Awareness is most effective for organizations that use a hybrid of digital and non-digital means

AAARRR Pirate Funnel- Awareness

71% of optimization required in awareness yields 50% and less effort

Top-of-funnel inefficacy can account for up to 37% of missed conversion expectations — Outreach

Background

Awareness is at the top of the funnel. This essentially is your entry point. If your awareness doesn’t yield large enough exposure, both in quantity and quality, the remaining of the funnel will be largely ineffective. Acquiring a new customer is 5 times costlier than keeping an existing one, hence, awareness has to be well done. This means being able to target the right customers, at the right time in the right place. These efforts are multiplied by the fact that you need to be in many places at once over a period of time. Awareness is a costly exercise.

Context

The awareness phase is 13x more costly than any other component of a growth funnel. Therefore, if it’s not done effectively it won’t work well, as it impacts customer acquisition costs, and then impacts customer lifetime value. Hence, cost-effective awareness is vital, like using low-cost public relations, organic community building, email list building, and social media campaigns. Although paid ads are 28x more effective in hitting the right target they also need a larger cash flow upfront to sustain. This can become an uneconomic solution for many companies.

Takeaway

Garbage in, garbage out. If your awareness isn’t effective, the rest of your growth funnel will suffer. Therefore, focusing on long-term quality organic awareness lowers customer acquisition costs and will raise customer lifetime value. This makes the growth hacking process even more essential to companies of all sizes to make this happen.

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ABOUT — Growth Thinking

Growth Thinking is a design methodology for growth hacking by the bestselling author of Ready Set Growth Hack, Nader Sabry. It has been applied as a book and a $1 million challenge known as the 10-day growth hacking challenge, which has generated $138m in revenue. This methodology has been adopted by universities like Harvard and Stanford, fortune 500s (Google/Microsoft), and unicorns.