The 5 Stages of Prospect Awareness and how to write for them

Key points:

• Marketing and growth funnels give us tactical ideas.
• Though they don’t point to the awareness of the prospects we’re likely targeting.
• The five stages of prospect awareness instructively describe what answers your users are looking for and how to write for them.
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There are a million online resources claiming to have mastered high-converting landing pages. This may be true, though do these pages answer your users' questions rather than prioritising button colours?

Conclusion: An exercise in prospect awareness is a great way to plot your prospect and the answers they’re looking for… or might not have even known existed.
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The five distinct stages of prospect (user) awareness.

In digital, we often talk of (buying) funnels: constructs of content, functionality, and offers that help users move from the top of the buying funnel to a transaction and loyalty.

I’ve written that such funnels are not linear, though the funnel helps visually represent the approximate journey and your efforts.

Funnels are usually broken down into several stages of engagement:

1. Awareness (top of the funnel).
2. Consideration (middle of the funnel).
3. Conversion (bottom of the funnel).
4. Retention (post-funnel).
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What we do less of is consider the stages of prospect (user) awareness in a formal sense.

In his book Breakthrough Advertising in 1966, Eugene Schwartz broke down the awareness of prospects (users) into five distinct stages:

1. Unaware market: No knowledge except to perhaps have an opinion or inclination.
2. Problem-aware market: The prospect (user) suspects a problem but is unaware of a solution.
3. Solution-aware market: The prospect understands the desired result but does not know your product is that solution.
4. Product-aware market: The prospect knows what you’re selling, though unsure if it is right for them.
5. Most-aware market: The prospect knows your product and only needs to see the offer.
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You could easily overlay these five stages of prospect awareness over a funnel.
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Why understanding the five stages of prospect awareness is important.

Simply put, it is too expensive and inefficient not to.

The prospect awareness stages go deeper than the marketing funnel stages of conversion.

Understanding and defining prospect awareness can make your content and messaging more empathetic and targeted.

Given the cost of traffic and digital marketing, ensuring that you’re meeting your prospects where they are in their understanding of the problem to be solved will translate to lower costs and improved conversion.

I’m ditching the funnel.

I’ve decided to write this article because I am working on a couple of landing page projects and this model reminds us: have we addressed the problem before we’ve provided the solution.

Answer: often not.

I’ve seen Facebook and Google vacuum up enormous budgets with little to show.

A landing page converting at 5% with a CPC of $5.00 is $100.00/lead.

And you then need to convert those leads to paying users.

Which is why digital marketing is often prohibitive.

To illustrate the strategy, I am ditching the funnel analogy and using a journey analogy instead. Whilst a funnel is ultimately a journey, it isn’t helpful for writing, and your words and content are key here.

And for this article, I am only focusing on the top three stages of prospect awareness because this is by far the hardest space to tackle and get right: this is strategy, patience, experimentation and splitting hairs stuff.
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1. Unaware market

We’ve determined that the unaware market isn’t aware that a problem exists.

This is about awareness, which means getting in front of such prospects through social.

This is the hardest and most expensive cohort because you are starting cold, and you have to take them through the entire journey, which is unlikely to be a single, linear thing.

And just that you have a solution to their problem, they need to be convinced they have a problem.

Here is the content/messaging journey:

• Identify the symptom.
• Diagnose with a problem.
• Introduce your solution.
• Answer objections/questions/increase trust.
• Where to buy.
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2. Problem-aware market

When we know we have a problem, we start researching.

Which means searching.

And this means understanding and articulating your target market's issues and problems as part of your content strategy.

The strategy here is search, both organic (long-term) and paid (short-term).

Organic search is more powerful than paid, especially over the long term, and it is here I would start with a targeted content strategy, remembering that within organisations:

• The buyer is often different to the user.
• Different roles within the same business will often have the same problem: e.g. sales and the CFO both have revenue issues to contend with.

There are some solid AI tools out there that can help build out prioritised topic clusters to start you in the right direction. Here is an example for excessive sweating*:

And here is the content/messaging journey:

• Call out the problem.
• Introduce the solution.
• Answer objections/questions/increase trust.
• Where to buy.
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3. Solution-aware market

The solution-aware market is further down the path and is now in solution mode,. We must create a relationship between their desired solution and your product or service.

This is potentially a retargeting opportunity if the prospect has visited your website.

This is also a search play via content marketing.

These prospects are warm. They know they have a problem; they just want the solution

• Call out the solution.
• Answer objections/questions/increase trust.
• Where to buy.

4. Product-aware market

At this stage, we’re into conversion and don’t need to focus on journeys as we did with the previous three markets.

These prospects know your product; they’re unsure if it meets their needs.

Here is where we get into sales and conversion.

Something is wrong if your landing pages aren’t converting well at this point.

5. Most-aware market

These users know they have a problem.

They know there is a solution.

They know your product or service is that solution.

They’re ready to buy.

Just give them an incentive. That’s it.

Wrap-up

When I talk to clients through the prospect awareness concept, I find that visualising the journeys together helpful to show the changes in content, as well as how targeting strategies might also change:

Remember, this is mainly to instruct content which is so critically important in all this.

For tactics, look to the other funnel.

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* No, I don't have an excessive sweating problem. I have just always used it as my go to: big problem, big desire to solve it!