Using the 5 stages of awareness to improve the effectiveness of your online marketing

Today. I want to talk to you about something very important whether or not you're running paid marketing strategies or you're just putting together content that you're going to be releasing on your social media platforms. 

I want to talk to you about the five stages of client awareness. 

Now you may have heard of this before, it's definitely not new to marketing. In fact, it's an integral part of human nature that is never going to change, but it's very important that we understand the different stages of awareness because it's going to allow us to tailor our message to our market much more effectively. 

So the five stages of awareness are about your potential clients, your customers, and what level of awareness they are in their brain of the problem that you solve, the solutions that are out there, and the products that are those solutions. 

Where the stage of awareness of this person is, depends on what message is going to catch their attention. 

So what you say is going to be very different depending on what stage of awareness they're at. You need to be able to be talking to the right person in the language that they need to hear. 

For someone to become a client/customer, your marketing needs to progress them through the stages of awareness to the point they are ready to spend money to fix their problem. The higher up the stages of awareness someone is, the less work is involved. 

But what stage of awareness they are starting at dictates your initial marketing message.

So what are these five stages of awareness? 

1. UNAWARE

Well, the first stage is totally unaware. They're not even aware that they have the problem. 

I know that sounds funny but this is what happens with human nature. We're so good with just getting on with stuff that we don't actually realize that some of the things that we're just putting up with is actually a problem we can solve.

This makes the unaware group the hardest people to market to, because you first have to educate them about their problem so that they realise they have one. And you have to do that before you even start talking about solutions or products.

These are not people that you would go for unless all the other stages of awareness have been totally saturated by everybody else that was already in the market, all the other products and solutions that are already out there. And if that was the case, then if you had run through all your marketing campaigns and they were no longer effective then you would turn your attention to those people who are totally unaware. 

First you would have to educate them about their problem that they have so they're aware of that before you can move them onto the next stage of awareness. So let’s talk about that stage now...

2. PROBLEM AWARE

So the next stage up is the problem aware. They're aware they have the problem but they haven't actually done anything else about that. 

They don't know if there are solutions out there, they don't know if there are products out there, they're just aware of the problem. So you can imagine that the way you would speak to this group of people would be very different to how you would speak to them if they weren't aware of the problem. 

You wouldn't have to educate them so much about the problem that they have, but more now about moving them onto the next stage of awareness which is that there's a solution. 

You would have to educate them on what the solution was. 

3. SOLUTION AWARE

The third stage of awareness is solution aware. They know the solution is out there, they may not know what products are going to give them these solutions, but they're aware that there are solutions, that there might be an answer to their problem. 

So now you're going to educate them on what the products might be, what your product might be and how you can help them so that you can move them further up the stage of awareness to...

4. PRODUCT AWARE

The next stage of awareness is now they're product aware. Now they may be aware of many different products. 

For instance, if you have a sore neck, there's not just one product available, there are many different things. There are chiropractors, physiotherapists, and painkillers. There are heat packs, Voltaren gel, and special pillows. 

There are many different solutions that might be able to help them with their problem but you want to educate them specifically about your products so that they become product aware of you. 

5. YOU AWARE

After product awareness, the final stage of awareness is you aware. You are the one that can help them in your own specific way. 

So you can see how the way I explained this, the five stages of awareness is how we're moving them through, we're talking to them, we're giving them the information that they need to move to the next stage of awareness.

It's not until you have moved someone through this whole information journey, and get them to the other end, that they're going to become a client, whether or not they're a client of yours or a client of somebody else's. 

An awesome example of ads that take people from totally unaware right up through the five stages of awareness is the daytime television ads. You know the ones. They come on with a product and before long you’re nodding your head, because you have trouble getting the fitted sheet to fit over your mattress, or your blood circulation doesn’t seem to be what it once was. 

And all of a sudden you find yourself thinking about buying that vegetable dicer, because although till that moment you never realised you had a problem, now you can see how messy and time-consuming it is using a normal knife. 

Some people will convert instantly, they have a problem and they are very highly motivated to solve that and within one message you can take them all the way from unaware through to buying your product. 

They're very rare people, they're one-percenters. 

If you're an entrepreneur you might be a one-percenter like I am, we want a fix and we want a fix fast, and we're willing to just try that product. We don't want to go off and spend hours doing research. 

But there are other people who need between five and twelve exposures to something before they're willing to buy. And these are the people that we need to move through the journey and this is why when we're marketing, it's very important that we are building an email list so that we can keep putting ourselves in front of them, because they may not be ready to buy now. But that doesn't mean that they're not ready to buy next month or even next year. 

SO when you are creating your marketing message take the time to identify what level of awareness the prospects you are targeting are at, and make sure that you craft your marketing in such a way that you are moving them up the stages. 

Ask yourself, who do I want to speak to, and how can I speak in the most succinct way possible that's going to give them clarity and allow them to make a decision? 

What is the goal of what we're doing? The goal of what we're saying? 

Let's not just throw stuff out there because we know that we should be throwing stuff out there. Let's be a little bit more strategic about how we do our content, whether it be organic or paid marketing. Especially if it's paid marketing because we don't want to be wasting money. 

Hope you guys have an amazing week, see you in the next article.