Understanding The Different Stages of Awareness

Look. this is absolutely nothing new.

Legendary Copywriter and Direct Response Marketer Eugene Schwartz first wrote about this in his seminal book 'Breakthrough Advertising' back in 1966, though it was Todd Brown that really put me onto this in recent years.

Schwartz believed there were 5 different “Stages of Awareness” that are as follows:

1. The Most Aware: Your prospect knows your product, is aware of all the other products, offers, and solutions out there, understand what works and what doesn't and just wants to know what “deal” you're offering to him (i.e. how much is your product, what are the terms, how can he access it etc)

2. Product-Aware: Your prospect knows what you sell, and the other offers out there from your competition, but isn’t sure your offer is the best fit for him so may be considering another offer from a competitor.

3. Solution-Aware: Your prospect knows what end result he's after and knows what the different solutions are on offer, but not if he can get his desired end result from your product yet.

4. Problem-Aware: Your prospect is aware of a problem though he has no idea how to solve it or what the potential solutions are.

5. Completely Unaware: Not yet even aware they have a problem (even if a problem is present) and so doesn't have any knowledge of any products, offers, solutions or options.

Some important information on awareness...

Every single market, including yours, has people in ALL 5 categories.

Depending on how advanced (i.e. how long the market /niche / problem has existed) the market is will determine how many people are in each stage.

Advanced markets will have high amounts of people who have already reached the “most aware” section and newer markets / problems will have less in the “most aware” section.

However, even in the most advanced markets there are ALWAYS going to be new people developing a problem and / or becoming aware of your niche for the first time so there will be a steady flow of people entering the bottom “completely unaware” stage and flowing through into the other stages too.

The great thing is this; there's no right or wrong choice about which awareness level you pick.

It's a personal choice based on your experience level, who you'd like to target, and what you have to offer.

Here's a simple step by step process to decide which level to target based on your personal experience...