaining autonomy about their choices.
This is what a guided buying tool (product advisor) looks like. And there are solutions out there, like bluebarry, that are easy to implement and that guide buyers as a product advisor towards the right product page for them.
2. Engage buyers on your product pages
When they land on your product page, maybe because of retargeting, or a decent Google ranking, or even a well implemented product advisor, give potential customers what they want. And what they want is pretty clear from research: they want action and engagement.
And it makes sense.
Ask yourself this: why are YouTube and TikTok the 2nd and 3rd largest search engines in the world? Because people want to see and experience. This goes for products as well. People want to see honest reviews, honest product videos and transparent quality. They want all the insecurity of a bad buy removed, so they don’t have to look somewhere else to get this confirmation. Facilitate that on your product pages or in your own content.
3. Put yourself in their shoes
One of the things that we’ve talked about is the level of uncertainty that’s emerging in this stage. Uncertainty is in general related to anxiety and stress. This is literally why we call it the “stress of choice”. Physiologically we actually get stressed in the process of choosing. It’s also why decision fatigue occurs. I always try to give some real world examples of everyday situations where you can truly recognize how a buyer might be considering your product.
Sometimes it’s good to just sit and think about your buyer. Think about the steps he’s making through the journey. Not just the measurable steps, as we’ve talked about, but also the “dark” steps. The unmeasurable things.
4. Talk to them!
Talk to your customers. Ask them questions. Relevant questions.
What problem did you actually want to solve?
Why is solving that problem important to you?
What are the alternatives to our solution? What did you compare?
As you see, all open questions that open up interesting discussions with your actual buyer.
And remember: they are always right! Even if they aren’t.
5. Understand what your alternatives truly are
In the consideration phase, you have direct competitors, but you also have indirect competitors. These indirect competitors can be directly competing with your product. But from another point of view.
Try to do some Google Searches that your customer might do. What are the main brands that pop-up? But more importantly, what are other ways of solving the same problem? People perceive the value of a product in relation to the alternatives they know about.
I’ll give you one alternative or indirect competitor that you are almost always competing with:
Doing nothing…
Indecision is one of the biggest reasons people don’t buy. So that’s also who you are competing with. What are the costs of doing nothing? Not buying your product? Those are interesting insights. Which might change the perception you have about your own products.
There’s probably more
There’s probably more to it. But for now, I think you’re equipped with the right tools and ideas to make some improvements in your product positioning, buying journey, content, product pages, and more relevant assets to make sure you win over your visitors in the buying journey.
Interested to learn more? Around once a week, we share an article on this exact page. Interested to get in touch? Make sure to connect with me on LinkedIn. It would be an honour. I’m also just sharing my own learnings and ideas there. To see what sticks, see what makes an impact, and see what doesn’t.
If you’re interested in the product advisor tool I mentioned in this article. Make sure to try out bluebarry, it’s free for 30 days.
Thanks for reading, see you next time.