Author: Rishabh Dev

In Chapter 16, we discussed the growth funnel which we call the A3R3 funnel or the AAARRR funnel in detail.

We also saw a visual overview of the funnel with the growth marketing experiments you can run for each stage as well as some of the metrics you should measure at each stage of the funnel.

In this chapter, we will deep dive into the Awareness Stage of the growth funnel.

The Awareness Stage of the Growth Funnel

The Awareness Stage focus on growth activities and experiments that make the potential audience aware in the following situations:

• that a solution exists for a need they have which they may or may not know about
• that a solution is available with our startup
• educating them as quickly as possible that they have this need and then informing them we can fulfill it

In case they know a specific need they have but they’re not “aware” if there’s a solution yet, then we must design growth hacking experiments to reach them fast.

Awareness: Scenario 1

Customer is or might be aware of their requirement.

Here’s a step-by-step example experiment in the Awareness Phase of the A3R3 funnel:

• Step 1: Go through other close needs the customer may have
• Step 2: Make a list of products or tools that solve the closest need
• Step 3: Use the audience of these products or tools and market to their audience

Awareness: Scenario 2

Customer is not aware of their own need or requirement (sounds funny but this is often the case)

In this case, we can’t hack awareness of the product or solution directly, but we must first bring out the need and use Awareness hacks in parallel for maximum impact.)

Here’s a step-by-step example experiment in the Awareness Phase of the A3R3 funnel:

• Step 1: Find a podcast or webinar or social media live chat or AMA platform which your target audience subscribes to
• Step 2: Share general and specific tips during the event but also use it as a platform to ask questions and help people discover or understand or accept the need
• Step 3: Capture their information and use content and retargeting via email or ads to reach them again with your solution for their requirement or need

What you can do – Awareness Hacks

1. Run validation ad campaigns to their target audience (read more about Validation Marketing, another term coined by Rishabh, which is closely related to the awareness stage of the A3R3 funnel)
2. Join their community and have conversations
3. Find a few of their users and then leverage word-of-mouth
4. Run retargeting campaigns
5. Run email marketing drips and newsletters
6. Create awareness landing pages with simple opt-ins

What you should measure – Awareness Metrics

1. Responses to your initiated conversations
2. Traffic to your awareness landing page through these experiments
3. Impressions on your content and messaging
4. Amount of time in terms of minutes of attention to your awareness stage content
5. Visits to your website from your Awareness Hacks
6. Podcast Impressions and Listen times
7. AMA views where you talk about the need or product

This should give you a good starting point to initiate your Awareness Experiments. What you can do from here is design multiple awareness experiments based on the above ideas and then plug them into the growth marketing experiments process to start executing and measuring results.

Remember:

AWARENESS MARKETING should not be confused with finding a Product-Market Fit. Having a product-market fit and the audience having awareness are two different things and should not be confused.

Here, we’re talking about startups who have a product-market fit based on their initial feedback or MVP iterations.

The problem we’re trying to solve here is for them to be able to make their own target audience aware of the product by either first making them aware of the need or by addressing their existing need.

On the other hand, startups or ideas without a product market-kit should go back to the drawing board and focus on finding the fit first and not think about growth hacking or growth marketing.

A product-market fit is the key pre-requisite for growth marketing – and should be worked on before diving into any of the core growth marketing funnel experiments.

That’s all for this chapter.

In the next chapter, we will deep dive into the ACQUISITION stage of the growth funnel.

In Chapter 15, we went through the process of describing the customer’s journey through a growth funnel, which we called the A3R3 funnel or the AAARRR funnel.

The funnel describes the stages of an ideal customer’s journey – which are the stages of Awareness, Acquisition, Activation, Revenue, Retention, and Referral.

In this chapter, we will learn more about the growth funnel and in the chapters following this one, we will be dedication one chapter to each stage in the funnel.

We saw 2 examples of the user’s journey in Chapter 15 where we described how they go through each stage of the funnel.

Now, let’s look into the possible methods of driving the entire growth funnel as a growth marketer.

I want you to put your growth marketing hat on. Let’s get started.

Let’s say Startup A hired you as a growth marketer to define and drive their entire growth marketing funnel. Your first job will be to define the stages of the funnel well and the next step will be to design growth experiments for each stage of the funnel.

Let’s say the startup is an edutech company that creates online educational products for 5-15 year olds.

Here are some of the growth experiments we can plan for this startup:

1. Build influencer partnerships with mom bloggers who have parents of 5 to 10-year-olds as their target audience (since you will be mostly targeting parents of your audience) and create collaborative content with them.
2. Ask the influencers to offer a free trial class by your startup to their audience on an Instagram story.
3. Once parents and their children take the free trial class, offer them an easy onboarding user experiment, free training on the tool you use to teach online.
4. Provide the first 100 users who have taken a free trial class a 10% discount coupon for their first purchase of any online learning package for their children.
5. Review the data of how many children took all their paid classes in the package and provide the least likely to renew customers a 20% for their renewal.
6. Ask the most engaged customers to share your startup’s offering with their parents in their community or network.

These are only some of the experiments. I’m sure you can think of many more!

Good job. Now we have one growth experiment idea for each stage of the funnel for this startup.

Let’s do back to the examples and give the names of the stage to each experiment:

1. Influencer partnerships with mom bloggers – AWARENESS MARKETING
2. Influencers to offer a free trial class – ACQUISITION MARKETING
3. Easy onboarding user experiment and free training on the tool – ACTIVATION MARKETING
4. 10% discount coupon for their first purchase of any online learning package – REVENUE MARKETING
5. 20% for renewal of churn-risk customers – RETENTION MARKETING
6. Ask the most engaged customers to share your startup’s offering – REFERRAL MARKETING

This example should give you an idea of how you can design growth experiments for each stage of the funnel.

While a user could be in any stage of the funnel at any given time, it’s also important to understand that a new startup will have most users in the AAAR stages that are Awareness, Acquisition, Activation, and Referral. Throughout this phase of the startup, referral marketing campaigns will be highly ineffective since the referral-ready customer segment will be too small to make a huge difference in the marketing numbers.

This is important to know so you can design and plan your marketing experiments based on what phase your startup is in.

When a startup is very mature and has seen multiple cycles of the funnel, all stages of the funnel need to operate in parallel and growth experiments and marketing campaigns run based on segments across all stages at all times.

As an overview, here’s an infographic of all the stages we learnt in the A3R3 funnel along with some experiments for each – as well as the metrics you should measure at each stage.

That’s a lot of information but we will go into each through the next chapters:

A funnel, just like the name suggests, represents the typical stages a user goes through in the customer journey.

It is a way of visualizing the process that turns leads into customers and beyond. Not every user has to go through each stage in a marketer’s funnel but it is a great reference for the marketer to understand the possibilities of their customer’s journey – in order to get the most value from the user as well as to add the most value to the users based on the stage they are in.

Let’s take a simple example where a customer goes through the following stages for startup A:

EXAMPLE 1:

• Step 1: They come across a press release about Startup A
• Step 2: They visit the website and sign up for the startup’s newsletter.
• Step 3: They get a email and take a free demo by the startup.

These 3 steps would sound very familiar but the same can happen in multiple other ways.

EXAMPLE 2:

• Step 1: The user finds a shared social media post mentioning Startup A.
• Step 2: They visit the startup’s social media channel and subscribe to their updates.
• Step 3: They find a post giving a free demo and they sign up for it.

Now, both these examples are different however the user is going through exactly the same stages of the customer’s journey.

So, what we can do is to name these stages so further instances of such user behavior can be referenced easily by the marketing team.

Let’s call the 3 steps above (in both examples) by easy to reference names:

• Stage 1: Awareness
• Stage 2: Acquisition
• Stage 3: Activation

Now, go back to both the above examples again and see the further possibilities:

Back to Example 1:

• Step 1: They come across a press release about Startup A
• Step 2: They visit the website and sign up for the startup’s newsletter.
• Step 3: They get an email and take a free demo by the startup.
• Step 4: They like the free demo and pay for the product or service.
• Step 5: They renew their service after one month.
• Step 6: They ask one of their friends to sign up for the service too.

And In Example 2, let’s say the next steps are as follows:

• Step 1: The user finds a shared social media post mentioning Startup A.
• Step 2: They visit the startup’s social media channel and subscribe to their updates.
• Step 3: They find a post giving a free demo and they sign up for it.
• Step 4: They like the free demo and pay for the product or service.
• Step 5: They extend their service contract for a year.
• Step 6: They share the service or product on their social media where their friends can sign up for the service too.

See in both the above examples, the 3 new steps are actually the same stages of the funnel. This will help us extend our funnel to the following 6 stages:

• Stage 1: Awareness
• Stage 2: Acquisition
• Stage 3: Activation
• Stage 4: Revenue
• Stage 5: Retention
• Stage 6: Referral

This gives us our updated stages of the customer’s journey. We can create a simple acronym for the same to remember it:

• Stage 1: Awareness (A)
• Stage 2: Acquisition (A)
• Stage 3: Activation (A)
• Stage 4: Revenue (R)
• Stage 5: Retention (R)
• Stage 6: Referral (R)

That makes it the AAARRR funnel or we can shorter than to A3R3 funnel. This is a growth funnel any marketer can use.

Now, you should be thinking: what about users who churn? what about user’s who don’t refer their friends? what about user’s who, instead of renewal the product or service, go for another product or service by the same startup A?

Well, first of all, you are in the right mindset if you’re thinking about all these questions and this would mean you’re trying to get into the mind of your users.

The answer to all these questions can be different if we go into the specific scenario of the particular users. However, in general, the answer is that the growth funnel represents the “ideal customer’s journey”, not every customer’s journey.

The job of the growth funnel is to act as a tool for the marketer to design growth experiments in the potential and ideal stages of the customer’s journey.

As you run growth experiments on your customers, you will be able to start creating segments of users who are the best fit for each stage of the funnel. And then, you should focus those growth experiments only on those users.

For example, you’ll be able to know with the customer’s data the set of people who are “most likely to refer their friends” and design your initial referral marketing experiments to those set of users.

Also, remember that every user, at any given time, could be at any stage of the funnel. The key is to identify sets of users in each stage of the funnel and then design your growth experiments accordingly.

In the next chapter, we will deep dive into the A3R3 funnel or the AAARRR growth funnel that we just created together in this chapter!