Ok if you remember last time, I told you the five main stages of awareness a prospect goes through in relation to your product or service. I also told you that whenever we’re called in to help a client who’s not doing as well online as they’d like to it’s because they’re marketing to the prospect at the wrong stage of awareness.

So now I’d like to start showing you how to market effectivly online to your prospect in each of their phases of awareness.

Today I’m going to start with Phase 1

Your prospect knows about their problem and knows that your product can solve their problem.

Here your prospect is at their most aware.

Your prospect knows of your product – knows what it does – and (importantly) knows he wants it.

At this point, she just hasn’t gotten around to buying it yet. Your headline—in fact, vour entire ad only needs to flag the brand name, restate the main benefit and make an offer.

This is the position that Apple finds itself in for instance.

or this one from toys r us

Or this one from Domino’s pizza.

As you can see from the examples above the remainder of the advertisement can summarise quickly the most desirable selling points. Then add the name of the business, or an offer, and close.

This is the typical online store (amazon), franchise, discount store (groupon), or used products type of advertising (ebay). It takes advantage of all the offline and online advertising that has been done on the same product before it.

Its addition, its new thing, is the price or a free gift, or instant delivery or ease of pickup. Its prospect is fully aware he has all the information he needs.

Here the marketers job is nothing more than coming up with discounts or special deals such as buy one get one free. Usually the price is the most important part of his headline and that is what should be tested.

Possible tests to run are:

Percentage discount; eg 25% off

Monetary discount – save £20

addition of bonus – buy one get a free (thing)

volume addition – buy one get one free

There is nothing creative about his job, and the marketing team should receive the lowest possible scale of pay.

Next time things start to get more interesting as we cover phase 2 –

Your prospect knows about their problem but does not know that your product can solve their problem.

Want us to look after your online marketing for you?

Then why not check out our new “Outsourced Digital Marketing Department” service here

Neil