Are you looking to better understand the awareness stage in the buyer’s journey?
Wondering what type of content to create to attract your audience or even how to deliver the content to them?
In this article, we’ve got you covered!
We will first understand what is a buyer’s journey so we can understand the awareness stage in their decision-making process and then to define the type of content to create in attracting them.
We have divided this article into the following sections for your ease of navigation:
- What is the buyer’s journey
- What is the awareness stage
- Defining your buyer’s persona
- Understanding the awareness stage of the buyer’s journey
- How to approach creating content for the awareness stage to generate leads
- Content ideas for the awareness stage in the buyer’s journey
- Takeaways
Let’s get started!
What is the buyer’s journey
A buyer’s journey is the process a buyer goes through to learn about a product or service, consider the advantages and disadvantages of making a purchase, evaluate the other options in the market and ultimately make a purchase.
The buyer’s journey can be divided into three categories:
- Awareness stage
- Consideration stage
- Decision stage
The awareness stage is the stage where you become aware of a need or a problem leading you to want to educate yourself on your problem or opportunity.
The consideration stage is when you’ve done some preliminary investigation and have identified ways to solve your problem or take advantage of your opportunity.
The decision stage is when you are ready to make a purchase in order to definitively resolve your problem or concretely take advantage of your opportunity.
In this article, we will consider the awareness stage in detail and see how marketing efforts should be deployed to cater to the needs of someone starting their purchasing journey.
To do that, we’ll need to better understand what is the awareness stage.
What is the awareness stage
When a person becomes aware of a need, a problem or needs to take advantage of an opportunity requiring him or her to ultimately buy something, the buyer enters into the first stage of the buyer’s journey: the awareness stage.
Once we become aware of a need, we will want to explore that need further to understand what we want and how to get there.
We may ask ourselves many questions as we transition from the awareness stage to the consideration stage in our purchasing journey such as:
- What is my exact problem?
- How can this problem be fixed?
- Is there something that I can do to solve my problem?
- Is there something I can buy that will solve my problem?
- What will happen if I don’t buy something?
- How do others deal with the same challenge?
- Is there an opportunity that is available to me now?
- What information do I need to make sure that I can full advantage of my opportunity?
We all go through the awareness stage when looking to make a purchase.
The more complex our problem or challenge, the more time we may spend in the awareness stage to define what we need.
For simpler needs or less complex situations, we may go through the awareness stage very quickly and do very little initial reflection on our needs.
Business clients will potentially spend a lot of time in the awareness stage and consideration stage before making a purchase.
Consumers may quickly speed through the awareness stage and consideration stage to buy something based on emotion or personal desire.
Now that we know buyers start a purchasing journey with the awareness stage, how can we tailor marketing efforts to help them get the content and information they need on their challenges?
To answer that, businesses will need to define their ideal customer persona.
Defining your buyer’s persona
To define your buyer’s persona is to understand who you are selling to.
Your buyer persona will play an important role in how you will plan, strategize and execute your marketing efforts.
If you don’t know who is your ideal customer, how they think and what’s important to them, then you will not be effective in ultimately making sales.
You can understand your buyer’s persona by contacting some of your active customers and getting to know why they selected your products or services.
How did they initially find you?
What were they looking for?
What was their problem or pain point?
How did they make the decision that your product or service was helpful for them?
Then you’ll need to define what you consider to be an ideal customer for your business.
Take this theoretical customer and try to understand how this ideal customer would go about in buying your products and services.
Define how sophisticated they are and what type of content they will prefer reading.
How much content do they need to establish your credibility?
Will your customer make a decision individually or collectively?
Who are involved in the decision-making process?
Once you’ve built your buyer’s persona, you will then need to make important decisions on how to attract, convince and close this potential customer.
The more you know who should be your customer, the more you can accurately target your audience and attract your ideal customer.
What type of content should you create to attract your ideal customer?
Understanding the awareness stage of the buyer’s journey
To attract your ideal customer, you’ll need to understand how your potential customer makes a purchase decision.
A buyer will go through the buyer’s journey to become aware of, evaluate and purchase a new product or a service.
The first stage of the buyer’s journey is the awareness stage.
The awareness stage is when a buyer becomes aware of a problem or realizes they have a need.
They’ll start investigating their problem.
Typically, this investigation is to learn more about their challenge or opportunity.
Most of us will go on a search engine and use broad keywords to learn about a topic.
This is where an effective SEO strategy can be really helpful in helping people find your content.
If the prospect knows exactly the product or service they need, then they may not remain in the awareness stage for very long.
Those who stay in the awareness stage longer are those who need to better understand a topic before deciding how they should solve their problem.
They are looking to become aware of the different possibilities available to them.
Can they solve their own problem?
Should they buy a product or a service to solve their problem?
By creating content to answer these open-ended questions customers may have, you can put yourself ahead of the game.
Your organization should create content to educate your customers and answer all their questions.
In the awareness stage, the prospect has not decided to buy something.
So creating sales content will not be effective.
Don’t use sales jargon or pitch your products or services.
You should focus on the topics your audience cares for and just present yourself to them.
Your prospect is searching to find out about a topic and you should present yourself as a topic relevant to their search.
The more you educate your audience in their first stage of the buyer’s journey, the better you position yourself to ultimately making a sale.
How to approach creating content for the awareness stage to generate leads
When creating marketing content, you must have in mind what is the purpose of the content you are creating.
What’s the purpose of your content
Are you creating content to educate someone on a topic, are you giving them information to consider your product or service or are you trying to close the deal?
Depending on where a prospect may be in the sales funnel, you should strategically create content to move your customer from the top of the sales funnel to the bottom of the funnel.
The top of the sales funnel is when you are becoming aware of your needs, the middle of the funnel is when you are considering your options and at the bottom of the funnel, you are making a purchasing decision.
Depending on your industry and the type of customers you are targeting, your prospects may spend more or less time in the consideration stage before making a purchase.
To eventually make a sale, people should know you exist.
You must create marketing content to become visible and to have people find you when they are searching to find out more about their challenges and considering making a purchase.
Questions to ask when creating your content
To help someone in the awareness stage, you need to find a way to make them aware of your existence or your product.
To do that here are some questions you should answer for the benefit of your audience:
- Who are you?
- What do you offer?
- Why should the prospect care?
- Why is it important they deal with you?
When a person decides to go online and do some research on a problem or issue, they will typically either not know you or know you very little.
To get people to eventually buy from you, you’ll need to first present yourself and let them know who you are, the type of products and services you offer, the background of your company, your company vision or anything else about you.
You’ll want to let people know you exist and establish your credibility related to the topic.
The material you provide your audience should not be a sales pitch.
Rather, it should valuable information about who you are and why you exist.
Next, you should provide good reasons to your prospects why they should care in dealing with their problem or taking advantage of the opportunity now.
Your goal is to inform and educate your audience about how they can solve their problem.
Any educational or informational material you provide will be quite helpful.
As you educate your prospects, you will position your company’s products and services as a possible solution to their problem without pitching a product or a service.
Finally, you’ll need to let the customer know that they must act now.
If they take too long to decide, the opportunity may no longer be present to them or their problem may get worse.
Give them the reasons why they should not delay their decision!
Content ideas for the awareness stage in the buyer’s journey
You can create any type of content to help your audience in the awareness stage.
Your creativity is really your most important limitation.
To give you some ideas, we will identify some content ideas to help you in the awareness stage in your buyer’s journey.
Let’s start with the most popular type of content!
Informative articles
Informative articles are fantastic to help your audience in the awareness stage.
With a good article, you can provide a good and comprehensive view of the problems or opportunities your audience may face.
You can write the article in your own style and give it your own unique personality.
Your articles will not only help inform and educate your audience but will also help them find you when they search online.
With the right SEO techniques such as good on-page SEO and off-page SEO, you can get your article to rank high in search engines.
The more people find you organically, the better!
Educational videos
Next in line is educational videos.
Watching videos is a great way to learn about something.
YouTube is actually the second biggest search engine in the world after Google.
By complementing your articles with a video, you can not only provide a great channel to educate your prospects but the combination of video and an article will result in an awesome search engine ranking.
Learning to make a video may be difficult at first and can time-consuming but it’s well worth the effort!
Lead magnets
Lead magnets are content you will make available to your audience in exchange for their email address.
It can be access to useful industry reports, a survey, a premium in-depth article about a topic or anything of value that someone will be willing to provide their email address to receive from you.
Lead magnets are especially effective as they are not readily accessible to the user making it more valuable for the user to put their hands on.
Infographics
People do not have the patience to read really long articles and spend a lot time researching a topic.
This makes infographics absolutely fantastic.
You can use infographics to boil down a complex topic or idea into an easy to understand visual depiction of the subject.
Infographics can summarize the content of a complex report, can provide a visual step-by-step approach to do something, can give useful tips and tricks.
It can be about anything really.
Infographics are easy to read and understand.
Your audience will love “scroll-read” your content.
Social media
Social media is great to connect with your audience and create brand awareness.
More than 3 billion people in the world are on social media!
Businesses and consumers alike share and exchange with one another on social media on any possible topic.
If that’s where billions of people go to on a daily basis, then that’s where you need to go to have people find you.
Social media is a great way to have people find you but also put a human face on your business so people can connect with you personally and emotionally.
Whitepapers
Creating whitepapers can be really effective if your ideal customers are businesses.
Business customers make decisions based on logic and value.
Your whitepaper can provide an in-depth presentation of the issue, provide statistics, refer to industry reports and provide ways businesses can solve a problem or take advantage of an opportunity.
You’ll be sure to talk about your company and how your company operates in the industry.
Present your company as a credible business to deal with having the expertise on the subject in question.
Whitepapers can be great lead magnets.
You can give away your whitepaper in exchange for a user’s email address.
Blog posts
How can we not mention blog posts?
According to DemandGen, 71% of buyers will read blog posts during their purchasing process.
Creating useful and informative blogs can be amazing for your business.
You can combine your blog post with different types of content like video, infographics and lead magnets.
Writing content on the subject relevant to your customers can drive a lot of organic traffic to your website.
Webinars
Webinars are also highly effective to raise your audience’s awareness on a topic.
Using a webinar, your goal is to provide valuable information to your audience.
Teach them about a subject.
Provide them with a presentation on how to solve a problem or deal with an issue.
Your prospects will need to sign up and give their email address to access your webinar.
Be specific, short and sweet.
You’ll drive a good amount of business this way.
E-books
You can consider e-books as long versions of a whitepaper.
You can write an entire e-book on a very specific topic in an easy to read format.
Those who really like to educate themselves or for businesses that need a lot of data to make decisions, e-books can be great in conveying educational material and showing off your expertise in the domain.
Takeaways
Knowing who is your ideal customer and how they make purchasing decisions is fundamental to creating content in attracting them and leading them through your marketing funnel.
You define who your ideal customer is by painting the portrait of your buyer’s persona.
With your buyer’s persona, you’ll have a clear understanding of what they care about and how they make purchasing decisions.
With this data, you can create content to attract them to your business.
This content is created specifically to cater to your ideal customer’s needs as they enter the awareness stage of their buying process.
There are many ways you can create and deliver content to attract your prospects and educate them about their problem or pain point.
Use this article as your go-to reference to develop the content your audience needs to learn about their problem and discover you in the process.
We hope you enjoyed this article.
Do you have any thoughts on the awareness stage of the buyer’s journey? We would love to hear from you. Drop us a comment!
