Building a concept for effective marketing is challenging for starting scipreneurs. Understanding some of the core principles can help identify which communication strategies are more effective and double down on them.

There's a common idea that the scope of marketing is to move a customer through different levels of awareness. The four common stages are: unaware, problem-awareness, solution-awareness, and offer-awareness.

We can use those guidelines to plan how we communicate about what we do.

The first level addresses people who didn't know they had a problem. They were not aware of the limitations of their current systems, and they had no desire for any other solution. For new scientific instrumentation, it is very common that people are not aware of how the limits of their current devices are limiting creativity, or are giving erroneous answers.

A more common situation, though, is that customers are aware of the limitations of the current solutions, but they are not aware of solutions that overcome them. Every researcher will know that their instruments can't detect given ranges, or that they are too slow, or unreliable. It is rare to find a scientific niche where people haven't explored alternatives yet, but it may happen with true breakthrough technologies. Therefore this situation overlaps greatly with the next one.

The most likely situation for scipreneurs is to find researchers who have already tried (or at least are aware of) some solutions, but they are unaware of your specific offer. They know electron microscopes exist, but they are outside their budget, or they don't fully solve their problems. At this stage, you can introduce your offer. How do you solve their problems without creating new ones?

The last stage is when customers are aware of your offer but still don't know if it's the proper solution for them. Is it easy to use, is it expensive, does it take too much space off the bench. Do they need to apply for a grant or can they use existing funds to get it?

One of the challenges with marketing is that you need to address all the stages at the same time because you'll not have control over who receives what information.

For example, imagine you are presenting at a conference. There'll be different groups of people listening to you. Some will have already interacted with you, some will have read a paper using your technique, and many will be presented with your solution for the first time. If you are lucky, your audience will be fully aware of the current challenges they face.