Welcome to our third blog on ‘How Content Marketing Turns Unaware Customers into Aware Ones’!
We’ve created this series to help you discover how to take leads through the various stages of awareness to becoming customers using a content marketing approach.
Drawing a blank? Read the first post here.
Here’s a quick reminder: you need to take a different approach to consumers who are at various levels of awareness to help move them toward becoming your customer.
These levels of awareness were identified by copywriter Eugene Schwartz in his 1966 book Breakthrough Advertising and run from;
- Completely Unaware: Are not aware that they have a problem, let alone that a solution exists for it.
Through three more stages to
- The Most Aware: Aware of the problem they face, aware of your specific solution, and convinced that it is the right one for them. Ready to become paying customers; they just need to know the terms and price.
At the end of this blog, you’ll understand how you can use content marketing to take ‘solution aware’ consumers and make them ‘product aware’.
What this means is that people who were aware that a solution existed for their problem will now know that your offering is one of the potential solutions they could use.
Ready? Let’s dive in.
Spoilt for Choice
You might be thinking, ‘how do I know what problem my customer is trying to solve?’. If your product or service has a lot of applications, there could be a lot of options.
This is where understanding your customer and your offering pays off. Doing preparation at the beginning of your content marketing process means you don’t waste time later trying to play catch up.
Visit the previous blog in this series to learn more about understanding your consumer — and your offering.
Features & Benefits
At this stage of awareness, your potential customer is trying to understand which solution is right for their needs.
The best way to help them understand this is to explain the features of your offering (what it does) and the benefits (the ways it can help solve their problem) with the content you create and share.
Your customer isn’t interested in reading a catalogue, so your content should focus on the benefits of your offering. If you’re talking about the features, you always need to follow it up by explaining how those features can benefit the customer.
At this stage, think to yourself; how can I improve the awareness of the customer?
Earlier in the journey you can speak in more general terms, but this stage is a good opportunity to get into the details; as long as it serves your purpose of increasing awareness!
Tell a Story
A great way to increase your prospect’s awareness of your offering — and how it can benefit them — is through examples and scenarios.
(We’re not talking about case studies here; we’ll come onto them in the next blog.)
Companies often explain the features and benefits of their offerings in quite abstract ways, which means customers can’t build a picture of how their business would benefit, in a practical way, from choosing a certain product or service.
This lack of clarity leads to confusion, and usually results in potential customers disappearing to find someone who’s clearer about what working with them will be like.
If you can create a written scenario which resembles your customer’s situation, and demonstrate how your offering solves it, it stops the prospect having to think creatively to apply your solution to their situation themselves.
People don’t want to have to think creatively when choosing to make a purchase; they want to know that it will fix their problem.
You can create countless scenarios based on the number of different applications for each product or service that you offer.
At every stage, ask yourself the question: is this improving the reader’s awareness so that they’re more likely to become a customer?
Things to Remember
Your content at this stage should leave your audience clear about what your offering is and how it can help them solve their problem.
You’re not trying to persuade them of anything quite yet, so provide them with facts that help them make an informed decision on finding a solution to their problem.
If you find yourself getting tempted to move into ‘selling mode’ with your content, remind yourself that the focus is to improve awareness, not shout about how great your offering is. If you do, you’ll probably be waving goodbye to your potential customer!
Next Time: Most Aware Customers
Part four of this series will help you understand how to move customers from being product aware to the next and final stage: most aware.
This is the stage where customers (hopefully) decide that yours is the offering for them, backed up by the awareness that they’ve developed in the previous stages.
If you'd like to know more about showcasing your product as the solution to your customers' problems, get in touch with the Prize Content team today.
