From the course: Marketing Foundations: The Marketing Funnel

Funnel segment: Awareness

From the course: Marketing Foundations: The Marketing Funnel

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Funnel segment: Awareness

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- All right, let's jump into the funnel. So, you obviously can't sell something to someone who has no idea that your product or service exists. And that's where stage one, awareness comes in. At this stage, we're working to capture the consumers attention, we need them to be aware of our product or service, but awareness isn't good enough. What we really need is for them to be aware of, well, one, the fact that our company exists, and two, what it is that we do or sell, and three, that they have a need or want. Awareness must capitalize on those three things, but that process can happen in any order. Typically, we accomplish that through advertising, pay per click ads, webinars, direct mail, social media, blog posts, and so on. But awareness also comes from our competitors, the media, and our consumers environment. How you approach generating awareness is a function of what you're selling, and to who. You may choose to invest evenly across earned, owned and paid media. Or you may opt to stack your efforts in one area that yields the best results with your audience. It's up to you to find that delicate balance, too much attention at the top of the funnel, may exhaust your budget, leaving you with too large of an audience that you don't have the budget or resources to move down your funnel. No attention at the top of the funnel, and you're curious why your sales are lackluster. When we talk about awareness, or any stage of the funnel really, we're talking about it as it applies to a specific customer segment. You must remain diligent in talking to the right customer, at the right time, in the right place. Now, you may have several customer segments, and as such, you'll need to define the funnel for each of those segments. One way to visualize this, is to simply slice the funnel vertically, labeling the columns as they correspond to your customer. Or you can simply track the funnel for each segment individually, it's up to you. And this idea will make more sense as we look at marketing sequences later. As you explore awareness, don't fall into the trap of thinking your entire marketing strategy is just about awareness. There's this misconception you just dial up awareness and the rest will fall in place, but to really nail awareness, you need to keep showing up in the same demographic, that's why targeting is incredibly important. Awareness doesn't mean distributing your message everywhere, it means making your target demographic aware you exist. Have you ever talked to someone and they've never heard about the new product you're always seeing, and you're baffled? How have you not heard about that new shaving club, you haven't seen their ads, you're not getting their coupons? You see, if a marketer has done their job well, you the key demographic have become very aware because you're the right customer. They're not wasting their time making everyone aware, they're making the perfect customer segment totally aware, over investing in awareness will create a really wide funnel at the top, but prospects won't automatically fall down the funnel, the shape suggests gravity is at work here, but that's really not the case. If it's easier to visualize, turn the funnel upside down. You're now pushing that one target demographic up through your funnel, and that's a lot more effort which is the reality of that situation.

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