by John Hall
As you figure out what social sites to focus on, remember that LinkedIn—the platform as a whole, its groups, and its publishing platform—provides access to thriving communities that are segmented around industry and interest. Sharing with these networks is a great way to create conversations about your content and to connect with those who may well be a member of your specific target audience.
No matter what platform, you can assume that competition for attention is fierce. To ensure that your social efforts are on point, be diligent and thorough in testing your headlines and captions. Figure out what your audience finds compelling by analyzing click-through, sharing, and engagement rates. My team has found that combining quotes, stats, questions, and visuals yields the most effective results. Infographics are especially powerful; they garner three times as many likes and shares on average as any other type of content.2 Don’t forget to target editors and other curators of content in your industry in your social media efforts, and experiment with mentioning or tagging publications, editors, and influencers in your updates. This can increase your chances of syndication and improve redistribution opportunities.
Finally, consider budgeting for social promotion. At Influence & Co., we see the greatest conversion rates through LinkedIn and Twitter, so we buy LinkedIn Sponsored Updates and Promoted Tweets. The investment pays off for us. If you decide to go this route, make sure that you are constantly tracking success and evaluating the ROI.
Client Distribution
The fact that your current clients have already made it through the funnel doesn’t mean that the funnel is complete. (Remember the inbound methodology from Chapter 1? The last step, Delight, refers to this idea that you can continue to add value, nurture, engage, and educate your audience even, and especially, after you’ve landed their business.)
Content can strengthen relationships with your existing customer base, which can boost brand loyalty and engagement. It can also open up discussions that lead clients to upgrade the services they’re already buying from you—and also to refer other potential clients your way.
It’s not difficult to deliver content to your current customers; you have an existing relationship, and, if you’re doing your job right, they already trust you. That said, they’ll only read your content if it’s relevant and accessible.
We send our customers a weekly e-mail digest highlighting our best pieces, which helps keep them informed of industry trends as well as developments in our service offerings that can help them better achieve their goals. Maintaining an ongoing conversation with your clients through social media content is important, too; not only does it allow you to address their questions and concerns, it provides potential clients with insight into the level of customer care you provide. And the feedback you get from your customer base can help you shape your future content so that it is always useful, helpful, and relevant.
There are a lot of moving pieces to remember, which is why maintaining a checklist (a sample follows) can help you make sure that your content achieves maximum impact at every stage of the journey.
Tips for Maximizing Your Published Content
Content can add value to so many different areas of your company. Use this checklist to ensure you’re getting the most out of your published content.
Marketing
Continuously share each piece of published content via social. A few examples of ways to share your post include:
• The headline and the link
• A quote from the article
• A question
• Stats mentioned in the article
Comment on relevant conversations taking place in online forums and include a link to your post. These forums can be found on LinkedIn Groups, Quora, or your favorite niche industry site.
Republish articles to your company blog or LinkedIn’s publishing platform. As long as you include a link back to the original to avoid duplicate content, repurposing can boost exposure and drive engagement.
Utilize paid search, social media, or a content distribution platform. This will help you attract a larger but targeted audience for your content.
Sales
Prime and educate leads. Your sales team can use content prior to sales conversations to educate leads, making the sales call more productive. Try sending over links to relevant published content to prime them for more effective and more meaningful calls.
Overcome objections. Break down barriers by utilizing published content to help answer objections during sales conversations. When planning your content strategy, try to publish one piece of content that provides a solid answer to each objection your sales team encounters regularly.
Nurture leads. We recommend utilizing an e-mail marketing campaign that references relevant published content to help nurture leads throughout the sales process.
Human Resources
Create a newsletter to share published content with your team. You have a huge group of brand advocates within your company that can help promote and comment on your content.
Attract top talent and educate potential hires. Teach future employees about your company culture and values by linking to a few relevant articles in a job posting.
Train new employees. As you continue to grow your staff, published content lends itself more and more to the training process. Send new hires relevant content to give them insight into who your company leaders are and how your company positions itself.
Executive Branding
Link to published content in e-mail signatures. Spruce up your e-mail signature to include a link to your favorite post or your most recent or most engaging article. It boosts organic visibility without being pushy.
Keep your personal social media accounts up to date. Update your social media accounts, such as Twitter and LinkedIn, to include a list of the publications you’re a contributor to. This will direct prospects to check out your work and naturally increase your credibility.
Share content with influencers. Spark a conversation with people in your network by sharing your published content with them via e-mail. You’ll increase views and network at the same time.
Personalizing Your Distribution
Personalization relates to strategic distribution, too. When you personalize content for your audience and place it on the publications and platforms that they’re already reading and using, you strengthen that personalization. You make your audience feel like you’re talking directly to them.
That’s why picking the right platform for distribution is so important. The old days of traditional PR encouraged marketers to create a piece of content and farm it out to any outlet that would take it. If someone picked it up, you were good—but times have changed.
You don’t need to create entirely different pieces of content for every person you’re trying to reach, but you can personalize people’s experiences in smaller ways. For example, I like to send individual e-mails to partners, clients, and other contacts I’m communicating with. Instead of plugging in my content and links to articles in an e-mail blast that only personalizes first names, I use a template that I create myself and quickly change a few key details for each message. So, when I wrote an article about barriers CMOs face with other executive team members, I attached it to an e-mail I’d templated for my CMO contacts and changed something as small as the intro. Instead of saying, “Hi, Rick!” my opening line said, “Hey, Rick. I hope things are going well for you and your family in Chicago.”
Whether it’s within the published content itself, where and how you distribute it, or simply in your correspondence, you’ve got plenty of chances to personalize your interactions. Take them.
The Importance of Actual Engagement, Not Just Distributing to Get Eyeballs
One of the most important things to remember when thinking about distribution is the difference between “views” and “engagement.” Someone who looks at a piece of content isn’t necessarily engaging with it, which is manifested by reading it through to completion, staying on the page fo
r a certain amount of time, commenting and sharing, or citing in future content pieces. The industry is realizing that a page view isn’t really a way to build a relationship with an audience member. It’s a surface-level metric that, on its own, isn’t enough to get you top of mind.
Actual engagement is more desirable. Thankfully, technology has made it much easier to track these metrics more accurately than we’ve ever been able to. And because we have this ability, it’ll be a growing focus for digital content and distribution in the future.
It definitely is for my team. Earlier, I mentioned the software that my team created, which we use for all our content—internally and for our clients—to track published performance. When we publish a piece of content, we’re able to compare it to other content on the same publications and track performance by word count, style, day of the week, shares, and social reach as well as the finish rate on content published on our own site.
I’m very proud of what we’ve built; I think it’s pretty impressive, and it’s helped us in so many ways. But I can promise that these analytics are only going to advance over the next few years. I don’t doubt that technology will be able to identify and measure every sort of behavior a reader displays when he or she interacts with any piece of digital content—which should result in better content and stronger relationships.
That’s the real beauty: stronger relationships built on trust and consistent engagement with the audiences that matter most. Soon, content will be all about this level of trust and engagement, so understanding (and practicing) this mindset can prepare you for the future. Relationships will always have a strong impact on every aspect of your life—you have to understand and engage people, and do it consistently, to create opportunity.
Conclusion: Putting It into Practice
I think back to that conference I attended as a new CEO, when I couldn’t connect with a single soul in the room. I remember what it was like to call my wife and break down in tears, afraid that launching Influence & Co. would prove to be the worst mistake of my life.
I wrote Top of Mind because I never want anyone to experience the desperation I felt in that moment. I honestly believe that having a top-of-mind mindset can help you create an environment where opportunities consistently come to you and trust barriers dissolve to make all areas of your life a little easier.
Part of what makes embracing a top-of-mind mindset so wonderful is how easy it can be. Helping others when you have the ability, being yourself, and doing it all with consistency are normal human behaviors. Don’t get me wrong—it certainly takes time and commitment to put these behaviors into practice, to act on them enough that they become second nature, and to build and nurture personal relationships from them. But it is possible, and it can unlock countless opportunities—for business development, better relationships, personal growth, and more.
I used the example of written content as a vehicle for powering this mindset and applying it on a larger scale because I’ve experienced the benefits of this strategy firsthand. Through content, you can be helpful. You can share your knowledge, recognize others, and make people aware of opportunities. You can showcase your individual personality and your brand of likability. And with the right process, you can create content consistently enough to hit the right trust touch points, move yourself from short-term to long-term memory, and become top of mind with your audience.
On one level, this book is meant to be a practical guide for creating business opportunity. If you choose to read Top of Mind as a field manual, I am confident that implementing these strategies will help you grow your business. Even if you aren’t diving headfirst into a full content strategy, by consistently communicating with your audience in an engaging way that they find valuable, you’ll see a positive difference.
On another level, however, this book is about something much deeper and more personal. For me, achieving top-of-mind status is not the goal in and of itself. My goal is to create thriving, rich relationships. By focusing on making my relationships the best they can be, I’m able to prioritize what really matters to me—family, professional fulfillment, and friendship. My networks are packed full of people I genuinely care about, which makes nearly every interaction I have incredibly meaningful. There are many benefits to being emotionally invested in the lives of other people; top-of-mind status is simply one of them.
So I leave you with a challenge: As you apply the lessons of Top of Mind toward achieving your business goals, consider how you might use them to connect to people on a deeper level—team members, clients, friends, and family. What would happen if you put as much work into your relationships as you do into your work? How would your life change? What would the impact be on the people whom you love the most?
As we scramble to expand our networks, convert leads, and attract followers, it’s easy to lose sight of our shared humanity. Focus on human connection and everything falls into place.
RESOURCE LIBRARY
HERE IS A LIST of tools and resources to help you become top of mind with your audience and achieve your goals. Please reach out to me and my team directly with any questions at [email protected], and we’ll do what we can to direct you to the right resources based on what success looks like to you.
Content Management, Relationship Management, Automation, and Workflow Tools
BuzzStream (http://www.buzzstream.com/)
BuzzStream is an influencer outreach CRM and search engine that helps teams focused on SEO and PR build relationships with influencers, drive word-of-mouth traffic, and improve search performance.
ClearVoice (https://www.clearvoice.com/)
ClearVoice is a content marketing platform and freelancer marketplace that uses technology to connect brands, creators, and publishers.
Constant Contact (https://www.constantcontact.com/)
Constant Contact is an online marketing company that empowers small businesses and organizations to create and grow customer relationships and succeed through e-mail marketing.
Contactually (https://www.contactually.com/)
Contactually is a web-based CRM tool that turns relationships into results by helping maximize your network ROI, get more referrals, and gain more repeat business.
CoSchedule (http://coschedule.com)
CoSchedule is an ever-evolving content marketing Swiss Army knife that helps you plan and execute your content on a drag-and-drop editorial calendar, streamline internal communication, and save time.
DivvyHQ (https://divvyhq.com)
DivvyHQ is a cloud-based content planning, work flow, and collaboration tool built to help marketers and content producers get and stay organized and successfully execute demanding, complicated, and content-centric marketing initiatives.
Emma (http://myemma.com/)
Emma is an e-mail marketing tool that connects your data and builds your audience, and its Emma Plus e-mail automation platform helps marketing teams of all sizes do more with (and get more from) every aspect of their e-mail marketing.
HubSpot (https://www.hubspot.com/)
HubSpot is the leading inbound marketing and sales platform that helps companies attract visitors, convert leads, and close customers.
Infusionsoft (https://www.infusionsoft.com/)
Infusionsoft automates your small business’s sales and marketing while combining your CRM, e-mail marketing, lead capture, and e-commerce in one place.
Kapost (https://kapost.com/)
Kapost is a B2B marketing platform that powers marketers to deliver compelling, consistent customer experiences by aligning content, people, and programs from first touch through sale to advocacy.
MailChimp (https://mailchimp.com/)
MailChimp is an e-mail marketing service that helps businesses of all sizes optimize their e-mail and e-commerce marketing with powerful and easy-to-use e-mail, marketing automation, and analytics tools that integrate with hundreds of popular applications and services.
Marketo (https://www.marketo.com/)
M
arketo is the leader in digital marketing software solutions that helps marketers master the art and science of digital marketing and customer engagement.
Mixmax (https://mixmax.com/)
Mixmax is a productivity tool for Google that helps users send more engaging e-mails, customize templates, track e-mail opens, schedule messages, and ultimately build better relationships with the people in your network through improved communication.
ONTRAPORT (https://ontraport.com/)
ONTRAPORT provides a comprehensive business and marketing automation platform targeted to the specific needs of entrepreneurs and small businesses so users can easily start, systemize, and scale their businesses on a powerful platform integrating the marketing, sales, and business applications they need.
Pardot (http://www.pardot.com/)
Pardot is B2B marketing automation by Salesforce that allows marketing and sales teams to create, deploy, and manage online marketing campaigns through features, including CRM integration, lead management and nurturing, sales intelligence, and ROI reporting.
Salesforce (https://www.salesforce.com/)
Salesforce is the number one CRM platform that helps companies build more meaningful, lasting relationships with customers.
SalesforceIQ (formerly RelateIQ) (https://www.salesforceiq.com/)
SalesforceIQ is an out-of-the-box sales app and CRM for small businesses that uses data-driven insights to empower sales teams to sell smarter with Relationships Intelligence technology.
Zapier (https://zapier.com/)
Zapier makes it easy to automate tasks between apps online and connect apps and services to improve your productivity and business operations.
Content Creation and Distribution
Ceros (https://www.ceros.com/)
Ceros is a content marketing software platform encompassing a collaborative, real-time digital canvas upon which designers create animated, interactive content without the need for developers.