Consideration Strategy: Why Most Brands Skip the Most Important Stage
Consideration strategy is the deliberate work of moving a prospect from awareness to active evaluation. It is the middle stage of the purchase experience, and it is where most marketing budgets are either wasted or quietly doing nothing at all.
Most brands treat consideration as a gap between their brand campaign and their performance campaign. They fill that gap with retargeting pixels and hope. That is not a strategy. It is a placeholder.
Key Takeaways
- Consideration is the stage where purchase decisions are actually shaped, not just captured, and most brands underinvest in it precisely because it is harder to measure than clicks.
- Performance marketing at the bottom of the funnel largely captures demand that already exists. Consideration strategy is what creates the conditions for that demand in the first place.
- The goal of consideration content is not to inform, it is to reduce perceived risk and make the mental shortlist before a prospect ever enters a search bar.
- Brands that dominate consideration tend to win on familiarity and trust, not on price or product features alone.
- Attribution tools will almost never credit consideration activity accurately, which is why most organisations deprioritise it. That is a structural bias in measurement, not evidence that it does not work.
In This Article
Why Consideration Gets Skipped
Early in my career, I was obsessed with the bottom of the funnel. Cost per acquisition, return on ad spend, conversion rate. The numbers were clean and the logic felt airtight. If someone clicks and buys, the ad worked. If they do not, it did not. Simple.
The problem with that view is that it treats intent as a given. Someone types a search query, they are already in market, your ad captures them. But where did that intent come from? What made them search in the first place? What made them choose your category over another? Those questions do not have tidy attribution answers, so most performance-first organisations stop asking them.
I spent years running campaigns that looked efficient on paper. Then I started asking harder questions about incrementality. How much of what we were crediting to performance media was actually being created by it, versus simply intercepted? The honest answer was uncomfortable. A significant portion of the conversions we were claiming would have happened anyway. The person was already going to buy. We just happened to be the last touchpoint before they did.
Consideration strategy is what happens upstream. It is what puts you on the mental shortlist before the search ever happens. And if you are not on that shortlist, no amount of bottom-funnel spend will consistently save you.
What Consideration Actually Means
Consideration sits between awareness and purchase. A prospect knows you exist. They are not yet ready to buy. The question is whether, when they do become ready, they think of you at all, and whether they think of you favourably enough to evaluate you seriously.
That sounds obvious. It is less obvious in practice, because consideration is not a single moment. It is a period that can last days, weeks, or months depending on the category. A consumer buying a pair of trainers might spend two days in consideration. A procurement team evaluating enterprise software might spend eight months. The mechanics are different, but the strategic challenge is the same: you need to be present and credible during that window, or you lose ground to competitors who are.
Think of it like a clothes shop. Someone who walks in and tries something on is far more likely to buy than someone who walks past the window. The act of trying on reduces risk, builds familiarity, and shifts the relationship from abstract to concrete. Consideration strategy is the marketing equivalent of getting people into the fitting room.
That is not a metaphor about content volume. It is about the quality of the interaction. One genuinely useful piece of content that helps a prospect think more clearly about their problem is worth more than ten pieces that just restate your product features.
If you are building out your broader go-to-market thinking, the Go-To-Market and Growth Strategy hub covers how consideration fits within a wider commercial framework.
The Mental Shortlist Problem
When a buyer enters active evaluation, they do not start from zero. They start with a mental shortlist. That shortlist is shaped by everything that came before: what they have seen, read, heard, and remembered. If you are not on it, you are fighting an uphill battle. The buyer has to discover you, evaluate you, and overcome the inertia of already having options they feel comfortable with.
This is where consideration strategy earns its keep. The brands that consistently appear on mental shortlists are not always the biggest spenders. They are the ones that showed up with useful, credible, relevant content during the period when buyers were forming opinions, even passively.
When I was at iProspect growing the team from around 20 people to over 100, one of the things that changed our commercial trajectory was not winning more pitches. It was being invited to more of them. That shift happened because we had built enough of a reputation in certain sectors that when clients were forming their shortlists, our name came up. Consideration strategy at an agency level is essentially the same problem. You cannot win business you are never considered for.
The same logic applies to product and service brands across every category. Market penetration is partly a function of how many buyers actively consider you, not just how many of them eventually convert. Widening the consideration set is a growth lever that most performance-focused teams never pull.
What a Consideration Strategy Actually Contains
A consideration strategy is not a content calendar. It is a set of deliberate choices about who you are trying to influence, what they need to believe in order to evaluate you seriously, and what you are going to do to get them there.
Those choices tend to cluster around four areas.
1. Audience definition
Not everyone in your awareness pool is worth targeting at the consideration stage. Some people will never buy, regardless of how much content they consume. Others are ready to buy but need a specific piece of information to push them forward. A consideration strategy requires you to be honest about which segments are actually worth investing in and what their specific decision criteria look like.
This is harder than it sounds. Most brands define their target audience at a level of abstraction that is useless for consideration planning. “Marketing managers at mid-size B2B companies” tells you almost nothing about what they need to believe before they will put you on their shortlist. You need to go deeper: what are they worried about getting wrong, what does their internal approval process look like, who else influences the decision.
2. Belief mapping
Before a prospect will seriously evaluate you, they need to hold certain beliefs. They need to believe the category is relevant to their problem. They need to believe your brand is credible. They need to believe the risk of choosing you is manageable. Consideration strategy is largely the work of identifying which of those beliefs are missing or weak, and then addressing them directly.
One of the most useful exercises I have done with clients is mapping the gap between what prospects currently believe and what they need to believe to evaluate you seriously. That gap tells you exactly what your consideration content needs to do. It is rarely “explain our product features more clearly.” It is usually something more fundamental, like “make them believe this problem is worth solving now” or “reduce the perceived risk of switching.”
3. Channel and format selection
Consideration content needs to reach people when they are in an evaluative mindset, not just when they are scrolling passively. That has implications for channel selection. A YouTube pre-roll might build awareness effectively. It is a poor format for consideration, because the viewer is not in a frame of mind to engage with comparative or detailed information.
Formats that tend to perform well at the consideration stage include long-form editorial, comparison content, case studies, third-party reviews, and anything that helps a prospect think more clearly about their decision. Creator partnerships can also work well here, particularly when the creator has genuine expertise in the category rather than just reach. Creator-led go-to-market strategies are increasingly being used not just for awareness but for building credibility with specific audiences who trust particular voices more than brand channels.
4. Timing and sequencing
Consideration is not a single touchpoint. It is a sequence. The mistake most brands make is treating consideration as a single piece of content or a single campaign. A prospect who has just become aware of you needs different things than a prospect who has been evaluating you for six weeks. Your strategy needs to account for both, and for everything in between.
This is where the mechanics of a consideration strategy start to look more like a programme than a campaign. You are building a series of interactions that progressively reduce uncertainty, build familiarity, and make the case for your brand over time. That requires more patience than most organisations are comfortable with, and more budget commitment to activity that will not show up cleanly in a performance dashboard.
The Measurement Problem
I have judged the Effie Awards, which are specifically designed to recognise marketing effectiveness. One thing that stands out when you read through the entrants is how often the most commercially effective work is the hardest to attribute. The brands that win on consideration, that build genuine category authority and mental availability over time, rarely have a clean data story. They have a business story.
The measurement problem with consideration is structural. Attribution models are built around clicks and conversions. Consideration often works through memory, familiarity, and trust, none of which register as events in a tracking system. So when a prospect searches for your brand six months after reading a piece of content you published, the search gets credited to brand paid search. The content gets credited to nothing.
This creates a systematic bias in how organisations allocate budget. Activity that is easy to measure looks productive. Activity that is hard to measure looks like a cost. Over time, that bias hollows out the middle of the funnel and leaves brands entirely dependent on capturing demand that already exists, rather than building the conditions that create it.
The honest response to this is not to pretend consideration is easily measurable. It is to use proxy metrics with clear-eyed scepticism: brand search volume trends, direct traffic patterns, share of voice in relevant editorial contexts, win rate on shortlisted opportunities. None of these are perfect. They are better than ignoring the problem.
Behavioural analytics tools can help you understand how prospects are engaging with your content once they arrive, even if they cannot tell you why they arrived. Understanding how users interact with your site at the consideration stage can reveal which content is actually doing the work and which is just generating pageviews with no downstream effect.
Where Consideration Strategy Breaks Down
There are a few failure modes I see repeatedly.
The first is confusing consideration content with brand content. Brand content is designed to create emotional associations. Consideration content is designed to help a prospect make a better decision. These are different jobs. Content that is beautiful, on-brand, and emotionally resonant can still be completely useless at the consideration stage if it does not address the actual questions a prospect is trying to answer.
The second is treating consideration as a one-size-fits-all stage. A prospect who found you through a search query has different needs than a prospect who was referred by a colleague. A prospect in a high-stakes B2B purchase has different needs than a consumer making a low-risk lifestyle decision. Consideration strategy needs to be segmented, not just by demographics but by context, stakes, and decision dynamics.
The third is underestimating how long consideration takes in complex categories. I have worked across more than 30 industries, and the length of the consideration window varies enormously. In some categories, a prospect might spend a weekend evaluating options. In others, particularly in B2B or high-value consumer purchases, the consideration period can stretch across months and involve multiple stakeholders. A strategy built for a short consideration window will fail in a long one, and vice versa.
The fourth is assuming that good awareness work automatically feeds consideration. It does not. You can have strong brand recall and still be excluded from serious evaluation because prospects do not believe you are credible in their specific context. Awareness and consideration are related but distinct. A brand that is well-known but not trusted will not make the shortlist.
For a broader view of how consideration fits within product launch and go-to-market planning, the BCG framework for go-to-market launch strategy is worth reading, particularly for categories where the consideration window is long and the decision criteria are complex.
How to Build a Consideration Strategy That Actually Works
Start with the decision, not the product. What decision is your prospect trying to make, and what do they need to believe, know, or feel in order to make it confidently? That question should drive everything else.
Map the consideration experience for your specific category. Talk to recent buyers. Ask them what they evaluated, what they were worried about, what content they found useful, and where they found it. Do not rely on assumed buyer personas. Talk to actual buyers. The gap between assumed and actual consideration behaviour is almost always larger than expected.
Identify the moments where you are currently absent. If you do not appear in the search results for the questions your prospects are asking during evaluation, you are not part of their consideration process. If your brand is not mentioned in the editorial and review content they consume, you are not part of it. Absence at the consideration stage is not neutral. It is a competitive disadvantage.
Build content that reduces uncertainty rather than just communicating value. The most effective consideration content is not a sales document. It is something that helps a prospect think more clearly. Comparison guides, honest assessments of where your product is and is not the right fit, detailed case studies with specific outcomes, third-party validation. These are the formats that move people from passive awareness to active evaluation.
Commit to a time horizon that matches your category. If your consideration window is three months, your strategy needs to be built to operate across three months. If it is six, build for six. The temptation is always to compress this, because shorter programmes are easier to approve and easier to measure. Resist it. A consideration strategy that runs for half the time it needs to will produce half the results, and the attribution will not tell you why.
There is more on how consideration connects to broader growth planning in the Go-To-Market and Growth Strategy hub, including how to sequence investment across the full purchase experience without defaulting to a performance-first allocation that starves the middle of the funnel.
About the Author
Keith Lacy is a marketing strategist and former agency CEO with 20+ years of experience across agency leadership, performance marketing, and commercial strategy. He writes The Marketing Juice to cut through the noise and share what works.
