Tags – Making Audience Solution Aware
While writing this blog, all I kept thinking was: nuances.
If any of our blogs has been all about the nuances, this is it.
The simple fact is: if you can’t differentiate between problem-aware and solution-aware, you have a small, yet significant leap to make in your business mentality.
So let’s start from the beginning:
The “Problem” with Problem-Aware
Awareness is a term thrown around extensively, especially in marketing.
Almost all marketing and PR efforts seem to rotate around raising awareness.
But, have you ever sat down and tried to figure out what awareness you are raising? Yes, you must start with raising awareness about a problem, especially if it’s one of those cases where the actual problem is hidden away or only a small part of the problem is understood. In fact our last blog: Helping Your Potential Customers Become Problem-Aware, was all about this side of the challenge for businesses.
However, in order to push your target audience forward, you need to move from a problem focus to a solution focus; taking your audience from problem-aware to solution-aware.
Saying all that, we need to clarify that things are slightly challenging here.
The Transition Challenge
Humans are simply problem driven.
What problem driven is: instead of looking for solutions, people vent out their problems.
If you want examples of this, have a look into what people search for on Google. The fact is: most people spend more time looking into a problem-first search, without looking into resolving it.
This human tendency to vent out problems is both bad and good.
Simply venting out problems is bad because a significant proportion of people don’t really want a solution; they are just venting. (We all have friends who just complain – business leaders are no different)
However, the ones who are venting their frustrations and wanting a solution are doing you a favour. They are literally putting out their problems, or at least part of their problems.
So, your job then becomes: place yourself as the solution provider.
Here’s how you can do exactly that.
Guiding Your Audience into Being Solution-Aware
Your options include:
1. Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) and Content
SEO is particularly useful when it comes to educating your audience about a solution.
This is because most business problems are quite consistent and occur to businesses at a similar stage.
For example, if you are a recruitment company that works with finance companies, the hiring journeys are quite similar. This means that if you know about a recurring problem around, let’s say: attracting talent, your advice doesn’t need to change significantly from one client to another. All you need to do is provide specific pieces of well constructed content that answers these questions.
And once you rank for these questions, you will continually bring traffic that is interested in talking to you, because you are clearly solving the problem for these companies.
The one challenge here is: SEO is a mid term strategy and can take a few months to start bringing results. Therefore, you need to consider one of the following options too.
2. Paid Advertising
Not all advertising needs to be for the final product; solution-awareness can generate the right kind of PR for your business.
In addition, going in with a solution through advertising also creates a stronger connection with your audience too; you have spent the extra effort to demonstrate that you understand the problems of your audience.
3. Social Media Posts
This bit is quite obvious actually: your content on social media needs to be more meaty and authoritative.
The bigger challenge here isn’t the content itself; it’s the fact that most social media content makes it hard to cut through. So, you will need to get a bit more creative.
Again, consider running campaigns and other impactful social media formats, e.g. infographics and ebooks to grab attention.
Concluding Remarks
In order to extend the impact of your solutions, consider combining your content in a helpful manner.
For instance, the fact that most solutions have a couple of layers, create landing pages that bring together these layers of content into a single snapshot.
This kind of content can then also be converted into other forms of campaigns, e.g. advertisements and emails.
The simple fact to remember is that you are trying to place yourself as the solution-provider; make this fact as easy as possible to grab the attention of your audience.
To learn more, get in touch with us today.
In the meantime, check our SEO services.
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