The awareness system
Or, how to create great customers
Hi all -
A few weeks ago, I wrote about splitting out “awareness” from “conversion” in your Go-to-Market:
Sell when your prospect’s world is changing. Build awareness when their world isn’t.
Which segregates your marketing into two different systems that you should NOT mix:
The awareness system: Marketing that’s based on who your target customers are. It's focused ENTIRELY on what matters to them… and NEVER on selling your product
The conversion system: Selling that happens based on what happens TO your target customers. It's focused ENTIRELY on helping them navigate their situation. And, ONLY IN THAT CONTEXT, it mentions your product.
Before product-market fit, you tend to focus on the conversion system. You send cold emails or pay for ads that bring someone through a sales process. This gets you rich, immediate feedback on your value prop and product.
Then your conversion system is working. It’s clear you're sprinting towards product-market fit. And you start asking yourself: How do we scale this up?
Of course, there are tons of ways to scale your conversion system, for example:
Physically scaling the conversion system by hiring more people
Scaling by making your conversion system more efficient. For example, designing your conversion system around triggers.
But there’s this other thing. This thing called “Brand”, that people like me get squeamish about because it’s fluffy. And it seems to be a word marketers to excuse themselves for not delivering revenue results.
But, done well, Brand can be a lever that makes everything else easier. Deals close faster with the right customers. Customers achieve success faster, stay longer, give more feedback, and put up with bugs. In other words, Brand can create great customers.
As my company grows, I’ve started thinking more and more about brand as an “awareness system”. Brand is a way to get people to know about you without you trying to sell to them. This definition may annoy some brand marketers, but I’m sticking with it.
So… how do you build an awareness system?
Here’s how I’m thinking about it:
Content, distribution, & revenue
The goal of the awareness system is to be a low-effort way to make sales & retention easier by creating content & distribution that future customers will pay attention to before they hit the “trigger” that causes them to enter your conversion system.
Or: Make content that our customers like, that isn’t trying to sell them. And focus on getting as many eyeballs as possible.
We are starting with building our awareness system on LinkedIn because:
Our customers are there.
There’s limited competition: There doesn’t seem to be a lot of good content on LinkedIn for our target customers. Most is salesy or clickbait fluff.
It has distribution built-in: We can connect with people 1:1. Instead of praying that they sign up to our email list, or follow us back on Twitter.
Here’s the playbook our sales team is experimenting with. I’d love your feedback!
Content:
Text-only posts 1-2x per week
Video interviews with our buyer personas and/or industry partners 1x per week. Centered on a specific theme that our buyers care about & we know about. (For us: recruitment & retention)
Distribution:
Sending connection requests to 20+ target buyers per day on LinkedIn
Getting interviewees to share our posts
Edit videos & distribute outside LinkedIn (e.g., YouTube, newsletter, podcast). Try to get our connections to subscribe outside LinkedIn in case LinkedIn changes their algorithm
Getting influencers, partners, and industry associations to distribute our content to their audiences.
Success metrics:
When people convert to sales opportunities, we’ll ask: where did hear about us from? And we’ll see how many self-report LinkedIn vs. other sources.
But! This is a system that builds over time, so we won’t kill this in a quarter if it’s not delivering immediate results.
I will update on our awareness system as we launch it!
PS - I am thinking about how we can use a similar awareness system to recruit great employees and find awesome investors. The playbook is the same; the audience, content, and (potentially) channel are different.