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 top of mind awareness is important in marketing and explain how you can increase top of mind awareness with various marketing efforts.
Why Top of Mind Awareness in Marketing Is Important
Top-of-mind awareness should be a priority for any business. Staying top-of-mind means that you rank highly in the minds of consumers and it helps you attract leads and retain loyal customers. Top of mind awareness is defined as the first brand name that comes to someone’s mind when asked about a specific industry. Being top of mind is a huge deal for a brand. It means that consumers not only recall your brand and recognize it, but they think of it first over your competitors.
How Top of Mind Awareness Helps You Attract More Qualified Leads
Top of mind awareness helps you attract more qualified leads and filters out any unqualified prospects. Why? Because increasing awareness brings qualified leads to you when a need for your product or service arises (they remember you, not the competitor!). If you want your business to stay top of mind ahead of competitors, you must stop pitching products and start sharing expertise. Show prospects how you can add value and earn their business.
How to Keep Your Brand Top of Mind With Touchpoint Marketing
When an outbound salesperson cold calls a prospect, it could take months of nurturing that lead before they actually become a customer. But, if the prospect has already had touchpoints of communication with your company, they may recognize yours much quicker. The efforts of a marketing team can help a sales team tremendously. If your company has already provided value to a potential customer and established trust, you’ll be able to make a sale more easily.
Creating top of mind awareness can help you increase sales, even for an outbound lead generation program. It’s essential to be found online during your lead generation process. If a potential client just got off the phone with you and has never heard of you before, they will likely conduct a quick Google search to gather more information.
Nine out of 10 B2B buyers say online content has a moderate to major effect on purchasing decisions.
And this works both ways. If a potential buyer has already found you online through conducting their own searches, they will recognize your name more easily when a salesperson calls them. Establishing this trust early on is important and will help your sales team close more deals.
The following are just a few ways you can build brand awareness and achieve top of mind awareness with consumers.
Have a Killer SEO Strategy and Optimized Website
With an optimized website and killer SEO strategy, you may not even need to explain who you are to prospects the first time you speak with them. If you’re running an outbound marketing program where you’re cold calling potential prospects, it’s likely that you have a list of potential customers in your target audience who you’re calling on. These prospects are people who your organization has predetermined are a good fit as customers for your business.
If a potential customer is deemed to be a good fit for your business, there’s a good chance they have searched for what you offer (or will search for it eventually). A good SEO strategy ensures that your website appears at the top of a search engine results page when a user searches for the products or services you offer.
Some of the best things you can do to increase traffic and the visibility of your website include the following:
- Publish relevant, keyword-rich, shareworthy content
- Share content regularly to increase traffic
- Optimize your website
- Improve site speed
- Make your site easy for users and Google to navigate
- Focus on internal and external linking (also get backlinks whenever you can)
This list goes on; bottom line, great SEO = a higher level of brand awareness for your business. More brand awareness means top of mind awareness, which helps you close more business.
Utilize Creative Marketing Collateral
Creative marketing collateral like brochures, sell sheets, case studies, and so on can help your company tremendously when it comes to top of mind awareness. You can hand out printed copies to potential customers face to face, or you can use collateral in personalized emails as a part of an email marketing campaign.
Build Your Social Media Presence
The high-level business impact of social media is substantial. Building a social media presence can help you increase top of mind awareness because so many people use social media to discover and learn about brands. In fact, 92% of all Instagram users say they’ve followed a brand, clicked on their website, or made a purchase after seeing a product/service on Instagram. Social media will help you convert more leads into customers, but it will also help you stay top of mind. If a potential customer has already seen you on social media, they might be more likely to make a purchase when you call them.
Focus on Lead Nurturing and Qualification
Sure, marketing efforts can enhance an appointment setting program. But, a solid lead nurturing and qualification strategy is still an important part of the cold calling process. A lead nurturing strategy is important because it keeps you at the top of the minds of qualified leads in your pipeline. If you just call a prospect once or twice, they’re going to forget about you. If you can learn how to excel at lead nurturing, you’ll actually build relationships with prospects and increase conversion rates.
Stay Visible to Your Target Audience
If you want to increase lead generation, a B2B appointment setting program can help, but marketing services will push your success over the top. Marketing efforts can help you achieve top of mind awareness which will make deals that much easier to close.
For marketing and B2B appointment setting services that will increase brand awareness and help you generate more sales qualified leads, contact Abstrakt Marketing Group today.
