Your brand might be well-known, but are you remembered when customers are ready to buy?
This gap between awareness and action frustrates marketers across every category. The problem isn’t that people don’t know you exist, it is that you don’t come to mind at the moment they need what you sell.
The solution lies in Category Entry Points (CEPs), the specific situations that trigger someone to enter your market. These aren’t generic needs like “I want coffee” or “we need software.” They’re contextual moments like “I’m exhausted but have a 3 PM presentation” or “our month-end close crashed again.”
How Buying Really Works
A parent doesn’t wake up wanting a premium stroller. They think, “We’re visiting grandma, and her neighborhood has those old brick sidewalks.” A CFO doesn’t browse ERP solutions for fun. They’re tired of explaining why the month-end close failed again to the board.
These triggers are your true competition. Peloton doesn’t compete with other bikes, instead, they own the moment when someone feels winded playing with their kids. Slack doesn’t battle messaging apps, instead, they own when email chains become impossible to follow. The brand that comes to mind first in these moments has already won.
Why Traditional Brand Building Falls Short
Most marketing starts inside-out: what you do, your differentiation, and creative execution. However, customers think outside-in: situation, tension, need, then solution. By the time they’re comparing features, the brands associated with their trigger moment have an insurmountable advantage.
You can be the most famous cybersecurity company, but if CISOs don’t think of you after a breach attempt, you’re invisible. Traditional research asks why customers choose you or what features they value. But these questions assume customers think about your category like you do. They don’t.
Finding Your Category Entry Points
- Conduct Story-Based Interviews: Ask customers what happened the day before they started looking. Key questions:
- “What was the final straw?”
- “Who else got involved when this became urgent?”
- “What were you trying to do that you couldn’t?”
- Mine Search Data Differently: The most valuable queries often don’t mention your product:
- “Baby won’t sleep, neighbors complaining” (not “white noise machine”)
- “Board meeting tomorrow, dashboard broken” (not “analytics software”)
- Analyze Support Triggers: What situation do customers describe first in support tickets? These patterns reveal entry points competitors miss.
- Map Competitive Gaps: Which high-value entry points are unclaimed? These represent your biggest opportunities.
Activating Entry Points
Owning Category Entry Points will require tweaks to your entire marketing system. Your content strategy should address the questions people ask in these moments, not just the features you want to promote. Your media plan should show up where people are when these triggers occur, and your creative should mirror the emotional reality of these moments in addition to communicating functional benefits.
- Creative Strategy: Instead of “We’re the fastest database,” try “When your query times out during the demo.”
- Content Marketing: Create guides for situations: “What to do when your toddler won’t sleep,” not “Benefits of white noise.”
- Media Planning: Data breach happens? Dominate news site adjacencies. Tax season? Own that temporal entry point.
- Website Architecture: Navigation like “When you’re scaling fast” or “When things break” helps visitors self-identify their entry point.
- Sales Enablement: Train teams to identify which trigger brought each prospect. Competitive pressure requires different messaging than internal inefficiency.
At Direct Agents, our strategy team works closely with clients to uncover and activate their most valuable Category Entry Points. Through a mix of market and competitive set research, win/loss analysis, and search insights, we help our clients identify the real moments that drive buying behavior.
We translate those insights into campaign strategies, creative concepts, and media plans designed to show up in those moments, with the right message, in the right environment. The results are typically seen in improvements in ad engagement, conversion rates, and revenue growth.
The brands that win will be the most mentally available when it matters, not necessarily the most famous. This shift from awareness to association isn’t tactical; it’s fundamental. Stop starting with what you sell. Start with when and why people buy.
Jackson Richards, VP of Strategy, Direct Agents