While all businesses struggle with customer awareness of their brand, some businesses have a particularly challenging position of providing customer awareness of their brand… and the customer’s problem.
When your product or service is particularly revolutionary, sometimes your customers don’t even know they need you yet. You end up needing to start from scratch with a customer who struggles with a problem but doesn’t know that it can be solved. If that sounds like a position your company is in, here are three steps to effectively building customer awareness.
Start with the negative.
A brand that addresses a well-known problem can outline the positives of their brand’s product or service right from the start. But a product that addresses a problem that people don’t know they have needs to establish the pain points for the customer first. Only then can you create awareness of the problem’s solution and how your particular product is the best solution.
For example, take a look at Apruve’s clever marketing video that appeals to its customer’s accounts receivable department. It immediately speaks to the AR employee’s experience of how much paperwork can be involved in making a business purchase, clearly identifying a common pain point for its customers.
Empathize with the negative.
Once you’ve established the problem, your first brand engagement can begin. Using language and examples that truly speak to what your customer is experiencing shows your customers that you deeply understand the problem and are just as bothered by it as they are. This immediately establishes common ground for a trusting relationship.
Apruve’s marketing video perfectly empathizes with its customer’s pain, also, but it’s not the only B2B company successfully targeting this method. Just look to Xerox’s 2013 “Chief Optimist” content marketing campaign. The company partnered with Forbes to develop custom content that spoke to themes of optimism, positivity, and leadership in the workplace. Something we wouldn’t typically associate with a photocopier, but that often occupies the same territory.
Present your solution.
Once you’re well on your way towards a relationship built on common ground, there is room for you to present your business case. Now that you’ve drawn attention to the problem and positioned yourself as an empathetic problem-solver, the customer actually cares what you have to say. This is the perfect platform on which you can present your product or service and stand out in your customer’s mind with marketing assets like blog posts, white papers, and video.
SunGard Availability Services, a data security and management company, positioned itself as a solution incredibly well with its award-winning 2014 “How to Pack for the Holidays: Pack Like an IT Pro” campaign. The campaign garnered a lot of attention from the press and from customers, generating more than 3,000 leads in three days.
Building customer awareness among those who aren’t even aware that they have a problem is a big challenge. But if you can embrace it as a step-by-step opportunity to build a relationship with your customer, you’ll be far more successful in exposing them to their problem- and your solution.