Salesforce discovered that people have heard about them but few people knew how they could help their business grow!
Despite its fame, Salesforce suffered from a very specific type of awareness problem: a deficit in situational awareness. General awareness is great, but that alone won’t build a brand. It’s not about what people think of a brand – it’s about when. Brands grow when they readily come to a buyer’s mind in as many buying situations as possible. This situational awareness is called “mental availability” and, the more mental availability a brand builds, the more the brand grows.
The Ehrenberg-Bass Institute defines mental availability as “the propensity of the brand to be thought of, or noticed, in buying situations.” In other words, brands with high mental availability are “easy to mind” in relevant buying situations. While this seems simple, this school of thought requires a radical reconfiguration in the way B2B marketers think about marketing. Specifically, mental availability requires marketers to become less brand-centric, and more customer-centric.
Putting yourself in the mind of your customer isn’t easy, but it is essential to success. If you can understand the needs and triggers that cause your customers to enter the market – if you can identify those category entry points – you can use them to build mental availability.
A marketing strategy that optimizes for mental availability does so by building more awareness, across more buying situations, in the minds of more buyers. Do this, and you will grow your customer base, your sales volume, and if you do it better than competitors, your market share.
If you would like to create a tailormade strategy for your business that increases mental availability then schedule an exploratory call with us here