I’ll directly jump into the deal: When you are creating a long term marketing plan, you need to categorise (new) customers as the following:
1) Problem unaware
Many marketers don’t know about this category. They might think that all customers know what exactly their problems are. It’s wrong. As Ford said, if you asked people what they wanted back in the days, they would’ve said “Faster Horses“
Another recent example is Dropbox. The problem that they were solving did not exist on top of anyone’s mind. Noone thought that storing their important files on offline hardware was less safe. Dropbox came in and said “Hey, you could lose all of your documents if your device decides to shut shop“ - that’s when people understood that there is an actual problem.
2) Problem aware
This is another interesting category. People might be facing problems in their daily lives, that they don’t know a solution for. For example, My mom wanted to pay electricity bills without going to the electricity office and also she thought net banking via NEFT was too complicated. She had a problem but didn’t know a solution - until I introduced her to UPI payments.
3) Solution aware
I’ll bring in another example to explain this category. One of my clients was facing an issue managing their leads. They knew that using a proper CRM will solve their problem, but they don’t know which are all the best-suited CRMs out there. These people know the problem and also knows the solution, but isn’t product aware. This is where product education should come in order to nurture them to sales qualifiable leads.
4) Product aware
Last category, where people know about different products in the market that can solve their problem. They might just need a push in the form of word of mouth, testimonials or an enticing offer. Hottest of them all!
If you loved what you read, hit the subscribe button:
Also, I’m doing a webinar on “Zero dollar Marketing strategies“ on August 14th. You can reserve your seat here:
Let’s connect: thejaisonthomas.com