Three Principles Of Marketing Awareness Nurturing Trust

The 3 Principles of Marketing: Awareness, Nurturing, and Trust

November 24, 2021

Three Principles of Marketing

There are three core principles of marketing that can be found in The Hawke Method, written by Hawke Media CEO and founder Media Erik Huberman. 

In this comprehensive book on marketing, Huberman expounds on these principles of marketing: awareness, nurturing, and trust. Hawke Media has used these marketing principles to grow over 3,000 brands.

Each of the principles serves as the leg of a tripod. When one leg of the tripod fails, is too short, or doesn’t exist, your marketing and sales process topples. No matter what brand or what market you operate in, all three of these principles of marketing are essential for you to continue to make money and scale.

Let’s look into each of these core principles. 

Awareness 

As many as 89% of marketers claim building brand awareness is their top goal.

Awareness is the first step of any marketing process. It’s the stage where people traditionally think of advertising and marketing. 

This principle of marketing is the top of the funnel, the beginning of the pipeline, and the source of net new business that every single brand needs to keep scaling.  

Building awareness is more expensive than converting existing customers, but it’s the only way to fill your pipeline during the natural process wherein a customer eventually decides to stop buying from your brand.

Bottom line: Without adding new customers to your funnel, you will see it constrict. The investment is necessary.  

These are tactics that increase awareness: 

These are all potential ways to plant the seeds of awareness. Then it’s time to cultivate that awareness through nurturing.

Nurturing  

Nurturing is the process between initial awareness and the sale. 

Without nurturing, a customer could enter the awareness stage only to forget about your brand and never purchase. Nurturing doesn’t stop at purchase either; it begins at initial awareness and continues until the customer stops buying.   

Nurturing is one of the most involved and critical parts of marketing. Awareness can only get you so far, and that’s often not all the way to the purchase.  

Nurturing has the potential to shrink the period between awareness and purchase, called the “consideration period.” Done right, nurturing can increase both the speed and the likelihood of conversion, while increasing the likelihood of ROI on ad spend.  

These are tactics used in nurturing: 

Using these tactics in combination with automated, action-based drip campaigns keeps leads engaged and moving toward purchase. 

Well-executed nurturing reinforces or shortens the length of the purchase cycle. If you know that on average it takes three weeks for your average customer to purchase, your nurturing strategy can intentionally move toward purchase in that timeline. Nurturing builds trust, which is the final core principle of marketing. 

Trust

Trust is the final component necessary to make a sale. A buyer needs to trust a brand enough to spend their hard-earned money on it, or to put their work reputation on the line. 

Hawke’s experts say that one of our jobs is to make our customers look and feel like rock stars. Those who buy our offerings can trust that we will make their brand and stakeholders look good. 

Studies have shown that 75% of consumers won’t buy from brands they don’t trust. Trust is something that is earned, but it’s also a form of vulnerability. How many times have you purchased something as a consumer and then started to research whether it’s a scam? Just me? I didn’t think so. 

Trust is an integral part of the purchase process, and you can’t cultivate it through a Facebook ad. To keep a buyer coming back, you need to not only get them to trust you but also maintain that trust.

Some tactics used to build trust are: 

What makes you trust a brand? 

Do These Principles of Marketing Work for Both B2B and B2C? 

The short answer is yes. The longer answer is still yes, but involves the length of the purchase cycle.   

In B2C, where the average consumer spends $50 on an e-commerce website, the average purchase time between awareness and purchase is three weeks. 

Now consider B2B, where the average purchase time is 6 to 12 months instead. There are more stakeholders and often literal dollars at play than with B2C, where most decision times range from an impulse purchase to a few weeks for larger consumer items. 

Marry this to the notion that in the B2B world there are budgets that need to be approved, several stakeholders, payments and accounting, etc. Although B2B purchase decisions are less personal, they require more personal relationships and partnerships. B2C purchases may affect an individual more, but they are more anonymous. 

The timeline on which you see success in your marketing efforts is entirely dependent on the length of your purchase cycle.  

For B2B brands, it may take well over a year for your marketing spend to translate into the big wave of sales you expect. Deals made between two businesses take a lot longer than most consumer purchases. 

B2C brands can expect to see results with a month or two, or even less, depending on the type and price of offering and how quickly a customer will buy after first becoming aware of the brand. 

No matter what industry you operate in, these principles work.

Whether you’re thinking of starting a business, already own a multimillion-dollar corporation, are a marketing manager for a brand, or anything in between, there’s something to learn about awareness, nurturing, and trust. To learn more about the three principles of marketing, preorder Erik Huberman’s book The Hawke Method, which lands on shelves March 2022. 

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