Top of Mind

by John Hall

  Is he a content marketing expert? No, not by a long shot. But he has created a trusted resource for many to learn about otherwise complex and controversial issues that may affect their lives. By tackling real issues, and doing so strategically, he’s been able to grow his law firm substantially.

  Commit to Consistency

  There’s nothing quite so disappointing as reading a mind-blowing article, only to discover that the author never published another post. There you are, looking for what else this amazing author has written—but when you search, you find nothing. That was it. That article is all there is, and you’ve already read it. What do you do now?

  If that example doesn’t resonate with you, consider how things would be different if J. K. Rowling called it a day after the first Harry Potter book. Or if she wrote the first book, took a couple years off, wrote another one or two in the series, and went on hiatus again for six years. The lack of consistency would have devastated a generation of fans.

  Consistency is comforting. It lets your audience know what to expect and when they can expect it, which keeps them engaged and gives you more opportunities to connect with them over time—and earn top-of-mind space.

  As we’ll talk about in the next chapter, branding is much like working out. The lasting health benefits of an annual day of exercise, no matter how strenuous, are minimal. To effectively build and leverage your brand to grow your company, you’ve got to keep at it.

  Be Prepared for Content Triggers

  As I discussed earlier, content triggers are conversations that inspire aha moments about your industry or your clients’ needs. Triggers often present themselves in fleeting moments, so be alert and diligent. Once you’ve been triggered for content, keep track of your content topics, ideas, and commentary. My team and I use our proprietary software to create knowledge banks that store and organize those ideas, and we use the same process for clients.7

  A knowledge bank is a centralized location for storing and cataloging your team’s ideas, insights, content triggers, and experiences so they can be accessed easily when you’re creating content. Banking that knowledge and keeping all your triggers and relevant ideas in one place makes it easier and faster to create authentic, engaging content in the future.

  How do you fill up your knowledge bank? Send a quick message to anyone on your team who’s in regular contact with members of your most valued audiences. These could be your client service team leaders, salespeople, support specialists—anyone who’s hearing firsthand from audiences. Remind them that as team members on the front lines, they’re your best researchers, and you’ll reward them for any information they can share that helps you better understand your audience. Make it a contest to see who can add the most information to your knowledge bank, and award that quarter’s winner with a prize or bonus or something else the person finds valuable.

  Whether it’s recurring questions from clients, common pain points and objections your sales team is facing, or something else entirely, these are valuable triggers for content—and they’re perfect for filling up the bank.

  Distribute Through the Right Channels, Not Just the Ones You Think Are Cool

  It’s critical to maintain a vibrant presence on your company’s owned media (your company blog, social media profiles, e-mail marketing, etc.), but this is only one piece of the puzzle (or inbound funnel, if you will). Your audience reads and follows other types of media—media that you don’t control. To get your ideas delivered to them, sometimes you’ve got to earn that media, and that often takes the form of guest-contributed content, PR, social media, and so forth.

  It’s important to realize that distribution can take many forms. I categorize it as any tactic used to reach an audience you’re trying to influence. Maybe it’s a social media push with a little spend behind it, or maybe it’s a paid influencer marketing strategy designed to get more eyes on your content while it has a giant trust stamp from your favorite influencer.

  Those are great tactics, and they can be very effective. But I always recommend starting with earned distribution first. If you earn your own influence first, that puts you in a position to land valuable tactics for free—influencer partnerships, for example. This is much more powerful than running out of the gate throwing money at all your options.

  A lot of companies begin sponsoring conferences or paying for expensive ads on different sites and never see the ROI because they’re not even sure if they’re going after the right audiences. My team has focused on earned opportunities for speaking or content contribution, and in four years, we didn’t spend a dime on sponsorships.

  We accomplished this by building our own influence first and becoming the source of information and engagement that people wanted to host at their events. We learned what events work for us and what events don’t, which puts us in a much better position to put spend behind the right events in the future.

  The same goes for our content. We’ve earned our bylines in virtually every publication in our industry, and we know what performs well—and what doesn’t. Now we’re able to execute paid amplification strategies to distribute that content to a larger audience, and we’re even able to offer content for other contributors and influencers to source in their articles, keynotes, social media, and more. As a result, we’re in a position to guide the conversation about our brand and help shape much of the content out there in our industry.

  I find myself referring to this state—a state in which so much of the content in our industry is coming from us or from other influencers who’ve used our content as a source for information—as a content utopia. Imagine yourself in this utopia: every piece of content you want about your brand and your company is out there, coming either directly from you or from someone else your audience trusts. It’s published in a variety of outlets and promoted through platforms that enable you to reach your audience consistently. And because it’s published and in front of the right people, your audience and peers are talking about you in the exact way you want to be talked about.

  This utopia used to be nearly nonexistent, and honestly, it still takes work to achieve. But now, with the right strategy, a process for documenting and acting on content triggers, and a plan for execution, you can make it happen. My team and I have seen it happen time and time again. A company can go from no online presence to industry domination with the right content that’s distributed to the right people and places.

  Remember not to fall into the cool distribution trap. Don’t waste your time targeting publications or events that you think are cool. It’s not about you—it’s about your audience. Where are they? What are they reading? How can you get in front of them?

  Don’t let yourself become distracted by big names just because they sound impressive or because your competitors are over there. I won’t lie: this is difficult. But earning a byline in a publication such as Forbes, for example, isn’t meant to be refrigerator material for your mom.

  Above all, understand that to rely solely on publications for distribution is to leave opportunity on the floor. Publications—even the most reputable, highest-level marquee names—are vehicles to build authority and tap into an existing audience. It’s your responsibility to maximize that reach and further distribute and promote your content through methods such as paid advertisements, social posts, influencer marketing relationships, and so on.

  The Importance of Likability

  One of my favorite basketball players is Stephen Curry. He’s great at what he does, and he seems like a genuinely good guy. So whenever I’m talking with someone about basketball, guess who’s the first person to come to mind?

  Naturally, you’re more inclined to advocate for people and brands that you like over those you feel neutral or even negatively about. That’s part of the power of being likable. It sounds simple, but it’s one of the most powerful top-of-mind tools.

  Still, it’s impossible to be likable and flawless all the time. Try as you might, you can’t avoid the occasional bad day, and
you can’t guarantee that every interaction you have with your audience will be perfect. Sometimes they just won’t have the best experience with you, and without likability and a record of overall competence, you risk negative brand advocacy.

  When you’re in this position, you can hope for one of two things: your audience is full of supernice people who would never speak negatively about a brand, or your audience trusts and likes you enough to understand that mistakes happen.

  Nobody is perfect, not even brands with entire teams devoted to service and communication. When we started as a company, did we have the best service? No, we did not. We were (and still are) learning and growing every day. It’s taken a lot for us to become the company we are today, and fortunately, clients liked and believed in us enough to give us helpful feedback and support us.

  It bought us some time in those early phases and gave us insights into how to improve so that now, years later, our service is much better. You aren’t going to master customer relationships 100 percent of the time, but if people like you and your brand, they’ll give you a chance to recover so that the occasional mistake won’t derail your company.

  It’s also worth considering that in the market, there’s almost always a cheaper option. And if you’re the cheapest option now, chances are that you might not be in the future. But providing good service and having a likable brand can help keep your clients from shopping around for a different company. For example, I find the employees of Southwest very likable, and that translates to finding the brand itself likable. Are they always the cheapest option? No. Do they ever make mistakes? Sure, who doesn’t? But because of their likability, I regularly fly Southwest. So, ultimately, their likability gives them a competitive advantage.

  Cultivating Likability

  One aspect often missing from conversations about transparency is the impact that likability has on personal and company branding efforts. The two concepts are interrelated: Likability without transparency is shallow, and transparency without likability can be off-putting. And yet if you try too hard to get people to like you, you risk coming off as disingenuous, which will kill any attempt you make to connect with people.

  So what does it mean to be authentically likable?

  To answer this question, it’s helpful to stop thinking of likability as a trait that you either have or don’t have. Just as there are various types of intelligence, likability manifests in different forms.

  The most obvious form is what I call “Paul Rudd” likability. Because who doesn’t love Paul Rudd? He’s a great actor who also seems to be a genuinely funny, charming, and self-effacing person. Whenever he’s in a movie, I drag my wife to the theater in the hopes that Paul may be in the audience and might want to hang out afterward. (Paul, if you’re reading this, please call me.) Paul Rudd likability is easygoing and natural, though that’s right about where it stops.

  Then you’ve got my high school English teacher, Matt Clark. As a student, I didn’t particularly like Mr. Clark, mainly because he made us read a classic work of literature every week. Seriously, we had a handful of days to make it through all 600-plus pages of Moby-Dick.

  Today, though, I consider Mr. Clark to be one of the greatest teachers I’ve ever had. Did I find him relatable? Nope. (I don’t think I ever saw him outside of class in one of those surreal moments when you see that your teacher is a real person with interests and errands to run when he’s not assigning you more homework.) But is he still likable? Yes. Thanks to him, I developed a pretty good understanding of Western literature, which I believe makes me a more well-rounded person. Matt Clark represents a very nuanced form of likability; it emerges not from the ability to pal around with you but from the great respect you develop for someone who pushes you to become your best self.

  Then there’s Oprah.

  Oprah is one of the most powerful and influential people in the world, and she didn’t get that way by being either completely fun (like Paul Rudd) or completely challenging (like Mr. Clark). Her show gives you a good idea of what I mean. Its focus wasn’t just “We’re here to have a blast!” Sure, she made it fun and enjoyable, but she didn’t shy away from difficult, sometimes even controversial, issues either. She shined a light on topics that could make you uncomfortable and force you to think about things differently, but she did it in such an approachable way that you could tell she cared even as she challenged you.

  Think about which one of these profiles resonates with you. Are you a happy person who prefers to have fun and get along without confrontation? You’re a Paul Rudd. If you couldn’t care less about whether people want to be your buddy but instead find joy in pushing others to be better versions of themselves, you’re a Mr. Clark. Or do you find yourself striking a balance between the two, prioritizing neither the “fun friend” nor the “tough teacher” but striving to represent both? If so, you might be an Oprah.

  As a concept, likability is expansive, complex, and fluid, and it manifests itself in infinitely diverse ways. Sometimes it boils down to personality, but being cognizant of a few key ways to be likable can help you see where you fall on the spectrum and find a path to improving, should you discover you’re too far on one side.

  These three figures represent a narrow sample; still, I find them a useful launch point for contemplating authentic likability. Personally, I shoot for the friendly-challenger balance of likability that Oprah personifies—it’s important for people to respect you because you bring out the best in them, but it would be ideal if they also enjoy being around you.

  Developing a Practice of Authentic Likability

  Like helpfulness, authentic likability is a practice. It can’t be forced, but it can be developed through everyday thoughts and actions. In Chapter 2, I mentioned an article by Jeff Haden that made me realize I could be doing more to develop my likability. This was a powerful reminder to be more aware of how I present myself. It’s tough to look at yourself honestly and realize that you’re falling short in so many areas.

  I put this list in its entirety here for you to explore and walk through the same process I did.

  According to Jeff, likable people always:

  1. Shift the spotlight to others.

  This is something I do, but not with enough frequency. I need to improve.

  2. Listen a lot more than they talk.

  I’m a talker, but I’m not a bad listener. I’ll never nail this one, but I can always do better.

  3. Don’t practice selective hearing.

  I understand it can be devastating, and I work hard to listen well. Not only will you make worse decisions if you lack all the necessary information, but you’ll hurt your relationships, too. (My wife would say I’m a work in progress on this one.)

  4. Are thoughtful simply because they want to be.

  I agree and believe that I make a genuine effort here.

  5. Put their stuff away (meaning they don’t check their phones, laptops, or watches during conversations).

  I never used to put all my things away. I always had at least my phone out in meetings. I’d say I put things away closer to 90 percent of the time now, so I can focus on the conversation, which leaves me about 10 percent’s worth of room to keep improving.

  6. Give before they receive—and sometimes they never receive.

  I truly believe in this one and do my best to live my life this way—which is why it’s a central theme of this book.

  7. Don’t act self-important …

  Failing grade here. As my influence has grown, so has my ego. I’ve worked very hard to turn this around, but it’s a work in progress.

  8. Because they realize other people are more important.

  I feel confident about this.

  9. Choose their words.

  This wasn’t something I used to do, but it’s now a habit I practice regularly. Slight adjustments in wording or tone can completely change a conversation.

  10. Don’t discuss the failings of others …

  As a kid, I was a brat abo
ut this. I thought it made me feel better, but I’ve learned that celebrating others’ failure is never acceptable (even if it is a competitor). You should focus on succeeding yourself; focusing on others’ mistakes distracts you from your own work.

  11. But readily admit their failings

  I’m a straightforward person and can typically admit my failings (at least to myself). I could probably be more transparent about this.

  Well, you’ve seen the process I took going through this article. I strongly encourage you to do it yourself and feel free to pull from other lists. If being likable is something you want to accomplish, you’ve got to work to become self-aware enough to achieve that.

  It’s easy to be a friendly, accessible person when you’re in a good mood and surrounded by people with whom you already have strong relationships. The challenge is to remain authentically likable when you’re frustrated, tired, and trying to engage people you don’t know.

  Authentic likability is a practice that requires commitment and humility. And there’s far more to it than simply following a checklist. If you demand that people like you—in other words, if you feel entitled to their good graces—you’ll come across as shallow and conceited, no matter how meticulously you follow Jeff’s advice.

  The key is to act with a sense of true intention. Be deliberate, open, and humble. To ensure that your practice is authentic, try making your own list. Think of the people you find charming, accessible, and inspiring, and list their most likable attributes. Experiment with putting these qualities into practice yourself and seek out others who embody them as well. Developing relationships with likable people will help you hone your practice.

  Remember, likability is something that confounds even (or perhaps especially) the most successful people—so be patient with yourself.