How To Get Inside The Minds Of Your Customers | Better Small Business Marketing

How do people buy? Imagine you asked your network for a product recommendation. Which CRM for our business should we get? Which espresso machine do you recommend? I'm looking for a new TV, what would you suggest? Most of the time you'll get the same 5 brands being mentioned. These brands are usually the leaders in their category, the ones that most often come to mind. It's rare that someone will recommend an outlier that you've never heard of, regardless of how great that particular product may be. In fact, you'll even get recommendations from people who haven't used a product but know its reputation within the category. For example, we get inquiries all the time from business owners who've been recommended to contact us, even though the person doing the recommendation isn't even a client. A large part of being in the buyer consideration space is something called salience, often referred to as mental availability. Simply put, mental availability is the provider that comes to mind when a buyer is ready to buy. If you're not on that shortlist, the chances of chances of winning the sale are slim at best. Our job as marketers is to get into that limited consideration space. How? Through positioning, messaging, and innovation. Or, if possible, all three.