Boost your top of mind awareness— Part 2

Last week, we demonstrated that if you can boost your Top of the Mind Awareness (TOMA), people are likely to recommend you for opportunities. The greater your TOMA is, the better chance you stand to be considered for jobs, business and many other positive opportunities. The question is then, how can you boost and optimise your TOMA and Intention to Recommend (ITR)?   Below we discuss five of the key things you can do to boost your TOMA and ITR.

1. Target audience: You need to define which type of people you want to have your or your product on their mind. This means that you will target your plans for maximising TOMA because you will now know exactly who wants or needs to know about you and your products or services. You cannot be simply reaching out to everyone. When you reach out to everyone, you lose the impact and sense of purpose. You need to focus your reach. Targeting your audience makes your TOMA strategy impactful.
2. Work on feedback: As you engage with your target audience, feedback will be coming through. You need the humility to embrace even the feedback that you may not like or expect. Of course, you are not compelled to take literally all the feedback. Some of the feedback may be clearly wrong or misleading—do not take that. But you need to be absolutely sure before you drop or ignore the advice. If you always embrace only sweet, positive and energising feedback then you are personally biased. You need some level of objectivity in dealing with the feedback that you receive.
3. Continuous Improvement: If you are top of the mind today, nothing is guaranteed on your ranking tomorrow. However, you have a chance to maximise the chance that your ranking will keep getting better or maintained at good level if you focus on continuous improvement. What makes you top of mind today may not be relevant tomorrow. You have to continuously upgrade yourself or products to suit the changing needs and the ever changing environment. Also with time, other products come into the market, younger and new people come into your profession. If you remain stagnant, you will quickly be overtaken. Keep improving and upgrading to remain relevant and to remain top of the mind.
4. Build your value: Why should they know you or your products or services? What unique value do you bring forward? People will not simply remember your name or that of your products for the sake of. They need to be impressed by the value they gain or experience from the product or service. People need to know that without engaging you, they will be worse off or that if you are engaged by their competitors, they lose out. Invest in building your value. There has to be a compelling case for engaging you or your products and services. This is very critical.
5. Network: If you engage and network with many people, and you influence them positively, they will be the best ambassadors and propagators of your brand. Networking on itself spreads and boosts your TOMA. Work and invest seriously in TOMA. In this new digital world, if you do not exist on the social networking platforms, you are almost as good as ‘dead’ in the wider community. You do not exist if you are not on the ‘net’. It is generally recommended that you should be active on at least three of the electronic social networking tools like Facebook, LinkedIn, WhatsApp, Twitter, Skype, Google+, Viber and so on.

Over the last two weeks, we have discussed the importance of boosting your top of mind awareness. We have further discussed how you can boost your TOMA. All the best as you rise and shine through boosting your TOMA!