Search begins with the Brain!

“The most important search engine is still the one in our minds.” 

Today, marketers invest billions of dollars in search engine optimisation. We want our brands to come to mind easily when buyers enter the market. We’ve got the right objective, but we’re optimising for the wrong search engine. The right search engine is the one in your head. Which is why the real focus for marketers should be brain engine optimisation (BEO). In essence BEO is the new SEO.

But how do you optimise for search results inside a buyer’s brain?

BEO isn’t so different from SEO. The goal is still to link your brand with a keyword – a mental keyword. Or a ‘category entry point’ (CEP). CEPs are the cues that buyers use to access their memories when faced with a buying situation and can include any internal cues (motives, emotions) and external cues (location, time of day) that affect any buying situation.”   CEP’s are important  because in a buying situation: “a category buyer first draws on existing memories to identify potential brands for purchase. These memory-generated brands are the starting point for the buying process. Other sources and search engines (eg Google, colleagues) are usually only consulted if the memory-generated options are insufficient. And, even when consultation does occur, buyers still show a bias for the brands they already know.”

This also explains how most marketing works to increase sales: by linking the brand to CEPs well before the customer needs to buy. In essence research has shown that B2B brands with more links to more CEPs are more likely to get bought. Just like pages with more backlinks rank higher in Google search, brands with more CEP links rank higher in brain search.

And CEPs don’t just help with customer acquisition. CEPs also help with customer retention. According to the research, each additional CEP link lowers the odds of defection by 5%. If you care about acquisition or retention, then you should care about CEPs.

Just like marketers use digital data to optimise Google search, marketers can use market research to optimise brain search. Brain engine optimisation is a four-step process.

Step 1: Identify the relevant CEPs for your category

Start by surveying buyers to understand the cues that trigger a buying situation. In B2B, you want to understand both the business needs and the professional needs of the buyer.

Step 2: Prioritise the right CEPs for your brand

With SEO, you try to pick the most valuable keywords. With BEO, you try to pick the most valuable CEPs. There could be 50 different CEPs for the cloud computing category, but not all are equally attractive to IBM. You can quantify the commercial value of a CEP by analysing the ‘three Cs’: commonness, credibility and competitiveness.

Step 3: Build (and refresh) links between your brand and the CEPs

Now that you’ve identified the most potentially profitable CEPs, it is time to start investing. Concentrate on no more than three to five CEPs to start (the smaller the brand, the smaller the list should be).

Find creative ways to feature the CEPs in your marketing and advertising, and co-present alongside your distinctive assets . Furthermore, align with your salespeople to make sure you’re all talking about the same CEPs (which are really just your biggest customer needs).

Put the CEPs on your website and into your Powerpoint presentations.

Step 4: Measure the effectiveness of your CEP-building efforts

If you’re doing your job right, over time you should see increases in the number of buyers who link key CEPs to your brand.

Most of us are busy trying to link the brand to a bunch of fluffy, perceptual attributes that marketing thinks are important, like ‘innovation’ and ‘trustworthiness’. Instead, link to CEPs that your customers think are important. It’s a more profitable approach and much easier to explain to sales and finance.

Memory generation is the best form of lead generation

Most B2B marketers are obsessed with lead generation, but the best B2B marketers are obsessed with memory generation.

If your brand doesn’t get remembered in a buying situation, it isn’t likely to get bought. People mostly just buy what they can easily remember, and brain engine optimisation is how you increase your odds of being easily remembered. And because brain engine optimisation determines most sales, it should be priority number one for every B2B (and B2C) marketing department.