Last updated on October 17th, 2025 at 10:01 pm
When people talk about sales funnels, they typically focus on converting site visitors into leads, leads into customers, and customers into repeat customers.
However, the awareness stage of sales funnels rarely gets the attention it deserves.
And that’s a shame because it sets the expectations for the subsequent stages. You only have one chance to make a great first impression, right?
Moreover, if you can’t get potential customer’s attention, the rest of your funnel doesn’t matter because they don’t know that you exist!
That’s why today we are going to take a closer look at the awareness stage. Want to get it right?
Continue reading…
What is a Sales Funnel?
A sales funnel is a process designed to attract visitors to your website, then convert those visitors into leads, leads into customers, and customers into repeat customers.
Here’s how all sales funnels look like from the bird’s-eye view:
- Top of the funnel (target audience) – You grab the potential customer’s attention. This is the awareness stage that we are going to be discussing in this article.
- Middle of the funnel (leads) – You convert that potential customer into a lead by persuading them to give you their contact information (typically their email address).
- Bottom of the funnel (new and existing customers) – You convert that lead into a paying customer by persuading them to buy your product, then into a repeat customer by persuading them to buy more products.
Note that while all sales funnels adhere to this general framework, there are several different sales funnel models (AIDA, the Value ladder, etc.), as well as a wide variety of ways to design your sales funnel (survey funnel, reverse squeeze page funnel, webinar funnel, etc).
The Value Ladder Sales Funnel
Our co-founder Russell Brunson has developed a sales funnel model called the Value Ladder.
We believe it’s the most effective way to sell online. It’s what Russell used to take ClickFunnels from zero to $10M+ in annual revenue in just one year. Now the company is at $100M+ in annual revenue.
The value ladder sales funnel has four stages:
- Bait – You offer the potential customer a lead magnet in exchange for their email address.
- Frontend – You offer the potential customer your least expensive and least valuable product.
- Middle – You offer the customer a more expensive and more valuable product.
- Backend – You offer the customer your most expensive and most valuable product.
Ideally, there’s also some sort of a continuity program, meaning a subscription product that generates recurring revenue.
And where’s the awareness stage?
It could be considered stage 0 because it’s what happens before the potential customer arrives on your lead magnet landing page.
In other words:
It’s how you drive traffic to your sales funnel.
The reason why the Value Ladder sales funnel works so well is that it allows you to:
- Start the relationship with the potential customer by providing free value
- Nurture that relationship by continuing to provide free value
- Gradually build trust by providing progressively more paid value at each stage
Here’s how Russell explains it:
We recommend you use this sales funnel model to grow your online business.
Throughout the rest of this article, we are going to discuss the sales funnel awareness stage with the Value Ladder sales funnel in mind.
How to Get the Attention of Your Ideal Customers?
So how can you get the attention of your ideal customers in today’s fiercely competitive attention economy?
And once you do, how can you get them to click through to your lead magnet’s landing page?
Hook, Story, Offer
We have found that the best way to get someone to do what you want them to do is the Hook, Story, Offer framework:
- Hook. You grab their attention
- Story. You tell them an engaging story
- Offer. You transition from the story to the sales pitch and end it with a call to action
You should apply this framework at every stage of your sales funnel, including the awareness stage.
Whatever traffic generation method you choose, ask yourself what’s your hook, what’s your story, and what’s your offer.
You need all three elements to get someone to click through to your landing page.
Social Media
You can start by building a following on social media.
It’s free, it’s built to encourage sharing content, and it can give you exposure to people who have never heard about your company.
However, it’s also an extremely distracting environment, which is why you need to think carefully about how you are going to hook your ideal customers with each post.
How can you make them stop scrolling and pay attention?
Facebook Ads
Entrepreneurs who are just starting out often have an aversion to paid ads because they don’t want to spend money on marketing.
That’s understandable if you are on a tight budget. Both of our co-founders began their entrepreneurial careers as broke college kids. We know what it’s like to try to build a business when you barely have enough money to pay the bills.
So if you can’t afford Facebook ads, then you can’t afford them. And that’s okay. There are other ways to get your business off the ground.
However, if you can afford them, then we recommend you experiment with running paid traffic to your lead magnet landing page.
With paid ads, you can be sure that those ads will be shown to your ideal customers (provided your targeting is on point).
Moreover, once you figure out how to run them profitably, you will have a reliable way to generate sales.
Note that your ad itself should contain a hook, a story, and an offer, as well as a call to action. You can fit all that in just a few sentences.
SEO
Search engine optimization can help you get organic search traffic from Google by creating content that targets specific keywords.
Once people click through to your blog, you want them to read the article, then click the call to action link at the end of it that takes them to your lead magnet landing page.
In fact:
That’s what we are doing with this article. We want to rank it for the keyword “sales funnel awareness”. There’s a free offer at the end. We hope that you’ll check it out! 😉
You might want to consider this approach if you always had a knack for writing.
YouTube
YouTube is the largest video hosting platform in the world that has 2.2 billion users.
You can tap into that massive user base by building a popular channel in your niche, then using it to promote your lead magnet to your subscribers.
This is an approach that you should consider if you are in a niche in which information is better conveyed visually: fitness, cooking, knitting, woodworking, DIY, etc.
For Example:
Matthew I. Smith has just six videos on his YouTube channel.
However, his first video “From Zero To One Arm | My Handstand Journey” went viral two years ago, amassing over 2.6 million views.
Since then, he has released five more videos and reached 56.8k subscribers, which may not seem like much by YouTube standards but presumably is enough for Matthew to make a living selling his flexibility and handstand courses.
It’s a great illustration of the fact that you don’t need a ton of content, what you need is super high-quality content. Anyone who wants to master the handstand will want to hear what Matthew has to say after watching his viral video.
You might also want to experiment with YouTube if you are:
- Good looking
- Charismatic
- Great on camera
These three qualities give you an advantage in the video medium, which is something that you wouldn’t necessarily have in other mediums such as text.
For Example:
Matthew Hussey, the world-renowned dating coach, has 2.28M subscribers on YouTube.
While he also has a blog, a podcast, social media profiles, etc. it’s probably safe to say that YouTube is his #1 source of traffic.
Word-of-Mouth
Word-of-moth is arguably the most powerful way to market your product… But it’s not something that you can control directly.
However, if your products exceed customers’ expectations, then those customers will want to recommend them to their families, friends, and colleagues.
We have experienced this here at ClickFunnels.
We went above and beyond with our software by providing not only the tools but also the knowledge required to build sales funnels that convert. We know that our customers’ success is our success.
And guess what successful customers do? They tell everyone they know about ClickFunnels!
Why You Need to ALWAYS Deliver What You Promised
The 1 mistake that entrepreneurs make at the awareness stage is making promises that they can’t keep.
This happens when you are so focused on the awareness stage of your sales funnel that you lose sight of the big picture.
Sure, if you make a grandiose claim about your lead magnet, then you’ll get more leads because people will want to see what’s it all about.
But if your lead magnet doesn’t deliver what you promised, potential customers will feel not only disappointed but also tricked. No one likes bait-and-switch.
Consequently, when you present them with your frontend offer, they will be like “No thanks”. Why should they trust you when you have already lied to them once?
So while grandiose claims can get you more email addresses, those email addresses will be worthless since you have destroyed trust in order to obtain them. And building trust is the whole point of the Value Ladder sales funnel!
It’s much better to get the potential customers’ attention with a reasonable claim and then deliver what you promised.
A great example of this is Nick Stephenson’s lead magnet. It’s a video course called “$0 to $1k Per Month”. In it, he teaches authors how to go from zero to $1,000/month in book royalties. That sounds like a realistic goal, right?
And if the potential customer indeed gets to $1,000/month by following Nick’s advice, then guess what?
They will be open to buying his paid course on book marketing because now they trust him to deliver what he promises!
Brand Reputation Management
You need to be proactive about building a great reputation because you never know how a potential customer might find you.
Say, if a friend mentions your company to them in passing, they might decide to google it later.
But what if that Google search returns articles about scandals you have been involved in, Reddit threads by disgruntled customers, Twitter threads of you arguing with said disgruntled customers, etc?
In that case, the potential customer’s first impression of your company would likely be negative, which means that you would have a much harder time persuading them to check out your lead magnet.
We recommend you to always remember that your actions reflect positively or negatively not only on you as an individual, but also on your company as an organization.
With that in mind, we advise you to go the extra mile to provide excellent customer support, be responsive to customer feedback, and handle conflicts with unhappy customers graciously.
And if someone wants a refund, just give them a refund. Your reputation is worth more than whatever they paid for your product.
Also, you might want to monitor social media for mentions of your company so that you could reach out to unhappy customers and resolve the issues before they snowball into full-blown PR disasters.
Want Russell to Show You How to Build Your First Sales Funnel?
Let’s keep it real:
Building a sales funnel from scratch can seem like a daunting task.
That’s why we created our 5 Day Challenge where Russell walks you through it step-by-step.
You will learn how to:
- Generate unlimited leads
- Create your first lead magnet
- Build your first sales funnel
- Create a simple 6-email follow-up sequence
- And launch your funnel
…in just five days!
So don’t hesitate.