How to Create Meaningful Buyer Personas for the Buyer's Journey: Consideration Stage

The buyer's journey is an important part of Kuno Creative's marketing success. Our strategies continue to evolve based on the buyer's journey for each of our clients. This six-part blog series describes each stage of the buyer's journey and how buyer personas can help facilitate promising strategies and success. This is the third blog within the series.

We’ve determined that the awareness stage is about the problem. So what about the solution?

This is called the consideration stage.

Remember the trigger events we mentioned in our previous post? When those trigger events occur and the company signals that they are willing to shake up the status quo in order to find a solution, it means they are looking for a company to help make that solution possible.

A Real-Life Example

A healthcare organization has recently experienced a change in leadership. The new executive team has fresh ideas to take the organization in a new direction since the pandemic took effect. This new direction leaves some of the old ways behind and challenges the status quo. One specific way the status quo is being challenged is by putting more emphasis on their telemedicine services by implementing a strong healthcare digital marketing strategy.

What can we learn from this? The healthcare organization is actively seeking new ways to achieve goals and, in turn, new solutions for helping patients and providing excellent care. The new leadership wants to get the word out to the local community that the organization offers telehealth services.

This type of thinking is the doorway into the consideration phase of the buyer journey. Assuming many discussions have happened regarding these new ideas, the organization’s new team now knows there are options out there to help achieve the goals of letting locals know they have access to these types of services.

Buyer Persona Development for the Consideration Stage

Now that the healthcare organization is aware of what wasn’t working before in terms of promotion and the solution options, what’s next? Well, that depends. To find out what happens at this stage in the buying process in your particular market, you’ll need to turn to buyer personas.

Here are some questions to ask existing customers about the way they navigated the consideration stage of the buying process:

1. When you first started looking for solutions to your problem, what did you perceive your options to be?
2. How did you look for information about your options? If you did a Google search, what words or phrases did you Google? Did you use voice search? Was your search query in question form?
3. Who at your company did you talk to about what you were doing, and what were their responses? Did you have a sense of who would need to be involved to make an actual purchase decision?
4. What were your impressions of the information you found? What made you dig further or abandon each one?

Once you have answers to these questions, you’ll want to take the answers into consideration and modify your efforts to align with the way your buyers think.

• Review the keywords mentioned and ask yourself if your website and any of your other content includes those keywords.
• From there, you’ll want to conduct some keyword research to determine whether you currently rank for the top phrases in your industry. If you don’t, you can start trying to rank for relevant keywords by including them in your content as part of your keyword strategy.
• Review your website from the perspective of your buyer. In the example given of the healthcare organization implementing telemedicine services, ensure patients won’t abandon your website because they couldn’t find information on virtual services. To do this, you’ll want to make sure you not only have a page dedicated to this new service line, but a clear path to get to it from your homepage.

Types of Content at the Consideration Stage

Different types of content are better suited for different stages, and these are the best for those in the consideration stage:

• eBooks
• Guides
• Checklists

Positioning Yourself for Consideration

Making it through the consideration stage is about positioning yourself as a viable option among a lot of other competitors. That means knowing what’s out there and working to stay in the game. With accurate buyer personas, you’ll have the information you need to create content that’ll keep you on the shortlist.

But don’t stop there. The next step in the buyer’s journey is decision. This is where the fun begins. 

Read Part 1: Buyer Personas

Read Part 2: Awareness Stage