Generating Awareness and Growing Users?
“How do you best generate awareness and grow users organically for B2C startups?”
The question of how to generate awareness and grow users is as old as business itself. Just as converting your first customer can be a difficult task for any budding entrepreneur, maintaining growth may require significant effort even with established businesses.
In business, the sales funnel is used to describe the process of how a potential customer navigates through their ‘customer’s journey’ when choosing to purchase your product or service.¹ The first stage in the sales funnel is Awareness, which is immediately followed by Discovery, Evaluation, Intent, Purchase, and Loyalty.² Awareness is the stage where you are making prospects aware of your company, products, and brand. This is the introductory phase where they’re learning about who you are, what you do, and how you are unique. Loyalty, on the other hand, lets you use previous sales opportunities to identify other needs that your products can meet and make additional sales.³ All stages of the sales funnel are essential to consistent growth, but none more than these first and last. Generating awareness will allow you to attract more customers, but generating loyalty will allow you to retain them, with customer retention being the main key to long-term growth.
In HubSpot’s Ultimate Guide to Brand Awareness, they outline a pretty comprehensive overview of what awareness is and how to achieve it.⁴ It really boils down to getting in front of potential customers through whatever means available to you. Even the best product or service cannot generate sales if no one is aware of it.
The methods by which awareness is generated can be broken down into Inbound and Outbound Marketing. Where Inbound Marketing is content designed to draw customers to you, and Outbound Marketing is a more direct approach to attracting prospects.⁵
Examples of Inbound Marketing include:
- Articles
- Videos
- Social Media
- Search Engine Optimization
Examples of Outbound Marketing include:
- Online Advertisements
- Emails
- Radio & TV Advertisments
- Billboards
It’s important to note that both these methods will only be effective if you fully understand who your potential customers are and how to reach them. If your target market is made up of a much younger demographic, you are more likely to reach them over social media and through online advertisements as opposed to through print media.
Generating awareness can be very rewarding when done well, but converting interested customers to paying customers and consequently to repeat customers requires a commitment to quality when offering your product or service. It’s not possible for your business to grow if too many customers are one-off purchases. If you secure a new customer but lose an old one, the result is net-zero, there has been no growth. For that reason, you should treat customer loyalty with the same importance as customer awareness. Satisfied customers will gladly spread your product or service by word of mouth, assisting you in building awareness. So in many ways, they’re two sides of the same coin.
With the right kind of approach, I’m certain you will be able to achieve the awareness and growth that you desire.
Footnotes
[1] Sales Funnel Breakdown: How to Create and Visualize Your Sales Funnel
[2] Image on googleusercontent.com
[3] What Is a Sales Funnel? An Ultimate Guide
[4] The Ultimate Guide to Brand Awareness
[5] Sales Funnel Breakdown: How to Create and Visualize Your Sales Funnel
