Most marketing organizations have clear owners at either end of the funnel. Brand teams build awareness and performance teams convert demand into revenue. The middle tends to be less clear. Responsibility is spread across media, content, social, CRM, creators and brand, while each team works towards its own objectives.
That becomes a problem when awareness isn’t translating into enough people who seriously consider buying. People may know your brand without understanding why it is relevant to them, how it differs from the alternatives or why they should choose it. When too few people make that transition, performance eventually has a smaller pool of potential customers to convert, however efficiently it captures the demand that already exists.
To solve this, you need to identify what’s stopping aware customers from moving towards purchase and make changing that barrier a clear job for marketing.
First, establish whether consideration is actually the constraint
Before trying to fix consideration, you need to know that this is where growth is breaking down.
Look for a disconnect between awareness and the signals that show people moving closer to purchase. If awareness is growing but consideration and higher-intent behaviors aren’t moving with it, that’s one indication the gap sits in the middle. Another is when conversion remains efficient among people already close to purchase, but the number of new customers reaching that point isn’t growing.
No single metric will diagnose that on its own. Brand tracking can show whether awareness is translating into consideration, while search behavior, product and comparison-page engagement, CRM data and audience growth can help show whether more people are moving closer to purchase. Look at those signals together to understand where momentum starts to break down.
If that evidence points to consideration, you’ve narrowed the problem. The next step is working out why customers are getting stuck there.
Find the barrier before you build the media plan
“Low consideration” is a symptom. To build a strategy around it, you need to understand what’s causing it.
The barrier might be price perception, a lack of credibility, weak differentiation or simply that people don’t see the brand as relevant to the need they’re trying to solve. Customer research, brand tracking and behavioral data can help distinguish between them, but the goal is the same: get specific about why someone who knows the brand still isn’t seriously considering it.
That specificity matters because each barrier requires a different response. If people don’t understand why the product is worth the price, simply reaching more of them won’t solve it. If they understand the proposition but trust a competitor more, repeating the proposition won’t solve that either. The diagnosis needs to tell marketing what actually has to change.
That’s the difference between “we need to increase consideration” and “people know us, but they don’t understand why we’re worth the premium.” The first gives you an outcome to chase. The second gives you a problem you can build a strategy around.
Make changing the barrier the brief
Once the barrier is clear, it becomes the organizing principle for the strategy. Take the premium-perception example. If people already know the brand but don’t understand why it’s worth paying more for, the immediate job is to give them a compelling reason to believe the premium is justified. That tells creative what it needs to communicate, whether that’s product quality, differentiation, customer proof or something else. Media can then determine where and how that message has the best chance of changing perception among the right audience.
The same logic applies to a credibility problem, a relevance problem or a weak understanding of the proposition. Different channels and teams may ultimately play different roles, but those roles are determined by the barrier they’re trying to remove. Creators might provide the proof a brand cannot credibly provide itself. Search or content might answer questions customers need resolved before buying. Paid media might build familiarity with a use case the brand isn’t currently associated with.
This is also how consideration gets clearer ownership without creating another team for the middle of the funnel. Media, creative, brand, social and CRM don’t all need to own the same activity. They need to be accountable to the same customer change. Instead of each function optimizing its piece of the journey independently, everyone knows what needs to be different in the customer’s mind or behavior for more people to move forward.
Measure the movement you set out to create
Once the strategy is built around a specific barrier, measurement can follow the same logic.
If the problem is price perception, start by establishing whether that perception changes among the audience you’re trying to influence. If it’s relevance, measure whether more people begin associating the brand with the need or use case you’re trying to own. If it’s credibility, look for movement in trust or the specific proof points customers were missing.
Then look for evidence that the change is carrying forward. Are more people searching for the brand or product? Exploring relevant product or comparison pages? Entering higher-intent audiences? Converting at a greater rate once they get there?
The goal is to build a chain of evidence from the customer problem to the commercial outcome: did we change the barrier, did that help more people move towards purchase, and did that movement contribute to additional growth?
Incrementality testing can help establish whether the intervention created outcomes that would not otherwise have happened, while MMM can show how consideration investment contributes to growth alongside the rest of the media mix.
This is more useful than searching for one perfect “mid-funnel KPI.” It also gives you better information when something isn’t working. If perception changes but intent doesn’t, the next problem is different from a campaign where perception never moved in the first place. Measurement should help you locate the next constraint, rather than simply tell you whether a campaign hit its targets.
Turning consideration into something you can act on
The consideration gap calls for a clearer diagnosis of the customer problem that sits between the teams you already have. Once that problem is understood, those teams can align around changing it.
Find where customers stop progressing. Identify what’s preventing them from moving forward. Make changing that barrier the shared brief, give each team a clear role in creating that change, and measure whether it ultimately produces additional growth.
That gives consideration something much more useful than an owner. It gives marketing a specific problem to solve.
