All the optimizing in the world can’t fix a landing page that doesn’t match your visitor’s expectations.
With the rising cost of PPC campaigns and the mad competition of organic search, the wrong messaging (especially at the top of the funnel) will lead to higher bounce rates than Ice Cube in the 90s.
God that’s a solid reference. Anyway…
Landing pages should never be a one-size-fits-all experience.
Presenting the same message to everyone — cold traffic, warm traffic, email subscribers, long-time customers — is a good way to come across as tone-deaf.
And broke. Tone-deaf and broke.
Because even if you look at it purely from an engagement standpoint, getting it wrong at the top of the funnel is worse than getting it wrong at the point of sale.
According to MarketingBlender, 73% of consumers report feeling frustrated when your website offers content that has nothing to do with them.
And you know what frustrated consumers do? They go somewhere else.
Not buying right away is one thing. Writing you off completely is another.
Creating a relevant landing page experience sounds easy-ish, but customers are picky as hell. “Nothing to do with them” is more nuanced than you might think.
The problem isn’t that you’re offering something completely out of pocket. The problem is giving them information that doesn’t match their level of awareness.
What “Problem-Aware” really means
Imagine you’re a first-time homeowner with a raccoon problem.
You are almost positive you’ve seen them in your garage. They freak you out and you want them gone…but you don’t really know the extent of the problem.
You know next to nothing about raccoons. You don’t know if they bite or scratch or spit freaky raccoon acid. You don’t know if there’s something in your garage that could be attracting them. You don’t know if they’re stealing your tools and you don’t even know if your cats are safe from their weird racoon hand-paws.
You would definitely like a way to get rid of them, but you really want to know what the hell you’re dealing with.
You are problem aware.
In his copywriting classic Breakthrough Advertising, Eugene Schwartz identifies the five levels of customer awareness, with problem-aware (just above unaware) described as this:
“Problem aware prospects know they have a problem, and have some idea of what that problem is, but they may not completely understand it. They haven’t dealt with this problem before. They’re totally unfamiliar with possible solutions.”
Even though your prospect knows he/she has a problem, chances are they don’t fully understand it. They’ve never had to deal with this before.
Visitors of your problem-aware landing page are relatively cold. They’re experiencing the pain of their problem and they don’t know anything about solutions.
Would they like one? Sure. But first they need someone who understands what they’re going through. The problem-aware landing page is where you set the tone.
There are a couple of ways to analyze your prospect’s situation and expectations.
Wider Funnel’s LIFT Model does a good job showing you all that goes into the value proposition when a prospect first comes into contact, but in my opinion it doesn’t show the whole story.
The hero (your prospect) has a problem, and even though they don’t know you, something (ad copy, search results, a well-placed referral link) is hinting that you may be able to point them in the right direction.
This is your chance to enter the story, but remember — your prospect is at the beginning of their journey. It’s still relatively easy for them to “try out” different guides. Whether that’s you or someone else.
So, how can you make sure your problem-aware landing page shows that you understand the problem?
How do you show that you are worth your prospect’s trust?
Empathy. A whole heaping amount of empathy.
Working Empathy into Your Problem-Aware Landing Page
According to Googs, empathy is the ability to understand and share the feelings of another.
Easier said than done.
Because here’s the tricky thing about landing pages nowadays: they usually check all the boxes.
Clear, benefit-driven copy
Key elements above the fold
Intuitive user design
To see whether or not you’re “optimized” for problem-aware visitors, you have to dig a little deeper. You have to look beyond the 5-second test and ask yourself if you’ve appropriately positioned yourself as the helpful guide.
To help you do that, let’s look at a few common pitfalls that stop well-meaning copywriters, marketers, and business owners in their well-meaning tracks.
Pitfall #1: Misplacing the source of the pain
Your problem-aware visitor might not have a full grasp of their problem, but it’s usually not due to complexity. It’s usually because they haven’t fully considered their situation.
Sometimes they aren’t even aware of what the real problem is.
A good opportunity for you to guide them, right? Absolutely. Except when you aren’t clear on what the real problem is either.
Take Tego. A location-tracking mobile app to help make sure friends get home safely.
It’s not hard to see what problem they are trying to solve: Not knowing whether your sweetheart made it home safely after a long night of “studying.”
But is that the real problem? Is there really no easy way to know if your friend got home safely?
I would argue there already is – a text message works just fine.
But that text message is connected to the real problem.
We always say “text me when you get home” but our friends never remember to do so. And if something were to happen, you would never know. (Are they gonna text you if they’re kidnapped? Not likely.)
The real problem is the drunk (I mean, over-studied) person following through and remembering to text their friends that they got home – a common situation that many college kids could relate to… and would probably consider a problem that they’d like solved.
As a problem-aware visitor, it’s easier to see the value when the problem references a specific situation, rather than a generic framing of a problem.
If your prospect doesn’t fully appreciate the problem in the context of their own experience, they won’t have any motivation to search out a solution.
Tego could address the real problem more accurately with a headline like:
Because You Can Do Better Than “Text me when you get home”
Or
Don’t Leave Your Friend’s Life in the Hands of a Text Message
Not only does focusing on a specific aspect show a deeper understanding, it then becomes more of a priority in your prospect’s head.
Which leads us to the second pitfall.
Pitfall #2: Focusing on the surface-level problem
Folks with problems don’t always know why they have problems.
In fact, most of the problems that drive us to look for solutions aren’t problems at all. They are symptoms of the real causes.
I like framing customer problems into two types: internal and external.
External Problems = Symptoms. Things that we Google solutions for.
Internal problems = Causes. Things we don’t tell anyone due to shame, embarrassment, unawareness or complexity.
Problem-aware visitors might truly believe that the problems they are Googling are the reason they are looking for relief. But most (if not all) of the time, they’re driven by something deeper.
As the copywriter, you have to go deeper too. Even when a company solves a seemingly simple problem – like buying a backpack.
Okay, so let’s look at this example from the perspective of internal and external.
External Problem – “I want a cool backpack.”
Easy enough.
Internal Problem – “I need something cool and functional enough that people can see me owning it without it being flashy and annoying. Oh, also I wanna align with a brand that represents me as a worldly, conscious traveler. Preferably one that wants to support local initiatives and cares about using artisanal methods, rather than big factory production. Bonus points for funky patterns and extra-zippy zippers.”
Jeez.
Would their prospects be able to tell you that right off the bat? Probably not.
Would they even agree that they want all of that if suggested to them? Probably not.
But it’s your responsibility to dig into BOTH these external and internal drivers. (Hey, customer research, you sexy beast.)
Get their head nodding by addressing an external symptom, and then back that up with an internal problem to show how much you understand their plight.
If you’re down for a three minute halftime speech, here’s a video where I break down internal and external problems a bit further.
Hitting them both is huge for you and your problem-aware landing page visitors.
Let’s look at a couple of examples that nail it.
External problem – “I want to get better at drawing and painting.”
Internal problem – “ I’ve always looked up to artists, and I want to become one myself. It’s not that I just want to draw good pictures – I want a life-long relationship with art. I want to become an artist rather than just a fan or observer.”
See how this distinction creates a deeper level of empathy?
Touching on those internal problems just shows that you get it.
You aren’t just offering a product or solution. You are providing relief, and an opportunity for lifelong transformation.
Sketchbook Skool could have said “We have the best teachers in the world and you will start drawing and painting in 10 minutes flat.”
But they know what their customers really want – a lifelong habit.
Here’s another one.
External Problem – “I need a better design library.”
Internal Problem – “My work life is a cluttered freakin’ mess. I waste so much time going through folders, renaming files, and clicking around while I should be focusing on client work so I can make more money.”
Eagle shows an understanding that even its audience might not get about themselves.
They realize that disorganization is the reason so many designers get frustrated and unhappy. They dig into the internal problem – the real cause driving them to look for a solution.
As a problem-aware landing page visitor, this tells me that they are designers too, not just some smart dudes who built a product. They’ve been through it, and they know what their audience needs to finally find relief.
Empathy.
Finding the real source of pain and addressing both internal and external problems will solve a lot of your problem-aware landing page issues. But there’s one more pitfall that copywriters should always steer clear from.
Pitfall #3: Forgetting the emotion
According to Paul Ekman, psychologist and co-discoverer of micro expressions, there are six basic emotions that every human in the world shares:
Happiness
Sadness
Anger
Fear
Surprise
Disgust
The reason emotion is so powerful in copywriting is because every reader has his/her own frame of reference for a given situation.
A lot of copywriters misconstrue the 5 second rule as “Since I have to quickly show that I’m valuable, I better explain exactly what we do right away.”
The result? Landing pages that breeze over the problem, completely minimizing the emotion and human element that is driving the audience to search for a solution in the first place.
Take this relatively standard SaaS landing page.
I have no doubt that Nurture Labs is solving a very important problem. But they don’t sound very convinced. Moreover, they don’t sound very in tune with what’s actually going on in their prospects’ lives. If they are, in fact, in tune, why not show it?
Let’s analyze it a bit more.
The problem they are solving is this: scaling is hard.
Ok fine. But they aren’t really showing prospects that they understand that scaling is really hard. There’s a lot that goes into it. Like, having to sacrifice time with your family, relationships and often money out of your own pocket just to see your baby flourish.
All the emotion that goes behind the problem is completely ignored upon first glance of this landing page. Fear, happiness, excitement, anguish. All emotions that, if I were able to feel them as a problem-aware landing page visitor, would instantly bring me closer to the brand.
Remember: At this stage they aren’t necessarily looking for a solution. They are looking for someone who feels their pain – someone who can really talk to the problems and emotions they’re having.
If I were Nurture Labs, I would ask myself things like “what are the potential implications if an entrepreneur isn’t able to scale?” and “what problems in their lives are actually causing the scaling problem?”
That would lead me to copy (and a more appropriate CTA) that better targets prospects’s pains. Ideas like:
“Need to free up your time and energy?”
“Is a slow pipeline preventing you from scaling?”
“Have you maxed out your resources?”
“Do you not know where to go from here?”
However you put it, you need to dig into the real life issue behind the problem.
This doesn’t mean you have to use a lot of time or copy to marinate on the problem. You can speed up this connection by using emotion. Take this great landing page from Ourbus.com:
External Problem – I want to take a trip.
Internal Problem – I miss my friends and I don’t want to be alone at Thanksgiving.
Rather than leading with “cheap bus rides anywhere in the country,” which would minimize the problem, they dig into the internal problem and the emotions surrounding it: the human desire for friendship and social contact. It also amplifies the ramifications of not finding relief to the problem. (You’ll be eating a turkey dinner for one.)
Skipping over the emotion is a fast way to make yourself replaceable.
Coming to terms with your problem-aware landing page
At this stage, your prospect isn’t looking for you to tell them what they should understand about your solution. They are looking to be understood.
Later in the customer journey you will have time to show your capabilities and expertise. Right now you need to marinate in the pain.
Your prospect needs to know that you can help.
No amount of clever copywriting can substitute for deep customer research. Dig into the hopes, dreams, fears and limitations of your prospects. Tune in to the conversations already happening in their minds.
If you can get your prospects head-nodding at this stage, the all-important transaction of monies will be much easier and more fluid down the road.
According to Hubspot, 83.9% of companies that use inbound marketing see an increase in leads within 7 months:
Not to mention, the stats and studies listed above happened in 2009, 2011, and 2013, respectively.
The competition to get more traffic and leads through content marketing has only increased.
Be honest: do you want to wait 6-12 months and ONLY get more traffic or leads?
I don’t know about you, but I don’t wanna wait half-a-year to start getting more organic traffic or inbound leads.
Nor do most startups I talk with.
In six months, startups want SALES.
You see, traffic is a vanity metric. And while leads are nice, it’s costly to chase after prospects which only clog your sales pipeline.
But more revenue means your marketing works.
I respect what Bonini and Sheridan did. But they had teams cranking out content, building links, and paying for ads like a retail store the day before Christmas.
Don’t get me wrong. If you have those resources available, use ‘em to your advantage to get faster results.
All I’m sayin’ is there’s a more efficient path to get quick sales with content marketing.
Why content marketing is often a slower path to sales than it should be
The more efficient path I’m about to teach you helped me double a startup’s annualized revenue in 6 months.
This type of marketing is commonly called product marketing. Product marketing is the intersection of three fields: product, marketing and sales, and customer research. By understanding how these three fields work together, I understood how to get sales faster than content marketing by itself.
You see, while a content marketer is likely focusing on traffic, a product marketer needs to know what traffic converts into customers. We do this by talking to customers, positioning the product, determining the price, and launching the go-to-market strategy.
As a product marketer for early-stage startups, I’m relentlessly testing what gets customers faster for my clients.
From my tests, I’ve found two areas content marketers often ignore, which leads to slower growth:
Defining the startup’s positioning with a unique sales proposition.
Knowing what content and keywords will generate sales sooner.
Content marketers often ignore positioning because it’s not easy to track how it leads to more traffic. Instead, they often “position” a startup by placing whatever keywords bring in more organic traffic on the homepage.
Because content marketers focus on getting more traffic, they also tend not to learn what keywords generates sales sooner. At best, they learn certain keywords have higher buyer intent.
They often look at PPC click costs to estimate buyer intent because they lack a meaningful framework. This approach is flawed because cost-per-click only tells you what advertisers are willing to pay. It doesn’t tell you how likely customer is to convert.
I say this as a reformed content marketer. It wasn’t until I worked with early-stage startups that I realized product marketingwithcontent marketing was a more efficient path.
Wanna learn the product marketing playbook I used to help Decibite double (+127%) their annualized revenue in 6 months? Then keep reading…
To understand the principles of product marketing playbook, we need to take a lesson from two of my favorite copywriters:
Rosser Reeves, who taught me the importance of creating a unique sales proposition (USP).
Eugene Schwartz, who taught me a framework to figure out what keywords will generate sales sooner. This framework also helped me to learn how the USP should improve the content strategy.
How Rosser Reeves taught me the importance of turning a weak-’n’-flabby value prop into ajackedunique sales proposition (USP)
Quiz time!
Which value prop do you think made Decibite more money?
Homepage value prop #1… Hosting with the Mosting: Managed Hosting
“Reeves taught me more about advertising than anybody I’ve ever known.”
Reeves isn’t the only marketer who believes in the power of a strong value prop.
Copyhackers founder Joanna Wiebe wrote a whole book on ‘em, based on a year of value proposition testing she did.
And Peep Laja, the founder of conversion optimization agency ConversionXL, also believes in the power of a USP, saying this:
“If I could give you only one piece of conversion optimization advice, ‘test your value proposition’ would be it.”
To clarify: a unique selling proposition is a value proposition. But not every value proposition is a unique selling proposition. (I’ll explain more in a moment…)
How to come up with a unique selling proposition (based on how the greats have done it)
I’m gonna make that whole diagram clearer as we go. But let’s start with the quick essentials.
How exactly do you come up with a USP that will work with your brand messaging and speak to your audience about something that’s unique to you? It comes down to five steps.
The 5 steps of creating a unique sales proposition
Talk to your customers.
Survey the market.
Identify your positioning.
Turn that positioning into a value proposition.
Turn your value prop into a USP.
Let’s dig into each of those five steps.
Step 1: Talk to your customers.
You are not in the business of selling a product or a service. You are in the business of providing a solution to someone’s problem. As such…
Your goal is to gain insights on what customerssay they’ve done in the past or are currently doing. You should also focus mainly on open-ended questions to get more in-depth responses too.
Do this by talking to them. The Copyhackers blog has many techniques on how to talk to your customers:
You wanna find out what they say because this language will fuel your copy.
Understanding what previous customers have said, done, and thought, you can predict what future customers will say, do, and think. That is, as long as your future customers are similar to your past ones (which I’ve found are often easier to acquire).
By talking to your customers, you can find out why your customers choose to do business with you rather than with your competitors.
What questions should you ask your customers when developing a USP?
Think back to the days before you started using our product/service. What was your life/work like before us?
If you can recall, what made you start looking for our product?
Since starting to use our product/service, what would you say is the can’t-live-without-it improvement it’s made to your work/life?
If you were to run our company, what is ONE thing you would do differently?
If you can recall what competitors have you used in the past, or are you using alongside our product now?
What did you like most about them?
What was your biggest complaint? Was that the reason you left them?
Imagine you were to talk to a friend/coworker about our product/service. What would you say about us that you’d be unlikely to say about any other solution like ours that you’ve used?
You will want to document what the customer is saying. For best results, you should consider just listening and taking notes on what you want to follow up on during the interview.
If you document what the customer is saying as she’s saying it, you may notice some gaps afterward. Instead, be sure to record every interview with your customer’s permission. Alternatively, you can bring in a second interviewer to take thorough notes.
Also, avoid the feeling you need to reach statistical significance with these interviews. There is an art and a science to writing a unique sales proposition. The goal is to squeeze a lil’ more science into the process than art.
Now it’s time to make sure the market agrees with what you’ve learned.
Step 2: Ask the market to validate brand messaging.
If we refer to the Growth Ramp diagram I mentioned earlier, we’re now at the second step:
After interviewing your customers, I recommend you survey your market. This will give you more data to compare to what you learned from your customer interviews.
Your goal is to avoid only confirming what you’ve learned. (AKA, you’re avoiding confirmation bias). Instead, the goal of market research is to help you validate or invalidate what you’ve found.
The tricky thing about surveying people is that you can never be sure you’re surveying someone who’s actually a match of your future customer. This is an added danger of mining product reviews and social media eavesdropping.
Even customer surveys may not allow you to segment the market that will or should buy what you offer.
So take everything with a grain of salt.
You’re looking to triangulate data, not arrive at a guarantee of messaging success.
Step 3: Use the brand messaging to start figuring out your brand’s positioning.
First, let’s define brand positioning.
Brand positioning is where your brand sits in the hearts and minds of customers, particularly in relation to your competitors.
Basically, your positioning is what separates you from the pack.
Before you land on your positioning, you first need to know how your competitors position themselves in the market. Also known as gathering competitive intelligence.
To gather this competitive intelligence:
Start by listing all your competitors.
Look at how each competitor positioned their company.
Step 3.1: Start by listing all your competitors.
It’s likely you already know a handful of your competitors. Do a quick 3-minute brainstorm and list every competitor you can think of off-the-top of your noggin’.
Next, find out what competitors your customers compare you to, including solutions that may not be direct competitors. You should have landed this info doing your customer interviews. If you didn’t (or need more data), you can use Google auto-suggest to help you find even more competitors:
Type in the name of your biggest competitor and add “vs.” afterward.
Then go through each letter of the alphabet.
Step 3.2: Look at how each competitor positions their company.
With your competitor list in hand, you’re ready to determine how each competitor positions their company in the market.
A simple way to see how each competitor positions their company is to write down:
What each competitor lists on their homepage title tag.
What each competitor has as their main header on the homepage (typically their H1).
For example…
With a quick trip to Google, you’ll find Hootsuite’s homepage title tag as “Social Media Marketing & Management Dashboard.”
The main header on Hootsuite’s homepage is, “Manage all your social media in one place.”
Thus with this 80/20 trick, you learn that Hootsuite wants to help you manage all your social media.
Perhaps you’re now asking:
“How is Hootsuite different than Buffer, Sprout Social, and the 50-some odd other social media management tools out there?”
Creating that distinction is what you’ll learn in the next step…
Step 4: Express your brand’s positioning with a clear value proposition (pre-USP).
Although you may conflate value propositions and unique sales propositions, I’d like to encourage you not to. Let me show you how, in my years as a marketer, I’ve seen a distinction between value props and USPs.
For starters…
A value proposition is the value you promise to deliver to your customers.
Allow me to illustrate.
While competing in The Amazing Race, Blake Mycoskie took an eye-opening trip to Argentina.
Four years later, Mycoskie revisited Argentina on vacation. There he met a woman who was volunteering to deliver shoes to shoeless children. The experience fueled his desire to start a footwear company to help more children in need. His goal was to donate one pair of shoes for every pair someone bought.
You may have heard of this famous footwear company. It’s called TOMS.
With nothing more than 200 pairs of shoes and a strong value proposition, Mycoskie began to pitch journalists.
A value proposition is the value you promise to deliver to your customers.
The better you communicate the value you promise (AKA, your value prop), the more sales you’re likely to make. That is, as long as there’s a market to hear and love that promise, which I’ll dive into discussing in a moment.
This brings us to this stage in the process of writing a value proposition:
A strong value proposition should be:
Relevant to your customers’ acute pain. It’s written in the language of your customer, so your customers’ know it addresses their ongoing problems.
Clear about the value you offer and how it will improve their lives. A customer should be able to read and understand your value prop in five seconds (or less). There should be no hype or business jargon.
Specific about the benefits you offer. There is a concrete result a customer will get from buying from your product.
Different or significantly better than what your competition offers.
To create a strong value prop, you’ll want to find out what benefit your customers receive when using your product.
The questions I recommended you ask your customers earlier in this article will give you the data to create your value prop.
But here’s where things get tricky…
Your competitors can easily copy most value propositions. For example, I’ve found over 30 companies using the one-for-one model (source,source,sourrce).
Your competitors will often offer a similar value prop as you. Perhaps they will phrase it a bit differently. But it’s almost an exact copy in the eyes of your customers.
So how do you write a powerful value prop that makes sales… and is nigh impossible for your competition to steal?
By turning your value prop into a USP.
Step 5: Add specificity to turn your value prop into a unique sales proposition.
Here are some examples of unique sales propositions.
Domino’s: “Fresh, hot pizza delivered to your door in 30 minutes or less or it’s free.”
FedEx: “When it absolutely, positively has to be there overnight.”
GEICO: 15 minutes could save you 15% or more on your car insurance.
Can you see what each USP has in common?
Each of these company’s USPs has two characteristics:
A benefit that their customer finds valuable. This alone is valuable, but it would only be a strong value proposition, not a USP. “Fresh, hot pizza delivered to your door” could apply to Domino’s or any pizza joint. Further, the customer takes on the risk if the company fails to deliver on the value proposition.
A specific claim that a customer can test to see if it is true. “…in 30 minutes or less or it’s free” becomes a guarantee where Domino’s takes on the risk. Yes, using a specific claim could influence a competitor to steal it. Yet, a USP often requires a change to the product or the company’s operations.
How to turn a value proposition into a unique sales proposition
To turn a value prop into a USP, I recommend you create a specific claim.
Let’s go back to Decibite to help you see how I create USPs.
Decibite is positioning itself in the web hosting market. Web hosts typically focus on one of four benefits:
Security
Scalability
Speed
Service
Known as a point of parity, every web host needs to offer these four benefits. Decibite needs to offer all four benefits to be a worthy web host. That’s the baseline.
The emphasis a web host chooses to put on one of these benefits shapes its position in the market.
To find out which benefit Decibite should focus on, I looked at…
What customers liked about Decibite,
What the market research revealed and
What the founders specialized in.
After examining the research, I identified “speed” as the benefit Decibite should focus on. Decibite customized their servers to increase their customers’ server speed. Good. The product had the unique sales prop baked inside it.
Even better, the co-founders love learning how to improve server and site speed too. This obsession, experience, and personality are good signs of founder-market fit. In simple terms, founder-market fit is a signal how founders have the gifts and skills to best serve this market.
My job was to create a customer-facing unique sales prop out of the data.
To turn a benefit into a USP, you have two options, as I see it:
You can either find a USP already in your product and create a specific promise.
Or you can create a USP and change your product to match the USP.
To create Decibite’s specific claim, I looked at my USP swipe file and tweaked Geico’s USP to fit.
So “15 minutes could save you 15% or more on your car insurance” became “Get 15% or faster web hosting by switching to Decibite, guaranteed.”
I hypothesized that it would be a strong USP to test in the market.
But I didn’t stop there. And you shouldn’t either.
How should you use a USP to craft your content strategy?
Here’s how I applied Eugene Schwartz’s 5 stages of awareness to a USP to double (+127%) a startup’s annualized revenue in 6 months
Eugene Schwartz identified The 5 Stages of Customer Awareness in “Breakthrough Advertising.” Each stage of awareness will change what you write to make a sale.
What are the 5 stages of awareness?
As discussed in detail here and in a ton of other Copyhackers content, these are the five accepted stages of awareness that your prospects find themselves in:
Most Aware: Prospect is in an excellent position to decide to buy your offer.
Product Aware: Prospect is learning about your solution.
Solution Aware: Prospecting is reviewing solutions.
Problem Aware: Prospecting is experiencing pain.
Unaware: Prospect is pre-pain.
In greater detail, those 5 stages of awareness are:
Most Aware: Your customer knows your product, and he’s ready to buy. Now it’s your job to give him the best reasons to buy now – like time-limited offers and the most relevant testimonials.
Product-Aware: Your customer knows what you sell and often what the competition sells. But she isn’t sure it’s right for her. At this stage, you need to position your product against the competition.
Solution-Aware: Your customer knows the result they want. But they may not know of your product, or that it provides the results they’re looking for.
Problem-Aware: Your customer senses she has a problem. But she doesn’t know what’s the right solution.
Unaware: Your customer does not know of their pain, even though he has this problem. These prospects don’t realize they have a problem. Think of this audience like someone who has cancer, but a doctor has not diagnosed the issue.
As a product marketer, I used these 5 stages to create content for each stage of the buyer journey.
Sure, targeting certain SEO keywords will influence where a customer is when they first land on your website. (I’ll cover how you can target the right keywords in a moment). But unless you have a magic wand to direct them through your website, they’ll skip around your pages.
By targeting the 5 customer stages with different content, you’ll make it easier for customers to buy from you.
That means it’s not just about mapping stages of awareness to pages like so:
Most Aware: Short offer-focused page.
Product Aware: Product-detail page.
Solution Aware: Long-form sales page, home page.
Problem Aware: Home page, blog post.
Unaware: Blog post.
Instead, let’s look at how to create content for each of the 5 stages of awareness.
How can you create content for customers who are ready to buy (most aware)?
Most-aware customers are often looong-time fans.
He or she is almost certainly on your email list. Heck, he may have even bought another product from you. All you need to do is to give him a buy button, and he’s ready to sign up.
As an early-stage startup, a customer who’s most aware is a luxury.
It’s *possible* you might have a few of these customers on your list. More than likely, different pages on your website will help these customers move down the sales funnel.
“Okay Jason, why the heck did you write all that, only to tell me you don’t need to create content for these customers?!”
For one simple reason.
I’ve seen waaay too many home pages, sales pages, and every-other-pages with a call-to-action button buried 10-feet deep.
“I keep expecting to see a BUY NOW type of button…”
“The endless promo page was doing exactly what you said [the product] would defeat. Sounding like everyone else promising stuff and going so overboard that I was oversold.
Now I’m so far at the other end of the decision scale I’m delirious.”
That’s why when I create content for product-aware customers (the next stage of awareness), almost every. single. page. has a buy button at the top.
Speaking of product-aware customers…
Here’s how to create content for product-aware customers
Do you remember the “I’m a Mac, and I’m a PC” ads?
Comparison ads like “Get a Mac” are perfect for product-aware customers.
Why?
Product-aware customers are aware of their pain. They’re aware of solutions to that pain. And they know some of your competitors too.
But they’re just not sure if the product you offer is right for them. That’s why you want to create a comparison for these folks. Since product-aware customers are comparing you to your competitors, why not educate ‘em on why your product is the perfect choice?
Include accurate claims about your competitor’s product.
Include a disclaimer that you are not affiliated with your competitor in any way.
Not change or manipulate your competitor’s trademark or logo in any way.
Not mislead or deceive customers.
Just like all marketing campaigns you run.
To ease any other fears you may have….
Ever since 1972, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) began to encourage comparative advertising. Their goal was to increase educational advertising. They believed this would spark positive competition to increase sales.
One benefit to comparison pages is that unhappy customers are already searching for an alternative.
This means these landing pages can bring you free traffic from Google.
There are four keyword categories you can target in this step. These are:
Alternative.
Example: Slack Alternative.
Pricing.
Example: Slack Pricing.
Review.
Example: Slack Review.
vs. .
Example: Slack vs. Hipmunk.
Are you worried that Google will penalize you for duplicate content for each landing page? Keep in mind, you’re duplicating and “refurbishing” your own content, not your competitors.
Google didn’t penalize me for refurbishing our own content.
I recommend creating a page for each of your product’s features. Then with each page, you will educate the customer on how your feature relates to your USP.
Ready to create content for problem-aware customers?
How to use USPs in your content for prospects who are experiencing a pain (“problem aware”)
Problem-aware customers feel intense pain. But they do not know your product exists. Nor do they know your product (or your competitor’s product) will cure them of their pain.
All this customer knows is that she has a problem, but she’s not sure there’s a solution.
Typically, you’ll find these customers when they hit a transition in their life.
She may have changed jobs, started a startup, or tried out a new hobby. With this new adventure comes questions she wants answered. Sometimes it’s an event she’s been doing for years which triggers a problem, like planning her social campaigns for black friday.
With this new adventure comes questions she wants answered. So she surfs the web until she finds her answers, such as this Black Friday article.
The “problem aware” stage of awareness is where traditional content marketing shines.
By traditional content marketing, I mean writing articles, creating videos, webinars, and the like.
There are several types of content you can use at this stage:
case studies,
calculators,
listicles,
teardowns,
how-to posts…
The list goes on and on.
My recommendation is to start by publishing original research, and here’s why.
This strategy is at the core of Copyhackers’s content’s success too. If you’ve read any articles on the Copyhackers’s blog, you’ve likely noticed several case studies:
Case studies, in effect, is a form of original research.
Now, what should you do about addressing customers in the final stage of awareness: totally unaware.
What content should you create for unaware prospects?
In general, “completely unaware” prospects need a lot of work to convert.
They haven’t felt any pain yet. So they aren’t motivated to pay attention to your content.
It’s like a person before they have their first child. They’re watching TV, and a diaper commercial comes on. They don’t care. But once they find out they’re expecting, suddenly they start to pay attention.
Unaware prospects are still prospects.
They’re just… not ready for you yet.
The content which works best here are ones marketers hope will “go viral.” The goal is to take a seemingly unrelated topic and tie it into the product.
LucidChart does a fantastic job showing their product in action while “explaining the Internet”:
All-in-all, I recommend AGAINST creating content for unaware prospectsunless:
You have a product that has a broad use-case (ideally with a free trial or freemium plan). Or,
You have a huge budget and can actually do some mass advertising.
Instead, focus more on people in problem aware, solution aware, product aware, and most aware stages.
Search engine optimized content is a long-term investment. But it doesn’t need to take 6-12 months for content marketing or SEO to “start working” either.
No matter your product marketing strategy, whether you use SEO, PPC, or some other three-letter acronym, there’s always a faster path.
What I’ve shared with you is the product marketing strategy I used to help Decibite:
Double their annualized revenue (+127%).
Triple their monthly traffic (+241%).
Quadruple their organic traffic (+331%).
All in six months.
If you start by creating your USP, you’ll have a clear and compelling reason for customers to convert.
You can then use this messaging as your content helps customers at each stage in your funnel. (Or any part of your go-to-market strategy, for that matter).
Perhaps as you apply this marketing strategy to your startup, you’ll grow even faster than Decibite did.
~jason
PS – If you found this guide insightful, I created this free 14-day product marketing email course. I think you’ll enjoy it because it goes deeper into all the product marketing strategies and tactics I wrote in this article.
Special thanks toJared Macdonaldfor reading and critiquing this essay.
Clear, benefit-driven copy
