The Awareness Ladder and Your Website
Last time I introduced the awareness ladder and today I’ll show you how to use the awareness ladder and your website to structure your marketing.
Decide which rung on the ladder is your primary focus. Some sites have pages that address each rung on the ladder, whilst others focus on one or a few. So, your site might be for people who know they have a problem and not for people who don’t.
Landing Pages – Steps 0 and 1
There’s a plague of frogs and you want to drive people to your site. How will you respond to their level of awareness?
Someone aware of the problem, who wants to know how to handle the plague of frogs might Google their problem. If so, they want their website to appear close to the top of the list Google generates for ‘plague of frogs’ or something similar. To do this analyse keywords and then search engine optimise (seo) your website to move it closer to the top of the list. I shall write about these later.
If you want to target people unaware of the problem, they’ll never search for it and so you must advertise. There are several ways to advertise online. You don’t always need to pay.
Whichever method you use to find visitors, when they click on a link to your site it should take them to a landing page.
The landing page should be relevant to the path the visitor followed to get to you. So, people aware of the problem will arrive on a different page to those who are not aware. When they arrive they should see they’re at to the right place and so carry on reading.
For the plague of frogs site, I might have one landing page for those who are not aware. For someone who is aware, a second landing page can move them from the problem to consider various solutions. Those not aware of the problem would move from the first landing page to the second if they want to know more.
Step 2 and 3
Movement from landing page to home page would be the start of a funnel, drawing the visitor deeper into the site. Later pages would lead my visitors to common solutions to the problem (step 2) and then my solution (step 3).
Steps 4 and 5
Step 4 would be a few optional pages, with evidence my solution works. They might cover research or satisfied customers.
Step 5 is a page where the visitor places their order.
Sometimes these later pages can be landing pages too. If you know your visitor is likely to be further up the ladder, there is no need for them to read the earlier pages.
In future posts, I’ll walk you through each of these three parts of a website in more detail and show you what is possible.
Do you know of websites that use this approach. How effective do you think it is? Have you purchased from such a site? What persuaded you to make a purchase?