Why Mastering the Awareness Stage Is Your Key to Winning the Customer Journey in Medtech

The customer decision journey (CDJ) is the path potential buyers take when deciding whether to invest in a product or service. It spans critical phases such as awareness, consideration, preference building, and post-purchase engagement—often referred to as "loyalty."

By mapping out this journey, businesses gain valuable insights into how to effectively engage customers at each stage, allowing them to craft tailored messaging that aligns with evolving needs. Perhaps most importantly, understanding the CDJ enables companies to allocate their marketing resources where they matter most. Too often, businesses leap into preference-building and promoting product specifics, but these efforts can fall flat if there's insufficient awareness of the brand or technology in the first place.

In this article, we’ll explore why focusing on the awareness stage is crucial—especially for medtech—and examine the impact of investing in, as well as the potential consequences of neglecting, this foundational phase. To delve into awareness building strategies click here.

What is the Awareness Stage?

The awareness stage marks the beginning of the customer journey, where potential buyers recognize they have a problem or need but are not yet familiar with available solutions. These customers could be current users of your technology, competitors' clients, or completely new prospects or projects. In healthcare, examples of challenges that trigger the awareness stage could include a need to increase patient referrals, expand services into new care areas, reduce inefficiencies such as long wait times or backlogs, or even improve brand recognition.

These objectives can vary widely—from overcoming very specific operational issues to broader, visionary goals. They may be driven by hard metrics like financial performance or softer factors such as staff and patient satisfaction. At this stage, customers are focused on understanding their problem and exploring potential solutions without making any purchasing decisions.

Businesses can also take it one step further by not just waiting for customers to realize they have a need, but by creating excitement around their latest innovations and actively triggering demand for change. We explore this in more detail in our article on shaping markets and creating demand. If your innovation offers significant impact, you have the potential to reshape the market entirely during the awareness stage and generate business that didn’t previously exist. Your brand can inspire change.

What Are Your Customers Doing During the Awareness Stage?

During the awareness stage, customers dive into research, asking questions and seeking information to fully grasp their problem and identify potential solutions. This could involve a formal Request for Information (RFI) process, or more informal discussions with current or preferred vendors for insights on how to address their needs.

If customers are open to exploring solutions beyond their existing vendor relationships, they’ll often turn to independent industry content. At this point, they seek educational resources like blogs, social media, and thought leadership rather than specific product promotions, as they build a broader understanding of what their solution might look like.

Based on my research with healthcare customers, online searches are a primary method for gathering information during this stage. They explore company websites and review neutral sources such as healthcare magazines, blogs, professional society websites, and independent platforms like ECRI or modality-specific communities such as AuntMinnie. While much of this initial research happens online, hospital teams also attend webinars, tradeshows, and conferences, and they often seek recommendations from peers.

In short, during the awareness stage, customers are primarily looking for educational, non-promotional content that helps them frame their problem and learn about the types of technology and solutions that could help overcome their challenges and achieve future goals.

How Do You Know if You Need to Build Awareness?

A straightforward way to assess whether you need to focus on building awareness is by evaluating how often you’re being invited to participate in tenders, RFIs, or informal discussions with customers looking to invest in the type of technology you offer. If you’re not a key player in these conversations, it’s a clear sign that your brand is not being seen as a relevant solution provider, or that your product’s potential to meet customer needs is not well known.

Beyond this, you can gauge your position in the customer decision journey by analyzing brand recognition, market share, and feedback from your sales teams and customer surveys. Are competitors being mentioned more often than you? Do customers approach you with little understanding of your offering? These are strong indicators that your brand isn’t top of mind and that your solutions aren’t well understood, even if they’re known.

Leveraging digital tools like Google Trends, social listening, or website traffic analytics can further clarify where you stand in terms of brand visibility and product differentiation. Additionally, you can conduct a customer journey mapping exercise from the perspective of your buyers. Ask yourself: Can they easily find you? Are they able to access the information they need without difficulty? If the answers aren’t clear, it’s time to prioritize awareness-building.

Why is it important to focus on the awareness stage of the CDJ?

The awareness stage is your first opportunity to connect with potential customers. If you fail to engage them at this crucial point, you risk losing them before they even consider your product or solution. Building awareness is the foundation of long-term success—it not only increases your visibility but also educates the market on why they need your offering.

Establishing thought leadership and credibility early in the decision journey helps build trust, which will be essential when customers move into the consideration and decision-making phases. By focusing on awareness, you can begin differentiating your technology and brand, highlighting the unique value you provide. This can be especially beneficial when it comes to pricing, as customers will better understand the justification for your price levels based on the added value you've already demonstrated.

One of the biggest business advantages of focusing on the awareness stage is the likely increase in leads and potential customers entering your funnel. When customers are familiar with your brand from the start, it becomes much easier to convert them later in the journey. As a result, you'll need to spend less on conversion marketing because the groundwork has already been laid. This allows you to allocate more of your budget to personalized approaches for key accounts, increasing your win rate.

Additionally, focusing on awareness can help uncover early-stage business opportunities. When your company and products are positively associated with a specific need or industry topic, doors open more easily, and customers may even approach you—sometimes before you’re aware they are even looking.

Ultimately, the goal of building awareness is to position your company as the go-to resource for customers seeking the solutions you provide, ensuring you're the first brand they think of when they're ready to act.

Consequences of Not Focusing on the Awareness Stage

Conversely, neglecting to focus on building awareness can result in missing out on a significant portion of potential customers who may never discover your solution. Your sales team can’t be everywhere at once, so the more effort you put into ensuring your brand and products are visible, the higher the likelihood that customers will actively seek you out when a need arises.

Failing to prioritize awareness also comes with broader business consequences. You risk losing market share to competitors who have stronger brand visibility and are more prominently involved in industry conversations. Competitors who dominate the awareness stage are more likely to be considered first when customers move to the next stages of the decision journey. Additionally, if your brand hasn’t established itself as a value-adding solution, you may face downward pressure on pricing, as customers won’t fully understand why your product commands its price point.

In short, without strong awareness, you limit your market presence, open the door for competitors to take the lead, and ultimately make it harder to differentiate your product or justify your value proposition.

Why Is Focusing on the Awareness Stage Especially Important When Selling to Healthcare Customers?

Healthcare decisions typically involve longer sales cycles and a larger number of stakeholders, making early engagement critical. Healthcare professionals and institutions are highly risk-averse, so it’s essential to build trust and credibility from the outset, ensuring you are viewed as a trusted advisor from day one. Healthcare customers are also particularly cautious about adopting new solutions. By focusing on the awareness stage, you can address these concerns early by providing educational content that positions your solution as compliant, safe, and effective.

This is especially important when introducing new technologies. If healthcare customers are unaware of your innovation, don’t fully understand it, or don’t trust how it can help them achieve the quadruple aim—improving health outcomes, reducing costs, and enhancing both staff and patient experiences—you risk being left out of their decision-making process entirely. Early awareness ensures you’re part of their journey as they work toward these critical goals.

The path forward: Unlocking success through awareness

Mastering the awareness stage of the customer decision journey is key to driving long-term success in the medtech industry. By engaging early, building trust, and positioning your solutions as essential to healthcare providers, you can differentiate your brand and open doors to new opportunities. In upcoming articles, we’ll explore specific strategies to build awareness, shape markets, and create demand for your solutions.

At Unplain Jane, we specialize in decision journey mapping and developing targeted initiatives to increase awareness for healthcare solutions. Whether you're introducing a new technology or seeking to strengthen your market presence, our expertise can help ensure that your brand is top of mind when customers are ready to act.