Mastering Stage One Of The Buyer Journey: Awareness

Every B2B business wants to get more revenue, which requires getting more customers. But before you can get customers, buyers must become aware of you. This is why awareness is the first of the stages of the buyer journey. When you focus on awareness in marketing, you improve your chances of being found by ideal buyers when they’re starting to look for a vendor like you. Here’s some more information about how to do this effectively, along with content marketing tips for this phase.

‍

Solve Their Problem

‍

Before you think about making potential buyers aware of your products or services, it’s important to understand why people enter a sales funnel in the first place. The main motivation is some sort of problem that’s causing them pain or impeding them from reaching their goals.

For example, a married couple might have lost a great deal of money on a poor investment and needs to find a different financial advisor. Or a doctor’s office might find that their patients aren’t getting the labs done that they’re ordering for them, so they start looking for at-home health testing they can offer patients instead. Your first goal in the awareness phase of the journey, then, is to be very clear about how you can solve your buyers’ most pressing problems. Also establish the value that you can deliver to them, even before they become a customer.

‍

Be Where They Research

‍

The next step is to go where your potential customers will go to start researching solutions providers. Even in the B2B world, buyers are ultimately consumers - which means they’ll use typical research channels like social media, search engines, review sites and so forth. It’s your job to make sure that your business shows up in these places, through social media marketing, SEO, content marketing and other associated strategies.

‍

Give Them What They Want

‍

When it comes to stages of the buyer journey, the awareness phase is much like the early season of dating. Buyers are scoping out their options, and don’t want to be forced to a make a commitment yet. One of the best content marketing tips for this stage is to keep your content high-level and solutions-focused, as well as short and visually appealing. Buyers are still deciding if you’re worth their time so they will invest very little into checking you out before deciding to dig deeper.

‍

Additionally, it’s important to note how buying is changing. A recent study found that virtually 100% of buyers want to self-serve for all or at least part of their buying journey, up 13% from last year. That means almost every single person wants to do their own research and answer their own questions, without intervention from you or your sales team - at least until much later in the process.

‍

So, enable them to do this. Provide answers to frequently asked questions in visible places and give them plenty of information they can consume on their own time. For instance, if you have a software company, you may want to offer an on-demand demo instead of asking prospects to schedule one with a salesperson.

‍

Direct Them To A Next Step

‍

Finally, remember that awareness is just the first of the stages of the buyer journey. Your ultimate goal is to move buyers from this stage toward the next one (which is consideration). To do this, ensure each piece of content you create includes a compelling call-to-action (CTA) and/or direction to a next step.

‍

If a buyer checks out your infographic that compares your solution to a competitor’s, maybe there’s a recommendation at the bottom of the infographic to read a corresponding blog post. Think of yourself as the shepherd of the buyer journey, heping your buyers keeping moving along the path while being available to them whenever they’re ready for a conversation.

‍

If you want to optimize your marketing for the awareness stage of the buyer journey and beyond, StringCan is here to help. Just give us a call!