Before we design a single test, we work out what every page should say. Not how it should look. What it should say, to whom, and in what order. The tool we use for that is awareness levels.
The five awareness levels
The idea goes back to Eugene Schwartz and his book Breakthrough Advertising. People arrive knowing different amounts, and the message has to meet them where they are.
- Unaware: they don’t know they have the problem yet.
- Problem aware: they know the problem, not the solution.
- Solution aware: they know the kind of solution, not your product.
- Product aware: they know your product, but they’re not sold yet.
- Most aware: they want it. They need the offer and a reason to act now.
Get this wrong and even a beautiful page fails. Show a product-aware visitor the whole story and they get bored. Show an unaware visitor a price and a buy button and they leave.
Every page gets a level
We map your traffic onto those five levels, then match every page to the people who land on it. Cold traffic meets the problem. Warm traffic meets the offer. The homepage and landing pages usually carry colder traffic than the product page or cart.
That same level also sets how far each page leans between brand and conversion. Colder pages lean brand, so first impressions stay premium. Warmer pages lean conversion, so buyers get over the line.
Market sophistication
Awareness tells you where one visitor is. Market sophistication tells you how many times your whole market has heard the promise before. Schwartz put markets on five stages.
- Stage 1: nobody has made the claim yet, so you can just make it.
- Stage 2: others have, so you make it bigger.
- Stage 3: bigger claims have stopped working, so you explain the mechanism, how it works.
- Stage 4: others explain mechanisms too, so you need a new or better one.
- Stage 5: people are tired of claims, so you sell identity: who they become.
The stage sets how bold and how new the message has to be. N-Pro’s animated mechanism section is a good example of a mechanism test: it shows, layer by layer, how their headguard protects you. It lifted revenue per session by 12%.
Pains and desires, in their own words
The last two pieces are pain points and desires. We pull every pain point out of your reviews, support tickets, Reddit threads and ad comments, then score each one by how often it comes up and how strongly it’s felt. We do the same for what they want instead.
The strongest pains lead the headlines. The strongest desires shape what the page promises. And because they’re in your customers’ own words, the copy sounds like someone who understands them, not like an agency.
Where it all ends up
All of this goes into one document: your messaging framework. It’s the first thing we deliver, in your first 14 days, and every test we design is written from it.
If you want to see the rest of the process, read how we work, or see which landing page fits which level in advertorial, listicle or quiz.
