When someone wants to buy your specific product/service, how quickly does your brand come to mind? Are you their #1 pick? Are you in their top 3? Do they think of your brand at all? If you want to win customers now—and grow your brand long term—you need to make your brand the most memorable in the market. How do you do that? Focus on increasing mental availability.
What Is Mental Availability?
Mental availability is a marketing concept that refers to how much real estate your brand takes up in your customers’ minds.
Remember: People don’t want to spend any more brain power or effort than they have to. Hence, when making purchasing decisions, they prefer to go with the first brand that comes to mind. The familiar choice is the easier choice because it takes less energy. It also feels like the better choice—simply because consumers equate familiarity with trust.
This is why mental availability is the key to market growth. But how do you increase your brand’s mental availability?
The Formula for Mental Availability
To achieve mental availability, you need to focus on two key areas:
- Awareness: People knowing who you are and what you do.
- Recall: People remembering who you are and what you do.
Note: There are many strategies to increase awareness and recall, and a healthy marketing strategy should allocate equal resources to both at key stages of the buyer journey. Fortunately, increasing mental availability is not as difficult as it may seem.
10 Strategies to Increase Mental Availability
Mental availability is ultimately about reach and repetition, which you can reinforce in big and small ways. Start with this roundup of go-to strategies to keep your brand top of mind.
1) Brand all your content.
Your brand is the amalgamation of your beliefs, story, voice, and personality—communicated at every touchpoint. As industries become overcrowded, brand is one of the last remaining competitive advantages. This is why it’s so important that any and all content accurately reflects your brand, from your visual identity (logos, colors, and design elements) to your personality and voice.
When you create consistent, cohesive content you stand out from the crowd and cultivate familiarity with your audience. This helps you become an instantly recognizable resource—one they will remember when it comes time to buy.
Tip: To create on-brand content, you need a visual identity that is both distinct and flexible. Use our brand identity toolkit to design your identity, and use our branded content checklist to ensure that every piece you put out is authentically and distinctly yours.
2) Use emotional messaging.
If you want to make your brand more memorable, you need to cultivate an emotional attachment between your brand and audience. (This is even true in B2B, where it is a myth that purchase decisions aren’t emotional.) There are many ways to do this across the buyer journey:
- Use more emotional language in your written content, whether it’s an article or CTA.
- Develop catchy, easy-to-remember taglines.
- Use more inclusive imagery.
Tip: Look for more creative and exciting ways to humanize your brand and connect with your audience. Try these tips to brainstorm bold content that elicits strong emotions.
3) Increase your exposure.
If you want to grow your brand, you need to reach as many people as possible through as many means as possible. That includes:
- Omnichannel ad campaigns to keep your brand top-of-mind. Start with our guide to run successful paid media campaigns.
- High-value content marketing on owned channels. See our tips to brainstorm content that will resonate with your audience.
- Features in industry publications. Find out how to promote your content like an agency would.
Tip: Although you want to increase your exposure, not all channels will work for your brand. Find out how to choose the best channels for your audience, then focus on building a strong presence on your priority channels.
4) Expand your network.
In B2B, there are a lot of people who influence purchasing decisions. While you want a broad audience to increase awareness, it’s also important to reach key decision-makers within that audience.
According to Gartner research, the average number of stakeholders that influence a B2B buying decision is 11—and sometimes up to 20.
To expand and engage this network, make sure you have segmented your marketing personas, as well as ideal customer profiles. This will help you better tailor your campaigns and cultivate stronger connections with the right people.
Tip: Participate in industry events and webinars to increase your visibility and establish yourself as an expert. You can also partner with relevant publications to get your brand in front of industry thought leaders.
5) Showcase the people behind your brand.
If you want to expand your reach, you don’t always have to focus on external players. Your own employees can be some of your best advocates. They have a wealth of expertise to share, and they can expand your reach across their own networks. Showcasing the real humans behind your brand also increases people’s emotional attachment to your brand (which, again, makes you more memorable).
Tip: Turn your team into content creators by encouraging them to share their tips and expertise. You can also highlight your employees and brand culture on social media. This is a great way to let employees express themselves and foster more human connections.
6) Use retargeting.
How do you increase mental availability? Repetition. Repetition. Repetition. Use retargeting ads to reinforce your message to people who have shown interest in your brand. (Sidenote: We’ve also found success by targeting competitor keywords in Google Ads.) Make sure to follow up with leads via emails and other personalized communications.
Tip: Personalization is an incredibly effective way to engage your audience. Find out how AI tools can make it easier to infuse more personalization across channels.
7) Highlight your customer relationships.
Social proof is always a great tactic to increase mental availability, as it demonstrates your expertise and elicits excitement (especially when you highlight the ideal state your customer will be in after they’ve used your product/service).
- Solicit testimonials from satisfied customers to build trust and recognition.
- Share detailed case studies that showcase your success and expertise.
- Showcase user-generated content on your channels to engage your audience.
Tip: Case studies are most effective if they follow a narrative arc. Find out how to turn your customer wins into compelling stories.
8) Engage people with interactive content.
Interesting and unique content will always stand out, which is why we’re such a proponent of interactive content. Interactives put your audience in the driver’s seat, creating a more engaging experience than static or video content. Whether you’re looking to entertain or educate your audience, think of ways to provide value via interactives.
- Build a helpful calculator or tool to help them accomplish something.
- Create an entertaining quiz.
- Synthesize data into an interactive data visualization they can explore.
Tip: Although interactives can be a great tool, not all content works with the medium. Ask these questions to brainstorm and vet your interactive ideas.
9) Embrace data-driven storytelling.
Data visualization and data-based stories can be incredibly powerful tools for brands for several reasons:
- Data increases your credibility.
- Proprietary data makes you stand out as an expert in your field.
- Data storytelling makes information easier to digest and—most importantly—recall.
Whether you’re creating an annual report, white paper, infographic, or interactive database, think about how you might add data to your content to create more trustworthy and even newsworthy content that expands your reach.
Tip: Proprietary data is ideal for data storytelling because it is original content your audience can’t get anywhere else. If you need inspiration, look at these internal data sources, and find out how to turn them into compelling content.
10) Engage your customers on social.
Social is one of the most powerful platforms to increase your awareness and recall via paid campaigns and organic interaction. Look for creative ways to build a stronger presence on your social channels.
- Run creative contests or solicit UGC.
- Expand your reach with social media account takeovers.
- Promote causes you care about.
- Run polls to seek customer feedback.
- Share memes, relevant news, or industry trends.
Tip: Maintaining a strong social presence across multiple channels can be tricky, but AI tools can make it a lot easier. Find out how to use AI to hack social and save energy, time, and resources.
How to Keep Increasing Mental Availability
Although we’ve found success with these particular strategies, increasing mental availability doesn’t happen overnight. You need to regularly analyze campaign performance and adjust your strategy for the best results.
Like everything in marketing, it’s a process of experimentation and optimization. But sometimes it can help to gain a fresh perspective. If you’re looking for a partner to help you grab more market share, see our tips to find the right agency or explore what it’s like to work with us.
Either way, remember the best way to stay on top of trends and top of mind is to educate yourself about marketing best practices. Subscribe to our Best Story Wins podcast for more expert tips to win your customers’ hearts and minds, and check out our full resources archive for tools and templates to work smarter and win your market.
Good luck out there.
