The Importance of Top of Mind Awareness (TOMA) in Brand Development

Think back to a time when you made a cold call to a potential customer for your business. Or, just think about any time when you’ve told a potential customer about your business for the first time. It probably wasn’t an easy sale. No matter how interested someone acts, most consumers aren’t ready to buy the very first time they hear about your product or service.

Before consumers make a purchase, they like to have established trust with a brand. When brands can earn full trust, consumers are 68% more likely to buy from them first, stay loyal, become advocates, and defend the brand. Before you build trust, you must first achieve top of mind awareness. If you aren’t ranking highly in the minds of consumers, you won’t have as much success closing deals.

This article will help you understand why the top of mind awareness is important in marketing and explain how you can increase top-of-mind awareness with various marketing efforts.

What is top-of-mind awareness?

Let’s play a little game of word association. If we say “smartphone,” you might instantly think “Apple.”

Music streaming? Spotify.

Cookies? Oreos.

Cloud-based CRM? Salesforce.

This exercise helps demonstrate what top-of-mind awareness (TOMA) is in the marketing world: an automatic link made in the customer’s mind between one brand and a particular product or service

True top of mind is when that customer thinks about a specific brand when asked a general or unprompted question about that market niche. For example, if we were to ask our readers about their preferred ways to talk with colleagues, we might get answers such as Slack, Google Hangouts, or even a project management solution like Wrike or Trello.

TOMA is so important because it can correlate directly with key metrics, like sales, market share, customer loyalty, and many other KPIs.

To understand how a brand can become top of mind, let’s dig a bit deeper into the pillars of TOMA.

1. Branding and Thought Leadership

To win their audience over, a Marketer has to prove that they know what they are talking about or, even better, have the vision and forethought to provide something new on a particular topic. The audience that gets access to that new information may feel like they have something no competitor has ever offered them, which can make that Product more valuable in their eyes and worthy of their business. That’s what thought leadership can do as a brand-building strategy for everyone from freelancers and founders to established business owners.

2) Authenticity

Being authentic means that you are real and genuine. When you shake it all down, authenticity means you’re being true to who you are as a brand. You’re presenting yourself and your brand from a place of sincerity and genuineness.

3) Helpfulness

Helpful is something marketers should strive towards as a way to foster engagement, users should be the end goal: giving people the content they need to solve their problems when they need it, and in the specific format, they want.

4) Likability

When you are in marketing or are trying to market your own business, life does become a popularity contest. By taking steps to become more likable, you’ll develop that certain, special quality that makes persuading people to buy your product or service so much easier.

5) Trust

According to PwC’s Consumer Insights Survey (2018), 14% of respondents put trust as their №1 reason for choosing a retailer. “Trust in brand” was the second most frequently cited reason for purchase decision-making.

Trust Is the Hands-Down the New Marketing Currency

Final thoughts

Trust is a byproduct of a commitment to quality and excellence. If you can deliver the right results to the right people over the long haul, they will come to believe and trust in your product and service offerings.

That’s all I wanted to discuss today on TOMA, I welcome your suggestions, questions, and feedback.

Thank you for reading the blog, You Can reach me at https://www.linkedin.com/in/udit-tandon/