Navigating the awareness phase of the customer journey
If you want more customers and sales, you have to elevate your marketing game. Lead generation is one of the most important goals of any business — both large and small — but it's easy to squander valuable resources on pointless, non-returning activities. To make the most of your marketing budget and to find out where more customers are hiding, you need a plan that targets them effectively. Today I'll show you how to attract new customers with a combination of content marketing and SEO.
The awareness phase is the first in the customer journey.
The awareness phase is the first in the customer journey. It’s where you build awareness of your brand and products or services. You do this by creating content that educates and informs potential customers about what you offer, how you can help them, and why they should work with you.
In the awareness phase, you're trying to reach new prospects with your marketing messages. You want to get them interested in what you have to offer so they'll do more research on their own. At this point, you don't know if they're going to be a good fit for your business or not, but you want them aware of who you are and what you do.
Customers in the awareness phase have a problem, but need to know about your business.
This is a critical time for businesses to win over new customers and build brand loyalty. If you're not doing everything you can to stand out from the crowd, then you could be missing out on valuable leads and sales.
The first step is to understand how customers think. This will help you create better marketing messages that appeal to your audience and resonate with them. Once you know what kind of information they want, it's easier to deliver it in a way that helps them solve their problems. However, you also need to know exactly what their problem is.
Find out what they want. To win at awareness, you need to know who your target audience is and what they want from your business. Your marketing messages should reflect those needs by answering questions like "How can we make their lives easier?" or "What problem does our product solve?" Focus on solving one specific problem at a time rather than trying to sell multiple things at once.
Finding out what your customer wants requires equal doses of risk and research. Risk in knowing that you may not be appealing to your customers in the way that you wish, but also researching to mitigate these risks as you narrow your approach. In essence, keep an open mind and keep your ears pointed to your customers.
How to get yourself noticed by potential customers in the awareness phase.
Create compelling content. The best way to get noticed during the awareness phase is by creating compelling content that engages your target audience directly and inspires them to share it with others.
Content marketing is great because it allows you to build relationships with your audience without selling them anything directly. The goal at this stage is just to make yourself known and trusted, which will make it easier for them to buy from you when they're ready.
This could be an article, a blog post or even a video on YouTube — as long as it’s interesting enough for people to want to read or watch again and again, it will help spread awareness of your brand across social media like wildfire.
To speed the process up, you can also use paid ads on social media platforms like Facebook and Instagram to target people who are likely to be interested in your product or service. What's beautiful about it is that the ads allow you to narrow your target market using some predefined parameters like age and product or service type. You send it off into the mysterious clouds of the internet and the platform will show off your brand to the users most likely to purchase a product or service like yours.
While you might not immediately convert these users into paying customers, at the very least they'll start following you on social media so they can stay updated with new information about your brand or service as it becomes available. This is a very effective way to get your name out there and start building up a following. The platform automatically optimizes the ads for you, so you don't have to worry about making changes or tweaks yourself.
This can be a very helpful feature if you have no experience with marketing or advertising. Most social media platforms automatically optimize the ads for you, so you don't have to worry about making changes or tweaks yourself. They also allow you to use multiple targeting methods at once, which means that your ads will reach more people and increase the likelihood of conversions. Technology is beautiful, isn't it?
The awareness phase is crucial for small businesses, and it's important to know exactly how to meet the needs of customers at this stage of the customer journey.
By creating awareness of your brand, you can build a stronger relationship with customers and increase your chances of turning them into loyal customers. If you have an idea for a new business or are looking to revamp an existing one, social media is the best place to start.