How to Use Consideration Content to Move Prospects Down the Funnel
August 4th, 2021 by
Key Insights
- Understanding the buyer’s journey is key to developing content that leads to conversions.
- The goals of consideration content are showing prospects how you can address their problem and getting them to add your business to their list of options.
- There are several types of consideration-level content that can be created and tracking methods to determine if your content is successful.
Imagine you’re the marketing coordinator for a small college that caters to working adults looking to change careers. Your ideal prospect is at home with their kids, frustrated with their current employment, and they decide they’d like to go back to school and get a degree or certification. They’ve now identified their need for your service.
They begin researching going back to school and land on a blog on your college’s site titled “8 Reasons to Consider Going Back to School.” Your team’s goal is now to get the prospect from the very top of the funnel to the consideration phase and through to conversion. But, how? In this post, we’ll discuss the consideration stage, what consideration content looks like, how to plan content creation, and how to track its success.
What Is the Consideration Phase?
The consideration phase is a stage in the marketing funnel. The marketing funnel visualizes the path that your potential customers will travel through on their purchase journey. This funnel consists of five stages: awareness, consideration, decision, conversion, and delight.
- Awareness: The prospect is aware of their problem or need and potential solutions to address it.
- Consideration (also sometimes referred to as Interest and/or Evaluation): The prospect shows interest in solving their problems by evaluating their options.
- Decision: The prospect is actively evaluating your brand and maybe others.
- Conversion (also referred to as Commitment or Close): The prospect closes and becomes a customer.
- Delight: This stage involves maintaining communication with your customers after they’ve made a purchase. Your goal is to establish brand loyalty and make customers promoters of your business.
Understanding the buyer’s journey is a key to developing content that leads to conversions. You’ll want to create content that understands your prospects’ problems and help them understand the options to mitigate their problem. The consideration phase in the buyer’s journey is where you want to offer your target audience content that will have them actively consider your business as a solution to help solve their problem. You’ll want this content to be informational but not too sales-y and overly promotional.
Defining Consideration Content
During the consideration phase, your content should highlight your products and services. What makes your product or service unique? What do your current customers and clients think about you? Are there free trials or demonstrations you can offer? You’ll want to help your prospect decide on their solution, and there are several types of content you can create to guide them to the decision phase.
Downloadable Content
Downloadable content can help usher your prospects from consideration to conversion. There are multiple types of downloadable content, including:
- White Papers: A report or guide that informs the reader about a specific topic. White papers are usually an authoritative, in-depth persuasive piece that presents a problem and then provides the reader a solution.
- E-Books: These longer-form downloads are similar to physical books. In contrast to white papers, they may be longer in length and even more in-depth. E-books may include a layout that makes information easier to digest.
- Content Downloads: This type of content is usually in the form of a PDF and shorter than both a white paper and an e-book and includes informational content about a topic related to your product or service.
Videos
Video content is great for storytelling and demonstrations. This could be a how-to video or a customer giving a riveting review of their experience with your services. The great news: you can create effective and engaging video content in-house with online resources.
Cost Calculators
Everyone has a budget, and cost calculators can help your prospect see the projected cost of your services or product and if there are any money-saving bonuses available. Cost calculators allow a user to input a few variables and get an estimated cost for the product or service. These are common across colleges and universities to calculate student tuition but can be useful for other industries like software companies or home improvement businesses.
Webinars
These virtual events can be a workshop, lecture, or even a simple presentation. Webinars allow your prospects to engage with your business while gathering relevant information about your product or services.
Planning Consideration Content: How to Brainstorm
You should build your consideration content around two things:
- Answering your prospects’ questions
- Addressing their pain points
Here are some ideas to help brainstorm and begin planning out consideration-level content.
Tap Into Customer Feedback
You can utilize customer feedback from review sites, surveys, and testimonials to get an idea of your customers’ frequent questions, concerns, and general feedback. This creates relevant, helpful content since it’s based on what your customers are already saying and asking about your business.
Focus on the Sales Process
During your sales process, you probably get a lot of good questions from prospects. This is a great place to get content ideas. If a prospect has a specific question during a consultation, it’s likely other people who may be researching your product or service have it as well.
Use Search Phrases
Doing keyword research can give you an idea of questions people have about your industry and services. This can be done in a few ways:
-
- Google Search Console: With Google Search Console, you can see which queries give impressions to your website. Look for queries that have high impressions but no clicks; these may give you ideas of what people are looking for and provide questions to answer.
- Google Auto Suggestions: If there are phrases or questions you know your customers or prospects use to find you or ask, you can place these into Google and take note of the suggestions Google presents to you. These searches are so common that Google is suggesting them to you.
- Google Keyword Planner: Google Keyword Planner is usually used for Google Ads campaigns, but you can use it for organic content development as well. Similar to above, add the phrases to the tool to get more keyword ideas.
- Answer the Public: This tool visualizes search questions and suggested searches. Drop a keyword related to your product or service, and Answer the Public will provide you with hundreds of questions that can be used to help you develop your content.
How to Set Goals and Track Success
Now that you know what consideration content is and how you can start planning your own content, how do you get users and prospects to engage with your content? To get them to take that desired next action, you’ll need the right call to action. What is the next step to expect from a prospect at this stage? You’ll need to understand your buyer’s journey to know what the appropriate call to action is.
Typically, moving into the consideration stage involves the prospect making a small commitment in exchange for their contact info for one of the pieces of downloadable content we mentioned above.
Depending on your buyer’s journey, the next step could be a light or hard ask to:
- Visit your website
- Sign up for a webinar
- Download a PDF or white paper
- Filling out an inquiry form
When your prospect takes whatever action you define, this will move them into the consideration stage of the marketing funnel.
How will you know if your content is successful? What metrics should you measure? To successfully track and measure your digital marketing efforts, you should set up Google Analytics to report site traffic, visits, conversions, and other tracking metrics.
At the consideration stage, you should be measuring:
- Call-to-action performance
- Content downloads
- Site traffic
- Time on site
- Bounce rate
- Comments
- Video watch time
Consideration content is all about engaging your prospects, answering their questions, and moving them to the next stage in the funnel. Now that you know how to create content, what will you work on first?
Partner with Search Influence to develop a custom marketing strategy that aligns with your business goals and helps move your prospects down the marketing funnel and closer to the sale. Schedule a free consulting session with one of our strategists to get started.
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