Top of Mind Awareness: Still Important?

If you Google “top of mind awareness” you get back 4,460,000 responses.

If you look up “top of mind awareness” on Wikipedia, you’ll get several definitions, including this one: “When people think of you first to fulfill their product or service needs.”

(Google and Wikipedia are wonderful things.)

In the olden days (circa 2003), you’d run a radio campaign enough times (“reach plus frequency!”) with the hope that when someone actually needed your product or service, they thought of you first. This was the goal. It made sense, just like carrying the adult-equivalent of a Trapper Keeper in your car as you made sales calls used to make sense—before you started carrying your laptop and smartphone instead.

Now, the goal should change. No longer does the customer need to remember your name, they just need to remember where to find you. For the rest of your life, is it more important to know how to do long division, or more important to know how to use a calculator? The same rule applies to your marketing—they don’t need to remember your name, they just need to know where to find you when they need you.

“Where to find you” can include:
• Favorite Places
• Facebook Page
• YouTube
• Twitter
• Phone App
• Business sites like Manta
• Search Engines

It should be easier to get saved into the potential customer’s smartphone or laptop than it would be to get them to remember your name, shouldn’t it? You can still connect with them through your advertising, but now the call to action isn’t a phone call or store visit—it’s simply that your info is stored for future reference.

Disclaimer: I’m only asserting that the “call to action” for advertisers may have changed—not that branding isn’t still important.

Your company’s marketing goals should now be to make someone’s list of Favorite Places, to get them to follow your Facebook page, and to have some real search engine ranking. You don’t need to be “top of mind”,  but you do need to be connected to the new tools people are using to keep track of their lives.