The Awareness Stage: Strategies and Best Types of Content
Consumers can’t purchase products or services from your business if they don’t know these items exist. This is where understanding the buyer’s journey is incredibly important. The first stage of the buyer’s journey is called as the awareness stage and is used to make these consumers aware of your brand and what products or services you have to offer them.
The entire process of the buyer’s journey is a sales funnel. Within this sales funnel, some marketing content, tactics, strategies, and campaigns are going to work best for each stage of the buyer’s journey. So, your business’s marketing and content needs are going to differ from when you’re at the top of the funnel to when you’re at the bottom.
When attempting to gain brand awareness for your business, you’re placed at the top of the funnel, or TOFU. The strategies and types of content you’re going to use for the awareness stage of the buyer’s journey need to be in line with marketing tactics fitting with the top of the funnel.
In this article, we’re going to explore the topic of the awareness stage and provide valuable information on how to create the best content that attracts potential customers and increases your lead generation.
What is the Awareness Stage?
The awareness stage is the first phase of the buyer’s journey and is the process of making potential customers aware of your business, its brand, and its products or services. During this awareness stage, prospective clients are just experiencing symptoms of a specific problem and are trying to place a name on it. These users are browsing through the internet in an attempt to figure out this issue and get a solution.
This is where your business comes in to save the day. By offering the right content, you have the ability to provide a solution for this prospective customer. The client doesn’t know your business or how it can offer a solution. In this awareness stage, it’s your job to make these potential clients aware of your brand and the products or services you can offer them.
What are the Goals of the Awareness Stage?
The ultimate goal of the awareness stage is to develop content that attracts leads and encourages these leads to become potential customers. Creating this content aims to get your business and its products or services in front of those who want or need what you have to offer but don’t know it yet.
What Role Does the Awareness Stage Play in the Buyer’s Journey?
The awareness stage plays a vital role in establishing the mechanisms that kick-start the entire buyer’s journey. How is this possible?
Well, the content created for the other stages of the buyer’s journey (consideration, decision, and closing) is irrelevant if there aren’t any leads that are made aware of your business and its products or services. The awareness stage can be seen as the foundation of the buyer’s journey that allows all the other aspects of the buyer’s journey to be set in motion.
Marketing Strategies for the Awareness Stage
Before discussing the different types of content that you can develop specifically for the awareness stage, you need to identify the awareness stage’s marketing strategies. Some marketing tactics are primarily for the top of the funnel and need to be understood before effective content creation can occur.
The most effective and straightforward method of approaching top-funnel marketing is to analyze and evaluate the following questions:
1. What Is Your Brand?
The audience you’re targeting during this awareness stage either doesn’t know what your business is or only has a very limited amount of knowledge of your brand and the products or services you offer. Before anyone buys from your business, they are likely going to want to know who your brand is and what it’s selling.
This goes far beyond just introducing yourself and the product you’re selling. Your audience won’t simply trade their money for your product or service. This money is only being used to support brands that these customers trust.
So, you need to provide your target audience with information that helps them understand your brand and its values. Doing this aids in increasing your conversions, which is the goal of the awareness stage.
How you can achieve this:
- Don’t provide any sales pressure.
- Develop content that gives the audience an upfront value while needing as little commitment from the prospective customer as possible.
- Offer content that reflects the values of your business.
2. Why Should Prospective Clients Care?
The next step you need to follow when creating marketing strategies is to inform prospective customers why they need to support your brand and purchase your products or services. It doesn’t matter who your target audience is as no consumer is going to spend their money on a brand, product, or service that doesn’t benefit them in some way.
That’s why you should share the benefits of using your brand’s product or service, rather than just mentioning the features. For this, you will need to understand your audience’s pain points very well.
Tactics to Achieve This:
- Show your prospective clients that there is a solution to their pain points.
- Create educational and informative content.
- Present your product or service as one possible solution to their problem.
3. What’s the Result for These Potential Clients if They Act or Not?
With this marketing strategy, you want to share what the prospective customer’s life is likely to look like if they use your product or services against if they choose not to purchase it. To achieve this you can use a technique called “Fear of Missing Out” (or FOMO), which is a very effective approach to make people curious.
Don’t confuse it with a sales pitch because it isn’t. It’s seen as an opportunity to share how your product or service’s benefits and features can change the life of the targeted audience.
This doesn’t necessarily need to be life-changing. You can achieve this tactic by highlighting how their daily lives can be positively impacted by having this product or service.
Tactics to Achieve This:
- Show off the value that’s offered by using your business’s services and products.
- Create content that shows off your industry expertise.
Types of Content for the Awareness Stage
Prospective clients aren’t ready to make a purchase during the awareness stage, but they want information. At this point in the buyer’s journey, the targeted audience is likely to have only just become aware of your brand and its products. The content creation for this awareness stage would need to be primarily focused on establishing yourself as an industry expert and building trust with this audience.
Here are some of the most common types of content that can be used during the awareness stage:
Articles and Blog Posts
Blog posts and articles are excellent content options for the awareness stage in the buyer’s journey. With them, you’re able to create informative content that isn’t pressuring the reader to purchase your product or service.
This type of content is also easily accessible through a simple search on Google or another search engine. Creating SEO-focused content for these blog posts and articles helps this information to get ranked higher in different search engines, which helps increase the number of people who see it.
Videos
Videos are the best way to showcase the people and personalities that are behind your brand. This helps make your brand look more approachable and human. There are various ways that this video content can be implemented in the awareness stage. Some of these include:
- “How-to” and educational videos
- Brand films
- Documentaries
Infographics
Using infographics during the awareness stage is the perfect type of content for this stage of the buyer’s journey. These infographics are easy to digest and can be shared very easily. Not to mention, these infographics are great for potential customers who have short attention spans. Infographics should incorporate key ideas, statistics, and points.
Social Media
The main goal of using social media marketing is to develop a community around your brand. However, this can be a little tricky because it requires an immense amount of creativity and quirkiness to be successful. Taking a unique approach to showcasing your product or services is what’s going to set you apart from others and help build a community.
The Bottom Line
The awareness stage of the buyer’s journey is something that shouldn’t be overlooked or completely ignored. The awareness stage is going to be the foundation that affects the way the rest of the stages of the buyer’s journey play out.
This is why extensive research needs to be conducted when establishing the strategies required to make your targeted audience aware of your brand and its products or services. These tactics can help determine the type of content that would be best for making your prospective clients aware of your business. These strategies then need to be integrated into your content creation in order to achieve the goal of generating leads and increasing website conversions.
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