This post is the second in our series dedicated to ensuring that your business fully understands the local customer journey and develops comprehensive knowledge of the five phases of a customer experience. This article will focus on the importance of the awareness stage, the first stage in the local customer journey.
What Is Awareness?
Awareness is the first phase of your local customer journey that will lead to business growth. This journey refers to the experience of all customers as they transition from being completely unaware of your business to becoming its most prominent advocates.
In the awareness phase, a customer knows who you are and what products or services you sell. This awareness means the customer understands the most basic information about your business. This information may include what you do and where you are located. With the right information, customers are more likely to move further along their local customer journey with your business.
How Can You Increase Customer Awareness?
Once upon a time, building awareness was a matter of having a big billboard on your local main street. This broad-based ad, combined with other paid advertising efforts in a local newspaper, used to be enough to give a customer an idea of who you were and what you do.
Of course, those days are long gone. New tools, including targeted advertising, Google ads, and online reviews, are all critical to increasing awareness and will allow you to boost sales. Increasing awareness generally relies on at least two specific marketing tactics, including the following.
Establishing a Strong Online Presence
An online presence means you have a powerful website that uses appropriate SEO strategies and can connect with your customers where they are. It also means you have marketing tools to create a robust social media presence. You create value-added and useful content for the right markets, enhancing your business’s awareness among relevant and appropriately targeted customers.
Using Targeted Marketing
You don’t want to advertise to customers who aren’t likely to do business with you. Instead, you want to market to customers who are most likely to buy your products. As such, you use targeted marketing, potentially taking advantage of extremely targeted SEO opportunities or paid ads on social media platforms. For example, you may purchase Google Ads for individuals searching for your product or service if an individual is in your service area. You’d also look at buying Facebook ads for people who have been to your website.
What Do You Need to Build Awareness?
Every business is on a limited budget. Managing resource constraints means ensuring you get the most “bang for your buck” when engaging in a general awareness campaign. As such, you need to consider the following:
- What sales tools do you invest in, and how do they operate with your other marketing platforms? You must ensure that your tools will easily integrate with your existing operations.
- How are your marketing, sales, and financial planning efforts aligned? Have you achieved business alignment in these areas?
- Do you have a consistent idea of who your customers are, where they spend their time, and what messages they respond best to?
Are you ready to learn how to maximize your business’s customer experience and build more awareness among your customers? Book a 30-minute call today to learn how our fully integrated, all-in-one marketing platform can help increase your business and ensure that more customers know who you are as they start their sales journey with you.