The Awareness and Discovery tier is the top of the marketing funnel — the layer where a future customer is searching for an answer to a problem rather than for a vendor. They might not yet know your name, your service category, or even the right vocabulary for what they need. Your job at this stage is to be findable on the surfaces where that early search happens, and to be useful enough that the visitor remembers you.
I plan content for this tier with reach as the primary metric, not conversion. Awareness pieces shouldn't be judged on lead volume in the week they ship; they should be judged on whether the right people find them and whether some of those people return.
The surfaces that work hardest at this tier vary by audience, but a few are reliable: long-form articles aimed at informational queries, YouTube videos that answer a specific question (which often appear in Google's video carousels above traditional results), and podcasts or guest appearances that put your name in front of someone else's audience. LinkedIn posts work for B2B audiences. None of these are conversion surfaces, and trying to make them one usually shrinks their reach.
The transition out of this tier is where most strategies break. A great awareness video that ends without a path back to your own site is a missed handoff. The fix isn't a hard sell — it's a single, clear next step (read this guide, take this assessment, watch this case study) that lets the curious visitor enter your owned ecosystem on their own terms.