Customer awareness is a part of a company’s marketing & communications plan. It is a process that helps an entrepreneur educate customers about his/her company, its performances and the products or services his/her company delivers. A well-designed awareness program ensures better customer engagement and protects consumer welfare.
Top Objectives of a Customer Awareness Program
Understand which category of customers would be interested in the product or service you’re planning to sell.
Prepare an effective marketing and advertising plan to reach the target consumer segment.
Help customers find out your products and services.
Convey a clear message explaining the strengths and benefits of your products.
Gain consumer’s trust by helping them understand how the product will solve their respective problems.
How Important is Building a Smart Customer Awareness Program?
Today, a corporation operates in a highly competitive environment. If an entrepreneur wants its target consumers to know about its innovations and prioritize its products over the similar category products that its competitors sell, it has to build a good customer awareness process.
An entrepreneur needs a solid customer awareness plan to reach maximum numbers of potential customers and create a product demand. However, it will not happen if a company doesn’t communicate with the customers effectively. When building customer awareness, a company has to put across its USP and solve the pain point of the customers.
Building customer awareness is important because consumers have a right to know why they should buy your product, what are its benefits and how safe it will be to use your product.
3 Steps to Building Customer Awareness
When building customer awareness, an entrepreneur determines his/her target market, uses a very specific marketing tool or channels to engage and communicate with the consumers and help them increase product and service knowledge. The three major steps that a customer awareness program includes can be explained as below –
In the first stage, a company creates awareness by pointing out the pain point of the customers. The company needs to talk more about the problem at this stage. The intention is to make consumers aware of the prevailing problem if they’re not already. Raise awareness using a very logical message.
Give customers a solution to that problem in the second step. Get customer’s attention by presenting your solution as the best way to solve the respective problem.
Present your product or brand as the best solution to the problem in the third stage. As the customers will know the problem they are facing by this time, it will be easy for them to understand that they can overcome the problem with the help of your brand.
Corporations Who Incorporate Customer Awareness
Ford’s customer awareness program is the best example. To create awareness about the company’s product quality, safety, social and environmental performance, the company engages into various two-way communications with the stakeholders and consumers. The company participates in stakeholder engagement forums.
Ford also uses other non-traditional marketing ideas to create awareness. They initiated a Drive One campaign in North American, which encouraged people to experience their vehicles firsthand and promoted the quality, safety, green technology and other smart features that their vehicles had. The motive of the campaign was to help consumers understand their product strength and thus increase the likelihood that they would buy it.
So the bottom line is, a well-designed customer awareness program helps a company convey a clear message to its target customers, gain their trust by giving them accurate product information and create a market demand.
