What are Category Entry Points (CEPs) in B2B?

The key to unlocking your brand's long-term success lies in understanding Category Entry Points (CEPs). While only 5% of your audience may be ready to buy today, the other 95% represents a massive opportunity. CEPs are the mental triggers or cues that potential buyers associate with problems they face—whether it’s a collaboration issue or a project management challenge. These triggers determine which brands come to mind when a need arises.

To be effective, your marketing shouldn’t just target the small percentage of buyers actively in-market. The real goal is to engage the broader 95% who aren’t ready yet, but will be in the future. By mapping your CEPs, you can create strong associations between your brand and the common challenges your audience experiences.

It’s not about selling features—it's about being the brand they think of first when a problem arises. By embedding your brand into the mental framework of your audience, you ensure that when the time comes for them to seek a solution, you're already at the forefront of their minds. Brands that master this approach don’t just get noticed—they get remembered, standing out when it truly counts.

Category Entry Points (CEPs) play a critical role in B2B marketing by linking your brand to the mental cues that decision-makers recall during buying situations. Understanding and leveraging CEPs allows brands to stay top-of-mind, making it easier to be considered when buyers are ready to make a purchase. In B2B, CEPs provide a structured way to connect your brand to the buying situations that are most relevant to decision-makers, which is crucial for long-term growth and customer acquisition.

What are Category Entry Points (CEPs) in B2B?

CEPs are the internal or external cues that trigger memory retrieval when a buyer enters a decision-making process. These cues guide which brands are initially recalled and considered. In B2B, decision-makers often rely on past experiences and brand associations stored in their memory to shortlist vendors or solutions. For example, a B2B buyer might think of a brand when they need a solution for "scaling a project quickly" or "ensuring security compliance." These are CEPs that relate to specific business needs, and a brand that is associated with these will likely be recalled when a solution is needed.

Importance of Category Entry Points in B2B Marketing

In B2B markets, brands must focus on building mental availability, which is the ease with which a brand is recalled in relevant buying situations. CEPs help build this mental availability by establishing connections between a brand and the key buying situations decision-makers face. Over time, these connections create a network of associations that make your brand more likely to be remembered and chosen.

As Professor Jenni Romaniuk, who developed the concept of CEPs, points out, B2B buying decisions are heavily influenced by the ability of a brand to be recalled in these critical moments. In contrast to short-term sales-driven campaigns, CEPs contribute to the long-term memory structures that ensure your brand is top of mind when buyers come into the market.

How to Identify and Build Category Entry Points

To use CEPs effectively, a brand must first identify the key buying situations and triggers within its category. This process involves:

1. Identifying CEPs: Understanding the retrieval cues buyers use in your category. These might include:
   • When (timing): e.g., "end of the financial year" or "when scaling the business."
   • Where (location): e.g., "remote work" or "international markets."
   • Who (stakeholders): e.g., "senior management approval."
   • Why (motivation): e.g., "to ensure security compliance" or "to innovate faster."
2. These cues reflect the moments when decision-makers are likely to think of your brand, and the questions they ask themselves when choosing vendors.
3. Prioritizing CEPs: Not all CEPs are equally valuable. Brands need to prioritize CEPs that align with their offerings and that have lower competition. This is where the 3C’s framework (Credibility, Competitiveness, and Commonality) comes into play:
   • Credibility: Does your brand have a credible offering linked to this CEP?
   • Competitiveness: How cluttered is this CEP with competitor brands?
   • Commonality: How often does this buying situation occur, and how valuable is it?
4. Building CEPs in Marketing: Once key CEPs are identified, marketers should integrate them into various touchpoints, including advertising, sales scripts, and thought leadership. The goal is to ensure that every interaction between your brand and the customer reinforces a connection to relevant CEPs, keeping your brand memorable when it matters.

Implications for B2B Marketing Strategy

CEPs shift the focus of B2B marketing from immediate lead generation to long-term brand building. By establishing associations with common buying situations, you ensure that your brand is easily recalled when buyers are ready to purchase. This strategy contrasts with traditional B2B marketing, which often emphasizes capturing the 5% of buyers actively in-market. CEPs, instead, help reach the other 95%—those who are not currently buying but will eventually need a solution.

Benefits of a Category Entry Points-Driven Approach:

1. Mental Availability: As you build associations with key buying situations, your brand will be more likely to be considered when a need arises.
2. Customer Retention: By consistently refreshing your brand’s presence in the memory of decision-makers, you reduce the likelihood of customer defection.
3. Increased Sales: Over time, as your brand becomes associated with more CEPs, you expand the scenarios in which your brand can be recalled, leading to more sales opportunities.

Measuring the Effectiveness of Category Entry Points

To assess how effectively your brand is leveraging CEPs, you can measure:

1. Mental Market Share: The share of CEP-brand linkages your brand holds compared to competitors.
2. Mental Penetration: The percentage of decision-makers who associate your brand with at least one CEP.
3. Network Size: The average number of CEPs linked to your brand among decision-makers who already have mental penetration.

These metrics help quantify how well your brand is performing in building and sustaining memory links with the buying situations that matter most to your audience.

Highlighting a critical, yet often overlooked aspect of marketing: the importance of maintaining brand awareness and memory structures to prevent decline, not just drive growth. Many businesses are focused on immediate ROI and attribution, trying to tie every marketing activity to measurable outcomes. But in reality, some of the most valuable marketing efforts are those that protect current performance levels and prevent sales erosion over time.

Dr. Simon Broadbent’s airplane analogy is particularly apt. Marketing spend acts like the engines of an airplane—while they’re running, the business continues to operate smoothly, often without dramatic gains or losses. However, when marketing efforts are cut, the descent into reduced performance is gradual and often unnoticed until it’s too late. This makes it easy for decision-makers to slash marketing budgets when the immediate impacts aren't felt, only to face significant declines in customer inbounds or sales further down the line.

The challenge here is the delayed cause-and-effect relationship between stopping brand marketing and the eventual decline in sales. By the time the consequences show up, the root cause (cutting brand marketing) might be obscured or forgotten. This lag makes it difficult to link long-term marketing initiatives to short-term revenue gains, which is why they often suffer under ROI scrutiny.

Brand awareness campaigns, for instance, work subtly and over long periods, maintaining customer recognition, loyalty, and market share. This kind of marketing doesn’t yield the kind of instant gratification that demand generation efforts do. Still, it’s crucial for preventing the natural decay of customer interest and market presence.

Marketing leaders need to advocate for the importance of these long-term brand efforts, emphasizing that their value isn’t always seen in quarterly metrics or traditional attribution models. Instead, they support the “engine” that keeps the brand aloft in the long run, ensuring stability and protecting against the slow descent into decline.

In the age of data-driven marketing, it's easy to focus on what's easily measurable. However, the real art lies in balancing short-term demand gen initiatives with long-term brand maintenance. It’s the quieter, often overlooked marketing efforts that maintain the foundational strength of a brand, and this requires a different lens—one that values long-term health over immediate ROI.

Category entry points are the mental and situational cues that trigger a buyer to consider solutions or brands. They go beyond a mere recognition of need; they reflect the personal or professional moments that prompt someone to seek change. In the B2B context, this often involves shifts from a company's offerings to the deeper challenges faced by the buyer. These challenges are frequently driven by emotions—frustration with inefficiency, regret over past mistakes, or the desire for progress. Understanding these entry points requires empathy. It’s not enough to focus on the solution; the real work is in recognizing the emotional drivers that lead to that decision.

A true customer-centric approach isn't about pushing urgency but about reflecting the buyer's journey—how a challenge becomes a realization, and how that realization evolves into a solution. In marketing, this means representing the customer's voice, not just through their words, but through their emotions. Recognizing these entry points allows brands to create content that resonates deeply, forging authentic connections that guide buyers toward solutions that genuinely align with their needs and desires.

Conclusion

In B2B marketing, success depends on more than just generating leads—it’s about being remembered when buyers are ready to solve a problem. Category Entry Points offer a framework for linking your brand to the key buying situations your audience faces, building mental availability, and positioning your brand for long-term success. By identifying, prioritizing, and building CEPs into your marketing strategy, you ensure that your brand remains relevant and top-of-mind when it matters most.