The Power of Hesitations to Buy

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Most of the time when researching to make ads, we think about reasons to buy from the brand or product.

One of the most important parts of research has nothing to do with reasons to buy - in fact it is the opposite, hesitations to buy.

It doesn’t matter how great your product or brand is, there will always be hesitations to buy from the consumer.

If you understand how to use hesitations to your advantage, you will get ads that print money.

Oh - by the way, I have a podcast called In the Cutting Room that talks about this:

I need to tell people more about my podcast.

1. What are hesitations to buy

Hesitations are hurdles customers have to jump over to get to buying your product.

Ads should speak to these hesitations and make it faster for consumers to jump over those hurdles.

A lot of times reasons to buy a product speak to the hesitations, but having a true understanding of what your consumer is thinking in terms of hesitations is powerful.

It is important that your ads speak to all of the hesitations all the time.

Here are a few hesitation examples:

• Price

• Skeptical of results

• Unsure of credibility

Ad examples to speak to hesitations:

• Show value to be more than price. Maybe price per day versus month.

• Bring in clinical results or show many customer results

• Have experts on ads to talk about the product and results

You can quickly see from these examples how hesitations can frame your ads to speak to your ideal customer. Understanding the hesitations to buy allows you to create ads from a stance of empathy for your consumer.

2. How to find hesitations

Talk to customers

Call up customers or email them. Personally what almost held them back from buying? Figure out what other solutions they were looking for or using before buying. Get into the shoes of the consumer by asking them. This exercise will allow you to go deeper with the experiences of the buyer.

Look at reviews

Many reviews will say what held them back and the relief once they did buy. An example would be, “I wasn’t sure it would be worth this monthly payment but now I am kicking myself for not getting this sooner. This product has changed my life and my skincare routine is better than ever.” Reviews can give you stories behind the customers.

Don’t be biased

This is hard, because we always will have bias. Take your brand advocate hat off, and try to see your product more objectively. What makes it hard to buy? How does it stack up against competition? Why would people choose another brand over yours? Customers and reviews can be a good starting point and then use this line of communication to go deeper with the hesitations.

3. How to use hesitations to your advantage

Hesitations can be talking points in an ad or they can create great ideas for full video concepts. Like I said at the beginning of the newsletter, hesitations can help your format or frame your next ad.

Let’s say you have three hesitations to buy.

You can have one video ad per hesitation and one static per hesitation. Let’s stack that with one video and static ad that speak all three hesitations to buy. All of a sudden you 4 videos and 4 statics to run. Of course there are many ways to talk about each hesitation so by identifying your hesitations to buy, you could come up with 12 video ideas and 12 static ideas quickly.

Beyond creative volume, you could also find new ways to communicate and show your product because your are thinking about addressing negatives head on. The expansion of ideas comes from this exercise.

I hope this was helpful. Let me know if you want me to address anything in the future for you. Just reply and I can write about it.

Make sure to check out the podcast.

Until then, keep creating!

Matthew Gattozzi

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Content you should watch

We are dropping Youtube videos every few weeks, this was a fun one to dive into predictions of advertising. Let me know if you agree or disagree.

Did you know we had a podcast called In the Cutting Room. Episodes drop every Tuesday. Make sure to listen to it on Apple, Spotify, or Youtube.

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