One of the most important objectives for marketing is to ensure that your brand, product or service are remembered when it matters. At the moment your potential customer has the need for a solution, we should top-of-mind, ie one of the brands that enters into the buying process.
In B2B marketing, the brand that is remembered the first day often is the brand that’s bought. Research from LinkedIn and Bain Company shows that 92% of all B2B purchases is done from companies that are on the “day 1 list”.
Every marketing decision needs to be checked from this perspective. When it comes to creative assets, marketers must ask themselves, ‘does this deserve to be remembered’ and ‘will my brand be remembered?’ When selecting media, ask ‘is this going to appear where it will be noticed?’ and ‘will the right people remember this information?’
How memory works is particularly important, especially when being remembered is a commercial necessity. In B2B, it can be the branded search at the beginning of a buying process. Or the ad or mail from your digital campaign being pushed out. In both cases, this moment is when the prospective customer turns to their most important search engine – their mind.
But how we build memories in B2B isn’t just about being served an ad. It is influenced by situation and context, the creative experience, recency and repetition. As marketers we must understand the memory mix to be successful.
There are four types of memory:
- Working memory, which we use for remembering in micro-short periods to perform easy, routine tasks.
- Episodic memory: these are the long-term memories that we have of past time, events or recollections, and these memories are most easily recalled when they are associated with present cues or feelings.
- Semantic memory, which helps us to remember language or a list of facts.
- Prospective memory, which helps us to remember the productive things we’re planning to do, such as events, dates, appointments or tasks.
As we write briefs and later, as we review creative work, we need to consider how we feed these different types of memory, asking: ‘what prompts are we giving,’ and ‘what are the time frames that we are expecting our memories to withstand?’
Memories are created through a four-stage process: Receiving, encoding, storing and retrieval. As marketers, we are most interested in retrieval phase: we want our brand to be thought of when a need is identified and the buying journey starts.
To do this, we must invest in advertising that grabs attention, features messages (not least your brand or company name) that can be encoded easily through communication units that are well-branded to ensure the memory stores over time.
In short, it’s worth investing in good creative marketing that will be remembered.
And if you want to discuss communication that creates result, you are always welcome to contact ulf@sfinxagency.se
