What this is: A plain introduction to Eugene Schwartz’s five levels of awareness, for independent consultants whose content keeps missing.
Who it’s for: Independent consultants and professionals who are showing up consistently and still wondering why it isn’t connecting.
What you’ll take away: A simpler way to see your audience, and a quieter way to use an old marketing idea.
Revisited June 2026. I first wrote about this in 2024, back when I was still using it to sell. The framework held. The way I use it has changed completely. This is the version I actually believe.
Someone once asked me what level of awareness my audience had.
I looked at him like he was speaking another language.
Your content isn’t failing because it’s bad.
It’s failing because you’re talking to everyone as though they’re all standing in the same place. And they’re not. The people reading you are scattered across five completely different stages of even knowing they have a problem. One message, sent to all of them at once, lands flat for most of them. Not because the message is weak. Because it’s aimed at no one in particular.
I know this because I was doing it for years, and I didn’t have a name for what was going wrong.
The call that changed how I work
I was on a call with Joey Ragona. We were talking about my audience, and he asked me, quite casually, what level of awareness they were at.
I had no idea what he meant. I genuinely looked at him as though he’d switched into another language. So I asked. What are the levels of awareness?
And in that one answer, he changed how I think about attracting the right people into my business.
After the call I did what you’d expect. I googled it, went down the rabbit hole, and found Eugene Schwartz.
The five levels of awareness aren’t mine. They belong to Eugene Schwartz, a copywriter who wrote a book called Breakthrough Advertising in 1966.
That’s worth knowing, because it tells you what the idea was built for. It was built to sell. To work out exactly how ready someone was to buy, and then push them the rest of the way.
The framework itself is sound. Sixty years on, it still describes something true about people. But what it was built for is the bit I’ve quietly walked away from. More on that shortly.
Here are the five levels, plainly.
Unaware. They don’t know they have a problem. Life is ticking along and the thing you could help with isn’t even on their radar.
Problem aware. Something feels off. They can feel the friction, but they couldn’t tell you what’s causing it.
Solution aware. They know there’s a problem, and they know solutions exist. Now they’re looking around, comparing, working out what might help.
Product aware. They know who you are and what you do. They just haven’t decided yet.
Most aware. They’re ready. They just need a reason to move now rather than later.
Read it back and you’ll probably recognise your own audience in there. Some are wide awake. Some don’t know they have the problem you’d be perfect for. And most writing speaks to one level while imagining it’s speaking to all of them.
If it was mine, here’s how I’d do it
This is where I part company with how the framework is usually taught.
Most people use the five levels to sell harder. You sort your audience into stages, then build a piece of content to nudge each stage closer to a purchase. Curiosity for the unaware, a final push for the most aware. It’s a funnel, and the levels are the markings on the side of it.
I don’t use it that way. I use it to listen first.
The level isn’t something you decide about someone from above. It’s something you can hear. Read someone’s post, or a comment they’ve left, and they’ll tell you exactly where they are, usually without meaning to. Someone describing a pile of symptoms but never naming the cause is problem aware and doesn’t know it yet. Someone weighing up three tools they’ve already tried is solution aware. You don’t have to guess. It’s there in their own words, if you’re paying attention.
And that’s the part most people skip. They start with what they want to say. I start with what I’ve heard.
Because once you’ve heard where someone is, you know what to write. If I keep noticing people circling the same problem without being able to name it, that’s not a frustration. That’s a brief. It tells me to write the piece that names it for them.
You’re in the middle of an example right now
Take this article. I’m writing it to the unaware.
Most people reading have never heard of the five levels. So I’m not selling anything. I’m teaching. I’m taking something invisible and making it visible, which is exactly what writing to the unaware looks like. An educational post, nothing more.
You’re experiencing it as you read. This is what it’s called.
That’s the whole shift in one go. The framework stops being a way to target people and becomes a way to hear them, and then to meet them. Same five levels. Completely different job. One treats your audience as positions in a pipeline. The other treats them as people who are telling you, in their own words, what they need.
There is a fuller version of this, where you take a reader gently through all five in a single piece, from naming the problem right through to the choice of what to do about it. That’s a longer conversation, and one for another day. For now, the listening is enough.
And here’s why it matters more than conversion ever did. You can’t build a relationship with someone you’re talking past. The moment you meet a person where they actually are, something relaxes. They feel understood, because they are. That isn’t a marketing trick. That’s just what listening does.
What I’d do this week
You don’t need to overhaul anything. Start smaller than that.
First, read before you write. Go and look at what your people are actually saying, in your comments, your inbox, the posts they leave elsewhere. Listen for the level. Where are they, really?
Then notice your own default. Most of us have one. Mine used to be solution aware, because that’s where I was most comfortable, talking to people already looking for help. Which means I was quietly ignoring everyone who couldn’t yet name the problem. Often the very people I’d serve best.
So pick the level you’ve been missing. Write your next piece for them, and only them.
That’s it. Not a strategy overhaul. One piece, aimed at one group, written as though you were listening to them rather than broadcasting at everyone.
Want to talk it through?
If something here has sparked a thought, a question, or that little voice saying, “I think this might be me,” Tea & Chat is open.
No agenda. No pitch. Just a cup of tea and a conversation. Sometimes all you need is someone to help you see the thing you’ve been too close to spot for yourself.
With courage & conviction
