Author Bio: Toby is a freelance business writer. He is currently completing an internship with BGN, a branding agency in Manchester, and likes to write about all things marketing and entrepreneurship

Marketing strategies aren’t one-size-fits-all. Every industry, every sector and every business needs its own, tailored approach. But on top of that, so does every customer.

Now we obviously can’t create a different strategy for each individual customer, and for the vast majority of businesses, we can’t even identify every single one of our different customers. So to help with this, marketing has long used marketing funnels to help separate customers into different groups. 

What’s the difference between awareness, consideration, and conversion?

The most commonly used marketing funnel divides customers into 3 groups: awareness, consideration, and conversion.

Awareness: At the top of the funnel, we have potential customers who have first become aware of your product or service. They might stumble across your website through a Google search or hear about your brand from a friend. However they discover you, this is when they first enter your marketing funnel.

Consideration: Prospects in the middle of the funnel are considering your brand but have not yet converted. They’ll likely still have a few barriers preventing them from making a purchase but are starting to compare your brand with competitors.

Conversion: At the bottom of the funnel we have potential customers who are closest to converting. They’ve probably already taken a few actions and built a relationship with your brand, and now just need a final push from your marketing department to pull the trigger.

How to tailor your marketing approach to each stage

Awareness

To move potential customers or clients into the awareness stage, we obviously have to make them aware of your brand or product. To do this, the goal of your marketing efforts should be reach and brand awareness. If you think of your marketing department as fishermen, this is where their net should be at its widest in the hope of catching as many leads as possible.

It may be useful to focus your efforts here on search engine optimisation (SEO) strategies. This involves improving your website and brand visibility on search engine results pages (SERPs) subsequently upping the chances of a prospective customer landing on your website as a result of a Google search.

You’ll probably want to target non-branded keywords as customers won’t be searching for you by name yet. You’ll also want to put a lot of effort into the page that potential customers are landing on; informational blog posts that explain your offering could be a great way to make new leads aware of who you are and what you do.

Consideration

If a customer likes what they see when they first discover your brand, product or service, they may start to consider doing business with you or taking further action. More often than not, a customer will engage on a lower level with your company before fully converting, these actions that act as steps to a conversion are known as micro conversions.

A micro conversion could be actions like signing up for your newsletter, following your brand on social media or even adding an item to the basket before abandoning the session. Whatever it is, your prospect still needs a little more convincing. 

Here you should be focusing on answering those final doubts, this could be through landing pages designed to solve specific pain points - Netflix has a ‘How To Watch Netflix On Your TV Page’ to target people who may be wondering if Netflix is too complex to set up on a TV. 

In the world of B2B, many businesses use case studies at this stage to show off their past work in an attempt to push potential leads to book that sales call.

Conversion

The final stage before a lead takes that desired action. Whether you're measuring signups, lead calls or sales, there’ll come a time when your prospect needs a final nudge. 

In the world of e-commerce, this is often achieved through paid ads, discount codes or creative email marketing such as the abandoned cart email which tries to entice customers back to the site if they have started but not completed a purchase.

For companies offering some kind of software, a free trial or discounted period is often used to tempt customers into signing up in the hope that they go on to become a long-term customer.