Top of Mind

by John Hall

  Building those relationships is still important, but if you can’t rely on individual interactions to develop them, you have to practice another tactic—and that’s where content comes into the picture.

  So if at any point in this book you start to wonder why I reference digital content, it’s because much of the success I’ve seen has come from creating written content and then distributing it to audiences online, interacting with followers and influencers on social media, and speaking at events.

  These types of content have been a core part of my top-of-mind strategy because they give me the chance to build trust and relationships with an audience I would otherwise never have been able to reach at once. They’ve also helped me grow personally and professionally.

  Because this top-of-mind practice has worked so well for me and others I’ve worked with, I want to share my stories, my lessons, and my tactics with you so that you, too, might better understand the unique role of content in placing you top of mind. Once you learn why and how a top-of-mind strategy works to create opportunity, you’ll learn exactly how digital content can help you earn, maintain, and scale that opportunity—and you’ll gain a tactical understanding of how to put it into practice.

  Ultimately, everything in life comes down to establishing and maintaining meaningful human connections. Therefore, the techniques I’ll be discussing will be just as relevant to growing your startup as they will be to raising your kids or pursuing your lifelong goals.

  I’ve certainly found them helpful, and I hope you do, too.

  1

  HOW YOUR CONSUMERS ARE CHANGING

  THE YEAR IS 1995. It’s daybreak in Illinois, and Peoria’s most promising young salesperson is already up and preparing for the day. What he lacks in experience he makes up for in enthusiasm. As he gels his hair, he rehearses his pitch in front of the mirror.

  “Hello, ma’am. My name is John, and you may think you know popcorn, but you’ve never tasted popcorn until you’ve tried this. If you’d just invite me in, I’d be happy to share a free sample. … ”

  I remember my teenage door-to-door sales days as if they were yesterday. Unlike most of my popcorn-hawking peers, I really enjoyed this job. When I think about it, I can still feel the excitement that began with ringing a doorbell and ended with closing a sale. Never mind that the popcorn (or sausage and cheese, or cookies, or whatever the faceless distributor had its young mercenaries pushing that week) was grotesquely overpriced; that didn’t matter. Put any kind of processed food in my hands, and I could sing its praises for hours. And if people happened to be listening, they’d probably end up buying it.

  But the thought of doing door-to-door today makes me cringe.

  “Ma’am, my name is John, and you may think you know popcorn, but …”

  “Now hold on just a minute, John. I read an article about the risks of eating too much popcorn, and I don’t know if I’m ready to buy this much just yet. Besides, the reviews are terrible! And people aren’t too thrilled about you, either. See? Cute but pushy. Free sample not worth it. Sorry, kid. Keep walking.”

  I didn’t realize it then, but as I was working on my teenage sales chops, the era of “Me Marketing” was coming to a close.

  Throughout most of the twentieth century, the marketing, sales, and advertising spotlight was firmly planted on the product and the person selling it. Charisma was currency. The consumer wasn’t an individual capable of independent thought; she or he was an object to be talked at and sold to.

  Why did the disciples of Don Draper take such a condescending view of their customers? Because, for decades, it worked. An aggressive pitch was the shortest distance between a brand interaction and a sale.

  And then the information revolution transformed life as we know it.

  From a business perspective, the Internet reshaped the consumer landscape completely. Suddenly, consumers had immediate access to product data, customer reviews, and trusted opinions. Connectivity empowered people to make informed, deliberate purchasing decisions. Instead of being seduced by a charismatic sales pitch (or a cute but pushy young salesperson), consumers could decide whether a product would fit their individual needs, desires, and lifestyle before ever laying hands on it.

  You might think that such a dramatic shift in power from the seller to the consumer would kill off Me Marketing—but you’d be wrong.

  In fact, Internet-era Me Marketing is a thriving, multi-billion-dollar industry, one defended by its advocates as more effective than ever.

  When was the last time you clicked on a banner ad? How many times this week have you pored through your spam folder, credit card in hand, just cruising for a good deal?

  Rather than disappearing, Me Marketing has actually intensified its efforts to capture and control our attention spans. To be alive today is to face a constant barrage of aggressive, annoying ads and pitches. They elbow for position in your inbox, Twitter feed, and favorite news sites. They interrupt the podcasts you’re listening to, and they bog down the apps you download. They punch you in the face every time you visit a website so you can’t access the content you want until you click them away.

  To survive, we’ve become experts at tuning out the noise. And we’ve turned to technology for help.

  According to Business Insider, the number of monthly active users of ad blocking software approached 200 million in 2015.1 That marks a 48 percent increase from the year before.2

  These numbers have both advertisers and publishers panicked because digital ad revenue fuels the Internet. But one look at our melting icecaps will prove that utter dependence on an unsustainable fuel source leads to catastrophe.

  My point is not that advertising is inherently obsolete; there are plenty of creative people doing compelling, effective work through traditional and new ad media. However, a traditional advertising mindset—one based on the Me Marketing philosophy—is not only obsolete; it’s a liability. Because when you annoy your customer base, you alienate the people who matter most.

  The same holds true in sales, as well as in personal branding. When was the last time an aggressive vendor irritated you to the point of not wanting to engage with his company? Or when the narcissism of a CEO’s social media profile made you reconsider partnering with her?

  Just because your customers are posting gigabytes worth of duck-faced selfies doesn’t mean you should be doing the equivalent with your brand. To be successful, you need to shift your focus from yourself and your product or service outward onto the people who matter.

  It’s Not Me, It’s You

  The Internet, social media, and mobile technology—not to mention the scars we all carry from endless battles with Me Marketers—have converged and given rise to the You Marketing revolution.

  No longer will consumers be treated like mindless sheep; neither will they be won over by vanity or charisma. Credibility is the new currency. As marketing expert Bryan Kramer explains, consumers want real human connection, the kind they can get only from other people—not from some soulless corporate brand.3

  Rather than looking at earning this credibility through communication from business to consumer or from business to business, Bryan calls for a human-to-human connection. Your audience is composed of humans, and when you talk to them (whether through online content, daily interactions, or speaking events where you’re addressing a large crowd of people), it’s critical that you and your brand connect on a human level—on their level.

  Just as You Marketing humanizes the consumer, it also humanizes the brand. I mean this quite literally. Your brand isn’t a logo or a product; it’s a distinct group of people united by a shared vision and values. You Marketing connects the people behind your brand to the people whom your brand benefits.

  As a philosophy, You Marketing revolves around a singular question: How can I make life better for you? Notice that the question is neither “How can I make life better for you so that you’ll buy whatever I’m selling?” nor “How can I trick you into believing that I ca
re?” Consumers are too savvy and too wary to be manipulated. The instant you misrepresent yourself or your intentions is the instant you lose all credibility.

  That might sound dramatic, but consider your other relationships. Think about one of your closest friends or your partner and imagine that person has lied to, manipulated, or misled you. Doesn’t just the thought of that make you feel hurt or betrayed? Remember that feeling because you don’t want anyone to ever feel that way about you or your company.

  When someone is not genuine or honest with you, that person breaks your trust. And once that’s broken, it is very difficult to rebuild. That universal truth applies to your personal and your business relationships. Trust takes significant time and careful effort to build. Act carelessly with it and you’ll destroy it.

  However, if you can tangibly improve your target audience’s quality of life, even in ways that seem minute, they’ll begin to think of you as a positive force in their lives.

  Do this consistently and your audience will reward you with top-of-mind status.

  Building Relationships Through Connectivity

  One of the most effective ways to enrich the lives of your target audience is to help fulfill their hunger for relevant, engaging information and insights. Great content—the kind that feeds your audience’s appetite—can take nearly endless forms, including insightful think pieces, enlightening how-to videos, and live updates from the front lines of a real-time event.

  As the possibilities within digital media become more nuanced and powerful, the demand for instant access is rapidly intensifying. In fact, the gap between human thought and online action is becoming so minuscule that Google has coined a new term to describe it: the micro-moment.

  Most of us experience dozens, if not hundreds or even thousands, of micro-moments every day. It begins with a thought. You are compelled to figure out the how, what, when, where, who, or why of a particular thing. In an instant, without even fully realizing it, you’re on your phone or at your laptop, asking the Internet for answers. It doesn’t matter that you’re not completely conscious of what you’re doing; what matters is that you’re acting with intent and purpose. According to Google, “Understanding consumer intent and meeting their needs in the moment are the keys to winning more hearts, minds, and dollars.”4

  “Meeting their needs in the moment” is foundational to You Marketing, which makes it a crucial part of achieving top-of-mind status. You can meet your customers’ needs only if you know what those needs are. Therefore, you can be effective only if you know how to listen.

  Listening to your target audience is the only way to know exactly what they want. And because their wants and needs are fluid, you can never stop listening. Whatever methods you use to communicate with your target audience—surveys, data analytics, focus groups, social media engagement—you have to create an open-ended conversation that is as dynamic as your customer base.

  As you learn about the needs, wants, and personalities that compose your target audience, certain patterns will start to take shape. Take note of what patterns resonate across your customer base; these are “content triggers,” and they are key to establishing a real connection. Use these triggers as a guide in creating and distributing content; they’re vital in your journey toward becoming top of mind.

  We will delve much deeper into the logistics of effective communication, content creation, and distribution later in the book. For now, remember these three basic steps:

  1. Listen to your target audience. What do they value? What’s important to them?

  2. Craft the way you engage and communicate with this audience around those content triggers.

  3. Repeat.

  Simple, right?

  The School of Inbound

  These three steps are also at the heart of inbound marketing. If You Marketing is a philosophy, then inbound is one of its practical applications. Both pursue top of mind as a primary goal.

  The rise of inbound is no surprise. None of us wants to be sold to constantly and indiscriminately by stuffy salespeople or obnoxious, intrusive ads. Inbound offers a more intuitive, effective solution to attracting and building an audience.

  Later in this book, I’ll cover more ways that this basic methodology can be applied to areas beyond marketing; think “inbound recruiting” or “inbound investor relations.” But first, let’s see what inbound marketing looks like.

  According to the experts at HubSpot (a marketing automation tool for inbound marketing), inbound marketers are “creating quality content that pulls people toward your company and product, where they naturally want to be.”5

  Rather than traditional Me Marketing that pushes a company’s message onto (often unwilling) consumers, this method of inbound You Marketing draws interested audiences toward your company. Here’s how HubSpot maps it out:

  Attract. The first step is to attract your target audience to you, and in the digital world, that’s very often your website. This means hosting and sharing compelling, engaging content—the most important element of which is your company blog. Getting these audiences to your site can take a few different forms. Maybe it’s an article your team published on an external industry publication that links back to relevant content on your site, or maybe your recruiter sent out an e-mail to desirable candidates about recent trends in your industry, enticing them to your company. Whatever combination of tactics you use, your goal is to attract them to you.

  Convert. Once prospective customers land on your home page, you need to convert them from visitors into leads by capturing their contact information. Do so by offering access to some form of extra-valuable content (white papers, e-books, etc.) in exchange for their contact information. It works like this: You’ve gotten your audience’s attention well enough to attract them to you and your site. Now it’s time to build on that trust by giving them more attractive, valuable resources—not a hard sell. Share your insights first to position yourself as the best resource for them when they’re ready to buy.

  Close. To turn your leads into customers, nurture the relationship through personalized communication based on how they’re interacting with your content and company. That means keeping detailed records in your customer relationship management (CRM) system and tracking your performance. What actions are your leads taking, and how are you responding to them? How could you respond more effectively?

  Delight. Finally, transform your customers into promoters of your brand. Unfortunately, it’s not uncommon for companies to close a sale and leave the new customer in the hands of the client service team without so much as another word. Sometimes, sales teams lose interest after what they perceive as their portion of the work is complete—that’s a bad move. Nothing hurts your new client more than feeling used, like you were only ever interested in the sale.

  I know this because when we were a younger company and I was more involved in the sales process, I received a few pieces of feedback that I was engaging and personable right up until the agreement was signed—and then I disappeared.

  I know that had to hurt my customers. It hurt me to hear. That was never my intention, but without continued engagement after the deal is done, that’s how they’ll feel.

  We know better today, and we continue to send educational materials to new clients: articles we’ve written, blog posts, various newsletters, and other tidbits of information after they sign to demonstrate our commitment to helping them even after the first check clears. This education makes your customers better clients; it often eases the transition, prepares them for what’s to come, and gives them fuel to share with their own networks down the road.

  Don’t hesitate to ask for your customers’ help promoting your brand with their networks. If this strategy goes well, you’ll have an army of brand advocates, ready to connect you with potential future clients and partners—so just ask. I used to feel bad asking for referrals, but if you’ve done your job well and have maintained that trust you’ve worked so hard to build, you’ve earned the
ability to ask. (When we asked our clients for referrals and I personally communicated with them for the information, I was blown away by how many of them came through with opportunities for us. If I’d never asked, who knows if they’d have shared that information?)

  As you can see, the flow is natural and intuitive—and it works. In its “State of Inbound 2015” report, HubSpot reports that inbound marketing delivers 54 percent more leads than traditional methods and saves companies an average of 13 percent in overall cost per lead.6 And when companies employ both inbound and traditional outbound methods, inbound campaigns are three times as likely to generate a higher return. Now, take the inbound research from an inbound software company as you will, but I can say that in my own experience, the highest yield comes from the combination of inbound and outbound.

  Consider someone who read your article on Forbes but didn’t click through in your article at that time or someone who saw your company’s tweet with your latest update or custom graphic but didn’t find her way to your site. An outbound ad campaign that gives these people another opportunity to discover more relevant content could remind them you’re there for them—or maybe it will remind them to reach out to you personally.

  What about the next time you attend a conference? Instead of shaking hands and focusing on your pitch, you could naturally say, “Hey, let me send you some of the articles I’ve written that talk about the exact challenges you’ve mentioned.” And if you don’t have any articles of your own to send, direct them to other resources on your website or company social media accounts that address their needs. You can connect people to the resources they need and position yourself as someone they can trust without having authored every piece of content yourself (although it certainly helps to have a few pieces of your own).