Most marketers are familiar with AARRR Pirate Metric Frameworks developed by Dave McClure. It’s the 5 stages of user behavior that product-led companies should be tracking; Awareness/Acquisition, Activation, Retention, Referral, and Revenue. In some cases, Awareness and Acquisition should be measured differently, also Revenue mostly comes before Referrals in my experience but that’s a different conversation.

While this framework helps with your marketing strategy and tactics, marketers may struggle with what outcomes to expect from the different stages, especially in a world where everything is focused on conversions.

The fact remains that customers are going to be at different stages of their buying journey and the earlier we accept the fact and manage expectations the less pressure and potential success you can get from your campaigns. Customers need to be aware of your company/product and are very unlikely to make a buying decision until they’ve had multiple interactions, usually across multiple channels.

If you’re growing your customer base and expanding your share of the market you cannot ignore the awareness stage of your campaigns, it is super important to manage stakeholder expectations as a lot of the top management are just interested in conversions, so, as you educate your customers on why they should try out your product, you should equally educate the team on why the awareness stage of your marketing cannot be skipped.

At present people see anywhere between 50–400 ads per day, with different brands and products competing for attention, why do you think a customer will see your ad and make a buying decision instantly, especially if it’s not a very low-priced consumer product, that’s not logical.

For example, your product is a SaaS tool that helps B2B businesses engage and nurture their customers, there’s a whole process of consideration, evaluation, and approvals that need to happen before that decision is made. The marketing rule of 7 says that the customer needs to have interacted with your brand at least 7 times before they make a buying decision, this rule was developed by the movie industry in the 1930s, and I believe this number will be higher today, given how many more things are vying for our attention.

So it just makes sense for marketers to set aside budget and resources for awareness and have expectations that match that stage of the journey. Plan your awareness campaigns depending on your ICPs, and try out different tactics and channels organic and paid. Measure your KPIs, which for such stages are impressions, reach, clicks, views, downloads of your ebooks, engagement rate, clicks, and CTRs.

Make this a line item as you plan your marketing campaigns and get the buy-in from key stakeholders so that they’re not outrightly expecting leads or customers from an awareness campaign. We will talk about attribution at some point 😊

Hope this helps a marketer out there.