I’ve been doing marketing for a long time. And after all of it, the seminars, the case studies, the campaigns that worked and the ones that didn’t, I’ve boiled the whole thing down to four words.
Get seen, get remembered, get trusted, get purchased. That’s the sequence.
Every single customer goes through those four stages before they buy anything, from anyone, in any industry. First they find out you exist. Then comes enough exposure to form an opinion. A decision follows: is this person or brand worth trusting? And then they buy.
In that order. Every time.
If your business isn’t growing the way you want it to, the diagnosis is simple: someone else is doing one or all of those four things better than you. Figure out which one, fix it, and things start moving again.
Get Seen
It starts here.
If no one ever sees you, you have no chance. The graveyard of corporate failures is full of great ideas that nobody ever heard about. Products that actually solved real problems, services that would have genuinely helped people, businesses that could have thrived. All gone because not enough people ever knew they existed.
Getting seen isn’t just about running ads. It’s about showing up consistently in the places your customers actually are. Organic social, paid media, search, word of mouth, referrals, PR, content. The channel matters less than the consistency. Visibility has to come before anything else can happen.
Many businesses will get stuck here early on. Most build something good and then wait for people to find them. Nobody’s coming. Go find them.
Get Remembered
Being seen once isn’t enough.
Getting seen one time doesn’t make you remembered. It barely registers. Showing up consistently enough, for long enough, is what actually sticks in someone’s memory.
Neil Patel has cited research suggesting it takes more than 12 touchpoints before someone remembers you enough to take action. Honestly, I think it’s even more than that now. The volume of content your customers consume every single day is staggering. Every brand they follow, every ad they scroll past, every email they delete. All of it competes for the same limited space in their head.
Cutting through that noise isn’t a one-post problem. It’s a patience problem. The businesses that get remembered are the ones that commit to showing up long enough that the audience stops having to remember them consciously because they’re just… there.
Most businesses quit before they get there. That’s actually good news for the ones that don’t.
If you’re not tracking how many times your ideal customer sees you before they take action, you’re flying blind. The Marketing Metrics That Matter guide walks you through building a simple tracking system that connects visibility to revenue.
Get Trusted
This is where most businesses lose.
People buy from people they know and trust. Brands they vaguely recognize don’t make the cut. A nice logo doesn’t close deals. What closes deals is the decision a prospect makes, based on repeated experience, that you’re worth believing.
Trust doesn’t come from a single great post or a clever ad campaign. Showing up consistently, saying things you actually mean, delivering on what you promise, and being honest even when honesty is uncomfortable. That’s where trust comes from. It compounds slowly and evaporates fast.
You have to show up enough to stick in someone’s memory, and then show up in the right way to earn their trust. That means they believe you understand their problem. Believing you can solve it comes next. And then believing you won’t waste their time or take their money and disappear.
Without trust, the other three steps don’t matter. You can be everywhere, be recognizable, and still lose the sale because someone else made the prospect feel safer. Trust is the variable that closes the gap between consideration and purchase.
Right now, there’s a new threat to trust that most businesses are either ignoring or actively making worse. AI.
We have watched brand after brand get torched by their own customers for using AI to generate content, respond to complaints, or replace the human voice that people connected with in the first place. The backlash isn’t irrational. People feel deceived. They followed a person, or thought they did, and found out they were talking to a machine. The Edelman Trust Barometer has tracked the erosion of institutional and brand trust for years. AI is accelerating it. That’s not a PR problem. That’s a trust problem, and it’s one of the hardest kinds to recover from.
The businesses winning at trust right now are doing the opposite. Showing up on camera. Talking like a real person. Sharing behind-the-scenes moments that are messy and unpolished and completely unscripted. One of our clients shoots all of her content on her iPhone. No lighting rig, no microphone, no production budget. Just her, talking to her customers about her products and her process. That content outperforms everything else she puts out. Because people can feel the difference between someone who actually cares and something that was generated to sound like someone who cares.
Being imperfect is not a liability anymore. In a world flooded with generated content, imperfection is proof of humanity. And humanity is exactly what people are looking for right now, because it’s the one thing they know a machine can’t fake.
Get Purchased
The thing that actually matters.
This is what everyone wants to talk about. Conversions. Sales. Revenue. And it is, genuinely, the point of all of it.
But here’s the problem: most businesses try to start here. They skip the first three steps, or rush through them, and then wonder why the conversion rate is low and the cost per acquisition keeps climbing. Nobody buys from a brand they haven’t seen, don’t remember, and don’t trust. The foundation has to come first.
When you do the first three steps right, the purchase becomes the natural next step. The customer already knows you’re real, already trusts your solution, and the only question left is timing. When the timing is right, they think of you first, not your competitor, because you did the work.
That’s the whole game.
Where Are You Losing?
Go back through those four stages and ask yourself honestly where you’re falling short.
Not enough people know you exist? That’s a visibility problem. People know you but can’t quite place you when it counts? That’s a consistency problem. They know who you are but aren’t buying? That’s a trust problem. And if all three are working but purchase rates are still low, that’s a conversion problem. The only one that actually lives at the bottom of the funnel.
Every marketing problem fits somewhere in those four stages. Find yours, fix it, and the rest starts to follow.
The first three are the work. Get purchased is what the work earns you.
If you’re not sure where your business is breaking down, that’s exactly what we do. Take the free diagnostic and find out which stage is costing you customers.
About the Author
Mike Birt
Mike Birt is Co-Founder and Lead Strategist at Big Brain Strategy. He has spent his career building marketing systems for businesses from startup to scale, with a focus on connecting acquisition, conversion, and retention to actual revenue. He believes most marketing problems are strategy problems in disguise.
Big Brain Strategy | The brains behind your growth. | bigbrainstrategy.com
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