You’ve been working on your marketing
efforts. You’ve worked hard to develop a list of prospects; you’ve put together a great offer and you now want to get sales. Over time you find that your conversion/response is dwindling, and you aren’t sure why.
You’re not alone! I've gone through the same experience with many of my clients and have found that most are struggling to make progress even though their efforts were quite the opposite.
By understanding how people move through the sales funnel, we can work backwards and create messages that meet prospects where they are, we can then help move them through the customer value journey from the stage they currently reside in. Don’t worry about where you want them to be – focus on getting them interested enough to move forward towards making a purchase.
The best marketing
meets your prospects
where they are, not where you want them to be, and there are multiple levels.
You want to attract the right attention to produce the best result at each level, you need to be sensitive to how much your potential prospects
know at each stage, so you can create the correct message
to move the prospect through the funnel.
Eugene Schwartz established the importance of Customer Awareness
and identified five levels that form a continuum. (Breakthrough Advertising 2012)
- Most Aware
- These are your best customers – multi-buyers. Your Advocates, Promoters, most Loyal Followers. The easiest level to deal with, they only need to know the bare minimum.
- Product Aware
– as suggested your prospects know your Product or Service but haven't bought from you yet. They're familiar with your offering
and the offering of your competitors'. They're unsure of which product or service is best as their solution. Here it’s about the Benefits and Features
that make your product and service better than the rest. What blow’s your competition out of the water.
- Solution Aware
- prospects know about solutions like yours, but don't know your specific product or service
exists. They need to be convinced your product and service is the best solution, here it’s about social proof, case studies, testimonials, the unique things that differentiate you
from the rest.
- Problem Aware
– your prospects know they have a problem, and have some idea of what that problem is, but they may not completely understand it. They’re unsure of what solutions are out there. Here it’s about letting them know you ‘feel their pain’
- Unaware
- These are prospects who are completely unaware they have a problem. They simply don't know a better way exists. It’s the mass market, the most scalable level, but also the most difficult.
The Customer Awareness Levels
help us in determining the right message or promotion that will work best based on your audience segments. You can’t use the same message or copy for everyone.
A prospect that is on your email list, knows your product and services, they know what you’re about, so they don’t need to receive messages or copy on stuff they already know.
As previously stated, this helps create your Customer Value Journey
or Funnel, as your prospect moves through the Levels of Awareness
they'll move into your sales process, resulting in a purchase.
However, someone new to your website, landing page, lead magnet
(cold traffic, stranger) doesn’t know anything about you, has no reason to trust you, so your message/copy needs to build that trust, the copy needs to be based on the ‘Customer Awareness Level’ more than just illustrating authority and social proof.
Sounds obvious doesn’t it, but it's one of the biggest mistakes’
businesses make in marketing.
