The consideration stage of inbound marketing is the second step down the funnel toward a final purchase. It’s where people are fully aware of their problem and are now beginning to seek out a remedy for it. This is when your prospects are spending their time doing deeper research and preparing for the next step.
After your work with a web designer on creating awareness-level content and design, you have hopefully become familiar with how to attract the leads you want and guide them through your site easily. If you've attracted the right demographic, it's time to refine your site so you can continue to nurture and reach those who may consider buying a product or service from you.
Since your prospective customers are still evaluating the possible solutions to their problem in the consideration phase, they could walk away in an instant if you don’t provide content and navigation suited to their needs.
Here are some custom web design ideas to keep consideration-level visitors interested so you can add more content later to convert them.
Optimizing Your Website for Conversions
Think about what keeps your prospects coming back for more—in many cases, it isn’t just the content. People continuously come back to sites for information that they find to be clean, simple, easy to read, and easy to uncover what they are looking for.
Visitors are more apt to identify themselves when you've developed a sense of trust and credibility on your site. Make sure the content you offer is in a prominent spot on your main page so it isn't missed. For instance, if you're offering e-book content, align it with the service pages in which you know your audience is most interested.
Make it clear what the user gets in exchange for identifying themselves and present it in a way that makes them feel good about it.
Case Studies
Providing statistics about your products or services on your site is important, but there is a proper way to do it. Visitors want to see definitive evidence of what you’re capable of so they know what you can offer them.
Case studies show how your products or services match up in a real-world context. By proving that these features have solved problems more efficiently than the competition, you’re not just saying that you’re the better option—you’re showing it.
Keep in mind, you still shouldn't use any sales tactics at this point. You'll be tempted to through case studies, but save this for the final buying decision stage.
Creating Custom Contact Forms
Custom contact forms are a vital part of design that far too many businesses forget to include when building or improving their sites. They enhance the promotion of events, subscriptions, or even e-commerce. How they look matters as much as a call-to-action button does.
Ideally, forms that are designed with intent and live on your site serve as a gate keeper for moving your prospects through the conversion process. They give you their personal information like their name, email, and company—in return, you give them a valuable and educational piece of content like an e-book.
Visitors may also want to contact you with questions about their pain points. Being able to answer their questions will build trust. Make all contact forms easy to read and use so they can reach you through multiple means. It doesn't hurt to even design a live chat portal for more immediacy in fielding questions.
Using Clear Calls to Action
The main goal of a call to action is to entice your visitors to do something specific. So how do you entice them to actually follow through? With the custom design of your choosing. There are best practices on color, size, and placement on your site.
During the consideration stage, the most important thing you can invite people to do is click! Sometimes users can't tell the difference between a link button and a static graphic, so make a "Click here" prominent enough for someone to know where to go.
The goal of your design during this stage on the funnel is to simplify things for your visitors, offer them content you already know they are interested in, and keep pushing them toward that final decision stage.