Key Takeaways
- If your company isn't in a potential buyer's initial consideration set, your odds of making a sale are no greater than 17%.*
- To improve your chances of being included in buyers' initial consideration sets, you must increase your company's mental availability with prospective buyers.
- Boosting mental availability requires marketing messaging and content that links your company to buyer needs and is memorable and easy to consume.
Why Initial Consideration Sets Matter
Creating an initial consideration set is an integral part of most B2B buying decisions, but most popular models of the B2B buying process ignore this pivotal step.
When a business person perceives a need to address an issue that may require a purchase, about 80% of potential buyers will create a mental list of companies they feel are worth considering before they do any research. And 90% of those buyers who purchase will ultimately buy from a company in their initial consideration set. (Bain & Co. and Google, 2022)
A potential buyer's initial consideration set is based on mental impressions that he or she has formed through touchpoints such as previous experience with a company, marketing messages, news reports, and conversations with colleagues and friends.
So, the perceptions that determine which companies will be included in the initial consideration set exist in the buyer's mind before he or she starts an active buying process.
What Is Mental Availability?
To increase the odds that your company will be included in your buyers' initial consideration sets, you must reach those buyers with the right messaging and content before they become active, in-market buyers.
More specifically, your objective is to increase your company's mental availability with your potential buyers.
The mental availability concept has been popularized by Byron Sharp and his colleagues at the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute for Marketing Science. In his landmark book, How Brands Grow, Sharp provided a simple definition of mental availability: "Mental availability/brand salience is the propensity for a brand to be noticed or thought of in buying situations."
Mental availability is different from general brand awareness. It describes the likelihood that a potential buyer will think of your company in the context of a specific buying situation.
Many marketing thought leaders argue that effective brand marketing is the key to creating mental availability. While this is generally true, it doesn't provide specific guidance about what kinds of messages and content will be effective for increasing mental availability.
Messaging and content must meet three requirements to boost mental availability.
Link Content to Buyer Needs
First, the messaging and content must clearly link your company to specific buyer needs. As noted earlier, when a potential buyer perceives a need that may require a purchase, the buyer will create an initial consideration set of companies that he or she believes may be able to address the need.
The initial consideration set will include companies the potential buyer mentally associates with the specific need he or she is experiencing. It's these associations that create mental availability. Therefore, your job is to build and refresh the memory structures that connect your company to the specific needs your potential buyers are most likely to experience.
You can't predict what specific need will prompt a particular buyer to move into the market. Therefore, to increase mental availability, you need to build and refresh memory links that will connect your company to all the important buyer needs your company can address.
With broader mental availability, you increase the likelihood that your company will be included in the initial consideration sets of a larger number of potential buyers.
Make Content Memorable
Marketing messaging and content must also be memorable to increase mental availability. When your goal is to boost mental availability, most of the potential buyers you are targeting won't be ready to begin a buying process.
You communicate with those potential buyers at a given point in time, and you hope they will remember your message at a future point in time when they perceive a need and are ready to start a serious buying process.
As discussed earlier, your messaging and content must clearly link your company to the needs your potential buyers are likely to experience, but how you express those associations is critical to making your messaging and content memorable.
In B2B, we tend to describe the benefits of doing business with our company in rational, "businesslike" terms - and sometimes in technical, quantitative, or economic terms.
To make your messaging and content more memorable, you need to capture in a visceral way what a potential buyer with a particular problem is experiencing, and you need to describe how your company can make that problem "go away."
Make Content Easy to Consume
The third important requirement for content that will effectively increase mental availability is that it must be easy to consume. By "easy to consume," I mean that the content doesn't require potential buyers to expend much cognitive energy.
This attribute is important because most members of your target audience are not actively engaged in a buying process and therefore won't be inclined to spend much time and effort consuming content that (at the moment) isn't a high priority.
As a practical matter, this means that most mental availability messages and content should be relatively short. That's why the 30-second or one-minute TV ad has been a staple of brand marketing for decades.
In B2B, we have the leeway to use somewhat longer content to build mental availability because most business people believe that keeping current on industry trends and innovative business practices is important for their career progression. Therefore, many business people will be willing to invest more time and effort to consume content if it's relevant to their work or career objectives.
The Bottom Line
If you want to drive revenue growth, you need to get your company into the initial consideration sets of more potential buyers. To accomplish this goal, you must boost your company's mental availability with potential buyers, and that requires the right kind of marketing messaging and content.
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*Research has shown that between 40% and 60% of prospective B2B deals do not result in a purchase. (Dixon and McKenna, 2022) Research has also found that about 80% of B2B buyers have a set of prospective vendors in mind before they do any research. And 90% of those buyers ultimately buy from a vendor in their initial consideration set. (Bain & Co. and Google, 2022)
Let's be optimistic and say that only 40% of prospective deals do not result in a purchase. Of the 60% that do result in a purchase, 48% of the prospects will create an initial consideration set (60% x 80%), and 43% will ultimately buy from a company in the initial consideration set (48% x 90%). That leaves only 17% of prospects that will buy from a company that was not in the initial consideration set. (60% - 43%).
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Image courtesy of Affen Ajlfe (www.modup.net) via Flickr (PD).
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