Most of your marketing is aimed at the wrong people.
Not wrong in the sense of the wrong demographic, wrong in the sense that most of it never reaches people who don't know they need you yet. Most content, most emails, most sales pages are written for people who already know they have a problem and are just deciding who to buy the solution from.
Here's the thing: that's a small slice of your total market, and it's the most expensive, most competitive slice there is.
The much bigger opportunity is sitting one stage earlier, with people who don't yet know they have a problem at all. They just know something feels off.
The five stages nobody talks about
Back in 1966, copywriter Eugene Schwartz wrote a book called Breakthrough Advertising that's still treated as close to gospel in advertising and marketing circles. In it, he mapped out five stages every buyer moves through before they purchase anything: unaware, problem aware, solution aware, product aware, and most aware.
At the unaware end, someone has a problem but doesn't know it. They're feeling symptoms (frustration, exhaustion, feeling stuck) without having connected those feelings to a cause. At the most aware end, someone knows exactly who you are, knows your product could fix their problem, and just needs a final nudge to buy.
Every stage needs different marketing. Urgency, discounts, and objection-busting work brilliantly on someone who's most aware. Throw that same messaging at someone who's problem unaware and you'll watch it bounce straight off, because you're trying to close a sale with someone who doesn't even know there's anything to solve.
Why most membership owners only market to one stage
Most membership owners, understandably, build all of their marketing for the most aware stage. Deadlines, offers, trials, comparison content. Then they wonder why conversion feels so hard and growth feels so slow.
The further left you go in that journey, the bigger the audience gets, but the longer the nurture takes. The further right, the smaller and more competitive the audience, but the faster the sale.
Most marketing advice assumes your audience is at least problem aware already. It skips straight to convincing them to pick you. But most of your potential market isn't there yet. They're still in that earlier, symptom aware phase (see also: Understanding the Customer Journey), and being symptom aware rather than problem aware changes everything about how you should talk to them.
The audience nobody else is fighting over
The problem aware crowd (the people actively googling solutions) is saturated. It's expensive to acquire from and full of comparison shoppers who'll happily ghost you for a cheaper alternative. That's the market most of the industry's marketing tactics are built to fight over.
The problem unaware crowd is a completely different story. It's bigger. It's cheaper to reach. And there's barely anyone marketing to it properly, because most people don't even know it's there.
Problem unaware doesn't mean naive or clueless. It just means someone hasn't connected the dots between how they feel and what's actually causing it. They feel frustrated, stuck, behind, or ashamed, and they haven't put their finger on why.
Your job at this stage isn't to sell. It's to name the problem for them.
What symptom-first marketing actually sounds like
This is where most content goes wrong. A problem aware angle sounds like “membership owners need better retention strategies.” True, but useless to someone who doesn't yet think of their situation as a retention problem.
A symptom aware angle sounds like this instead: ever feel like you're constantly hustling for new members, but your business just stands still?
That's language people would use about themselves. No jargon, no framework names, just a description of the feeling. When someone reads that and thinks “wait, that's me,” you've done the hard part of marketing before you've said a single word about your membership.
Case studies work the same way. If you can map a member's journey starting from problem unaware (they were feeling this, they didn't know why, we helped them realize this), you're not just telling a nice story. You're walking a prospective member through their own future recognition moment.
Diagnostic content earns its keep here too. Quizzes and self-assessments that ask “does this happen to you? do you feel this way?” do the naming for people in a format they'll actively opt in to (worth pairing with a wider content strategy built around the formats that already work for you).
When you accurately diagnose and correctly name a problem someone didn't even realize they had, you instantly become a trusted authority in their eyes.
That's a stronger sales tool than anything you could write on a sales page, and it's completely legitimate. You're not convincing anyone they have a problem they don't have. You're just helping them see clearly what's already there.
Where this works, and where it's harder
Podcasting and video are made for this stage. Long form, conversational, your voice and your personality doing the work of building trust and telling a story properly.
Written content is trickier. A blog post needs a genuinely compelling hook to stop someone mid-scroll, because you're competing for attention from people who don't yet know they're looking for anything. That's also why so much SEO content skips this stage entirely: people searching are usually already problem aware, actively researching. Problem unaware people don't know enough yet to know what to search for.
Short-form social is harder still, simply because there's less room to build the story. But it still works in pieces, question by question, symptom by symptom, gradually building the picture (and it pairs well with using your blog as a bridge into deeper content once someone's curious).
Three mistakes that will lose you this audience
Don't pitch too early. The moment you try to sell, your diagnosis of their problem starts to look like a sales tactic, and you lose all the trust you just built.
Don't be patronizing. Problem unaware doesn't mean unintelligent. It just means the dots haven't connected yet, and that happens to all of us, about all kinds of things.
Don't assume low intent. It's tempting to think someone who hasn't even identified their problem yet isn't a serious buyer. The opposite is often true. The people you nurture properly from this early stage frequently become your best, longest-staying members, precisely because you educated them instead of just selling to them.
Your move this week
Look honestly at your last ten or so pieces of content. How many of them assume the reader already knows they have a problem? “Ten ways to improve retention” and “five tips for better onboarding” are useful content, but they all require the reader to already know retention or onboarding is their issue.
If most of your content lives at that stage, aim to create one piece in the next month that starts earlier: something that helps your audience name a problem they haven't connected the dots on yet. It won't convert this week. Give it a few months, and it might just bring you your best members yet.
Want the exact questions to help your audience name their own problem, ready to drop into an email, a quiz, a social post, or a sales call? Grab the free Symptom Discovery Question Bank.
And if you'd like a wider view of where the gaps in your membership business actually are, our free Membership Healthcheck is built for exactly that.
