In the marketing services market, you will not find two agencies offering an identical set of solutions. Even if the service is called the same — “Targeting”, “SMM” or “Content Marketing” — a detailed analysis will show that each agency interprets these words in its own way. And this is true not only for marketing, but also for all areas where the result depends on the team — its experience, attitude, values, and even mood.

However, agencies are in no hurry to make the client’s choice easier, and sometimes vice versa. Every reputable marketing agency eventually “invents” its own unique method, which it proudly presents to the world.

Choice factors: another "brilliant" marketing framework or the Grand Theory of Everything?

Yes, yes. You understood everything correctly. We are no exception. In this article, we’re going to show you our Simba, which was born in the secret laboratories of Solve Marketing and is ready to conquer the peaks.

And maybe this article will help you make your choice easier. After all, it’s all about choice.

How choice factors solve business problems

What do choosing bread at a bakery, a car at a dealership, and a marketing agency have in common?
All these decisions are made based on similar principles.
And the key business question: how do you convince a client to choose you?

If we look at the bigger picture, choice factors are a tool that makes it possible to:

  1. Increase the number of potential clients (leads), since everything a client observes externally about the company appeals to them and motivates them to reach out.
  2. Improve conversion to payment by eliminating the “gaps” that caused potential clients to go to competitors.
  3. Bring back former customers and strengthen the loyalty of existing ones by offering them exactly what they expect.
  4. Create a clear marketing plan: by knowing which factors 99% of your clients pay attention to, you’ll be able to prioritize tasks more precisely.

Now let’s see how it works.

Why clients don’t choose you (and what to do about it)


Every business sooner or later faces the problem of no sales or insufficient customer engagement.
And in such cases, it’s quite logical to ask: Why aren’t people buying from us?

Usually, the reasons can be grouped into five main categories:

  1. Clients don’t know that their need can be solved in the way you offer — a problem of lacking experience and basic information about your product or service.
  2. Clients don’t initiate interaction — when, for some reason, clients don’t want to contact you. The impression your website and social media make, and what’s written there, doesn’t inspire the client to reach out. You either don’t stand out in the client’s eyes, or you stand out in the wrong way — in other words, you’re more likely to repel than attract them.
  3. Clients don’t like the interaction experience — all of the marketer’s previous efforts can be ruined by something seemingly small, like how long it took the manager to respond, their tone of voice, or specific words used in the conversation. In reality, there are plenty of possible triggers that can make a person decide not to buy even at the communication stage.
  4. The client compared specific factors and chose someone else. This fourth category includes the price and other “rational” characteristics of your company and product. “Rational” characteristics are anything that can be expressed in numbers and easily compared.
  5. The client didn’t continue working with you or didn’t make a repeat purchase. Many companies have a huge base of “former” clients — and no one is working with them. In this case, the client simply has no reason to return.

What’s the takeaway?
 If there are plenty of reasons why a client does NOT buy, is it possible to study them, write down the full list — and do the opposite?

Exactly!

It’s impossible to predict what exactly this particular client will pay attention to. But you can anticipate and implement the most complete possible set of factors that matter to 99% of your clients.

And that’s where our Simba comes in to help!

The сhoice factors framework: how to understand a client’s logic

Maybe you’ve tried creating a typical customer avatar — to study their desires, fears, beliefs, and other psychological traits in detail?
Then you already know: having well-defined avatars for different client groups doesn’t necessarily mean those clients will choose you.

So what makes the difference?

Most clients of Solve Marketing operate in complex B2B fields: biogas facilities, manufacturers of various instruments and industrial components, logistics companies, CRM integrators, and other businesses where clients don’t come by chance.
Most importantly — every such client is highly valuable to the company, difficult to attract, and essential to retain as a “client for life”.

Over 16 years, we’ve gathered a substantial base of practical research. Surrounded by reports and backed by our clients’ sales teams, we asked ourselves one key question:
What exactly brought this particular client to the company — and made them stay for years?

That’s how the choice factors framework was born — based on five key categories:

1. Experience BEFORE interaction

This is the information a client has before the first contact with you. For example, a person who doesn’t know about laser vision correction will choose glasses instead.
Yes, the marketer’s task is to understand what experience is basic for your client. Without this experience, you simply don’t exist for the client — they might learn about your offer only by chance.
Working with this category of choice factors is especially important for startups and new products, where clients still don’t know about your way of solving their needs.

2. Positioning

This category is generally called “positioning” because it includes all external brand manifestations before the client makes an inquiry: niche, visual design, reviews, recommendations, personalities associated with the brand — basically a wide range of elements connected to packaging and the overall business description.
This allows the client to distinguish the price segment, company size and experience, values, and form a general sense of trust in the brand.
In other words, whether the client moves on to the next stage depends on the factors from this category.

3. Interaction experience

Interaction experience begins the moment the client sends you an inquiry. It continues through communication with the manager, interaction with your presentation materials, invoice payment, and the actual work process.
At every touchpoint, the client decides whether to continue cooperating, so marketing doesn’t end once the client has paid the invoice.
This category of choice factors describes in detail everything that influences the decision to stay with you.

4. Rational characteristics


We singled out a list of specific company attributes that are easy to compare with other businesses. The number of completed projects, how many years the company has been on the market, team size, prices — basically anything quantifiable.
So, you’ve probably already understood the logic: the list of choice factors includes everything the client CAN pay attention to.
But what REALLY matters? We’ll talk about that shortly.

5. Reactivation factors

Imagine a client has purchased a product once, or your joint project has ended and the client left.
When a new need arises, what will bring the client back to you?
What actions from the company will, first, remind the client of your existence, and second, stimulate their need and speed up their return?
This is the role of the choice factors category that influences client reactivation.

In practice, any division of choice factors into categories is arbitrary. The only thing you can be sure of is that when a customer has made a choice in your favour, there are reasons for it. What category these reasons are classified in is not as important as finding them and implementing them in your business.

How to turn “choice factors“ into concrete tools

Every great journey begins with a single step. The same goes for choice factors: if you identify even a few key factors important to clients in each category and implement them in your business, you will already see results.
But how far can you advance in this direction, and what kind of results will it bring?

In this case study, we share our systematic work with CRM Solutions, one of the key players in the Ukrainian CRM integrator market. We started the collaboration and built the company’s marketing practically from scratch. During this time, we identified and implemented over 100 choice factors.

To demonstrate that this is a real business tool, here are examples of choice factors and the marketing department tasks they transform into:

The example of CRM Solutions shows that the systematic implementation of choice factors helped increase the average check by 30% annually, while the number of inquiries grew from 10 to 150 per month.

We’ve used the choice factors framework in 70+ businesses: from CRM integrators, SaaS services, mobile apps, to complex manufacturing topics. And it works! But, as with everything else, a systematic and consistent approach is important.

Marketing, like other business functions, is sensitive to the principles of marginal gains, which we have described in detail here.

The essence of the concept is that even small steps in every aspect of work significantly improve the overall result. The cumulative effect of seemingly small changes affects the company’s success. It is the same with choice factors: significant results can be achieved when the maximum number of choice factors are found and implemented, and this process does not stop while the company is operating.

What is the key feature of this framework?

Aside from the fact that this is our very own Ukrainian framework, there are at least two reasons why it’s worth using:

1. Marketing emerged in response to a surplus of supply over demand. When empty store shelves became a thing of the past, we found ourselves in an overwhelming world of competing offers.
And suddenly, we realized that low price is not a universal choice factor for everyone. In other words, different people may have different reasons for buying certain products or services.
The trend of customer orientation began with audience segmentation and evolved into a one-to-one marketing approach.

The choice factors framework is a logical continuation of the research by Don Peppers and Martha Rogers, authors of the book “The One to One Future: Building Relationships One Customer at a Time“.
In that book, they proposed the idea that the future of marketing lies not in mass advertising, but in personalized interactions with each customer.

But is it possible to create personalization before you even know the client?
Yes. And some of the steps to do this are already actively used in digital marketing.
For example, creating landing pages for specific audience segments is nothing more than a step toward a specific client.
That’s exactly how the choice factors framework works: we imagine each client’s journey as a sequence of likely touchpoints, each one part of a unique path to purchase.

We don’t know for certain what will influence the choice of any particular client.
But if we’ve implemented 100+ of the most important factors, the probability that 10–20 of the ones that matter to this client will align with what we’ve built is quite high.
Which means the likelihood of them choosing us also increases.

2. Researching choice factors allows you to build a marketing development plan for years ahead.
 Currently, in every project we work on, there’s a clear backlog based on choice factors.
Together with the client, we assess how frequently each factor appears, how important it is, how well it’s currently implemented — or whether it’s missing entirely.
From this, we build a list of tasks for both the marketing team and product development.

In other words, the business gains a solid foundation for decision-making: whether to invest in a specific task now or postpone it.
Marketing is the science of choice — and choice factors make this science practical and applicable to a specific business.

Checklist: do you need choice factors?

Here’s a quick checklist that usually makes it clear that your business needs to pay attention to the choice factors. By answering these questions, you will see where the gaps are:

  1. What exactly do clients need to know in order to understand your offer?
     Do you have such a list?
  2. Do you clearly understand how you differ from competitors — and do clients actually notice this?
  3. What kind of interaction experience is ideal for your client?
     Do you understand what separates the current experience from the ideal one?
  4. Which specific numerical indicators matter to your client?
  5. What will influence the client’s decision to come back to you again?

If you answered “no” or “not sure” to at least some of these questions, this is an area for improvement. And the easiest way to improve is to analyse the choice factors that are important to your audience and implement them.

Conclusions: from planning to action

If your business is operating, it means clients are already choosing you.
But can you make them choose you more often? Yes!

  1. Start small.
     Identify 5–10 key factors that influence your clients’ decisions and take the first steps toward implementing them.
  2. Measure and analyze.
     Study audience reactions, test hypotheses, and draw conclusions based on real data.
  3. Be consistent.
     Keep adding new factors, improve the client experience, and remind them about your brand — this is how you build marketing systematically.
  4. Build your marketing strategy.
     Over time, you’ll develop a clear backlog of tasks that will allow you to plan your marketing efforts at least a year in advance.

All that separates you (so far) from the market leader is the quantity and quality of implementation of the choice factors that your customers consider important.