Brand & Visibility
86% of your clients have already chosen before they call.
Pick a moment that works for you.
Your company just hit a problem. The heating boiler doesn't make it anymore, the ERP system drops below the floor, or a new coach has to come in for the leadership team. What's the first thing that happens?
If you think people open Google and start comparing objectively, I have bad news. In practice that almost never happens. What does happen: three or four names surface immediately. Three names that were already in their head. And in 86 percent of cases, it becomes one of those three.
Dat getal komt uit gezamenlijk onderzoek van het LinkedIn B2B Institute en Bain & Company. Het is het belangrijkste getal uit B2B-marketing van het afgelopen decennium. En de meeste MKB-bedrijven negeren het volledig.
Before we dig in, three numbers to remember:
Not on the list? Then you fight for the remaining 8 percent of the market. That's not marketing, that's bad luck and hoping someone still clicks your Google Ads.
The odds are simple: either you're one of the three names someone remembers before the problem arises, or you're in an almost-lost race.
LinkedIn calls this phenomenon the "Day One List". The idea is simple but radical. On day one of a buying process (the moment a company decides something needs to happen) the list of serious candidates is already set. Not built through research. Built through memory.
Those memories come from somewhere:
None of those moments is a sales moment. None of them converts. And yet those are exactly the moments where you get chosen or not chosen. Behavioural scientists call this mental availability. Your brand needs to be easy to recall the moment someone has a problem.
Here's the painful truth for most SMB owners. If you run Google Ads at the moment someone types "AC installer Haarlem", you're fighting for the last 8 percent. The core decision is already made. You're fighting the rest of the market over scraps.
That doesn't mean those ads are pointless. They have returns. But they're the derivative solution to a problem that originates much earlier: your company simply isn't in buyers' heads before they pull the trigger.
Worse: the moment you stop advertising, you're invisible again. LinkedIn calls this "rented prominence". You rent a place with the audience. The day the rent runs out, you're gone.
The brands that do make it onto the Day One List don't have a more expensive campaign. They have something else. They built presence over time, in content that stays in place.
Until 2022 the Day One List was formed in human heads. Articles, conversations, events. Slowly built memory. Since ChatGPT, something fundamental has been added.
An SMB owner now types into ChatGPT: "which installation company in the Haarlem region can install a heat pump and has good reviews?" The AI answers with three to five names. That is the new Day One List. Literally. Assembled by a language model from the content available on the web.
That list isn't rebuilt per query. It's built into the training of the model, in how often your company appears in trustworthy sources, in the context where you're mentioned. And then that list is returned in almost the same way every time someone asks a similar question.
The difference with Google matters. On Google someone scrolls through ten results. On ChatGPT the user gets three to five names and often goes straight ahead with one of those three. The shortlist is shorter, the pre-selection harder, and you don't see the ad opportunity like you do with Google.
In December 2025 LinkedIn published new research that makes this even clearer. The core message: stop renting, start building. Owned prominence (your own visibility built through content, authority and repeated exposure) beats rented prominence (purchased attention through ads) over the long term.
The number is striking:
That doesn't mean generic searches are worthless. It does mean most marketing dollars now get burnt in places where the competitor has already won. The real work is making sure people know your name before they start searching.
Until now this kind of research was for enterprise marketing. Large B2B companies with budgets of hundreds of thousands of euros per quarter. But the Day One List logic applies just as much to an installer in Haarlem, a recruitment agency in Utrecht or a coach in Eindhoven.
An SMB owner with a problem does exactly the same thing as a CTO at a corporate. They think of three names, ask someone else for advice, and pick one of those three. The scale differs, the behaviour is identical.
For three kinds of SMBs, this difference is existential:
When your client has an acute problem (leak, breakdown, defect) there's no time for research. That person picks up the phone and calls the name they know. If your name isn't there, you're not in the picture. The Day One List applies here almost literally.
A trust purchase, par excellence. Someone doesn't buy your programme based on a comparison Google search. They buy you because they've already seen, read or heard something from you. In your trade, mental availability is synonymous with sales power.
The client picks the recruiter who sits in their head as "the one who finds seniors that others don't find". You don't build that positioning with an ad campaign. You build it with content that keeps showing what makes you different.
The good news: for an SMB this is more achievable than for a corporate. You don't have to get on the Day One List of the entire country. You have to get on the Day One List of the specific group that fits you. That's thousands of names, not millions.
Three things that structurally work:
Articles, podcasts, videos, cases. Not a post every day, but every month something that's still findable three years from now. Google Ads are gone the moment you stop paying. A good article keeps pulling visitors, year after year, and works through into the training of AI models.
Make sure you exist in the places where the Day One List forms. That's Google (SEO). That's now also ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google AI Overviews (GEO). A company that isn't mentioned there simply doesn't exist for an increasing portion of the market. We previously wrote about how to get found in AI tools.
Industry media, other people's podcasts, guest articles, events. Especially the places where your name pops up next to another topic build memory. Not because someone needed your product back then, but because they saw you then and need you now.
The core shift: stop asking "how do I get this visitor to convert?" and start asking "how do I build a position in people's heads before they even start searching?" That is a different kind of marketing. Less action-driven, more systematic. Less peak load, more steady rhythm.
The Day One List changes where the game is played. Not in the search, but in the months before. Not on the landing page, but in the head. Not with campaigns, but with presence.
For SMBs who understand this and start building seriously, there's a real lead to be gained. Because most competitors will keep running ads for years for people who've already forgotten their name.
And the entrepreneurs who use this insight? They become the three names that surface on day one. They no longer have an 8 percent chance of the sale, but 92 percent.
Book a free call van 30 minuten. We kijken hoe zichtbaar je nu bent in Google én ChatGPT, en welke stappen het meeste opleveren om win a place in the heads of your audience over the coming months.