Five Stages of Visitors’ Awareness

The 5 Stages of Awareness is a copywriting framework popularized by Eugene Schwartz in his 1966 book Breakthrough Advertising. It helps you understand what level of questions your visitors have in mind so that you can provide the right information, at the right time, in the right amount.

1. Unaware: they don’t know they have a need, or they aren’t aware there is a problem.

2. Problem Aware: they know there is a problem, but they don’t associate that problem with what your product offers.

3. Solution Aware: they are aware of the solution, so they want the benefit or the result, but they still don’t know that your product is the solution.

4. Product Aware: They know your product can help them, but they aren’t ready to commit to it.

5. Fully aware: they know your product, and they want it.

Example of a wedding site: Visitor 1 is still figuring out the venue. Visitor 2 has decided on the location but needs to figure out the caterer, photographer, videographer, etc. Visitor 3 may be looking for bridesmaid dresses. Visitor 4 may be the parent of the bride and wondering how much this will cost.

Metrics to understand which stage the visitor is in:

Landing page: point of entry (click on the landing page through an email list), self-identification (ask who they are in a pop-up window), time on page, visit frequency, click-through rate (pulling them in from where they are to buy by redirecting to another page on the site), how many pages they visited

Email: open rates, click-through rates (each vertical has a benchmark for you to thrive for), response rate.

Pay-Per-Click/SEO: keyword utilization (if user type in long words, they have a better idea of what they want)

Low-awareness audience: When visitors are far away from the last stage, they need to be hit gently in multiple ways. A good starting point is to focus on the emotion. You need to spoon-feed them the information little by little until all the information bubbles up and they realize they need this. You also need to deploy all psychology principles (explained in Robert B. Cialdini’s book Influence) to persuade them, such as low-level commitment in the call to action, stories and metaphors, human interest, and should-ask questions. An example is how Volkswagen marketed its small cars when consumers had only been exposed to big cars.

High-awareness audience: Now, you should move away from the emotion. This is when the audience has already decided they want this product, but they need a justification to buy it. Your copy should be benefit-based, result-based, high specificity, and proofs like dollars gained, percentage improved, testimonial, endorsement, case studies, white papers, return-on-investment summaries, etc.

The 100 audience formula by Marylou Tyler (author of Predictable Revenue):

This formula appears to transcend multiple channels. It gives you some baseline numbers to aspire to for conversion rate optimization in your channels. Imagine 100 people sitting in a stadium. Three of them would have the level of awareness to buy right now. 6–7 people are open to it but haven’t decided yet(product aware). 30 people don’t think they are interested (solution aware). 30 people know they aren’t interested (problem aware). 30 are not thinking about it at all (unaware)