Top of Mind

by John Hall

  Written content has given my company and me the fuel to nurture our networks and stay top of mind with them more easily. I want to share with you how I’ve done it and how you can put it into practice, too.

  Before you jump to video or some other trend in communication, I can promise you this: at this moment, there is no better way to scale a top-of-mind strategy at a reasonable cost than written content. There is a time and a place for video and other similar tactics, but if you can’t scale your written content now, you’ll struggle with video and other tactics. You’ve got to walk before you can run. There is no denying these other tactics are valuable, but right now, written content remains the most scalable, affordable, and effective vehicle that should be at the core of your strategy.

  The exponential rise of content marketing reflects a collective desire to reconnect with the power of the written word. Decades of exposure to relentless advertising have transformed our attention spans. As we learned to tune out ads and aggressive sales pitches, we developed a hunger for substantive, engaging information. We turned to digital content—written pieces in the form of articles, blog posts, white papers, social media posts, and so on—for knowledge, insight, and entertainment.

  If you’ve spent more than 10 minutes reading things online within the last few years, you’ll probably think my ode to content is a bit precious. I’ll accept the critique; after all, the digital content landscape is kind of a wasteland. To pretend that humanity benefits from a thousand variations on “7 Ways to Startup Success Through Memes” would be deluded.

  However, it’s a wasteland only because so many people are writing content for content’s sake. The explosive growth of the content marketing industry has fueled the widespread misconception that any content is good content, which is why we’re drowning in “think pieces” that read like late-night infomercials.

  Good content is created for the sake of the reader. Your audience comes to your content with an agenda—they want to be educated, or perhaps just entertained. Regardless, they always want to be enriched. Write to their needs and you’ll earn a top-of-mind spot.

  But what if you’re not a great writer? What if the prospect of composing even a 600-word blog post makes you break out in sweaty dread?

  If this is the case, you’re not alone. I’ve always considered myself a lousy writer, which would be unremarkable if I weren’t the CEO of one of the fastest-growing content marketing companies. Throughout the early days of Influence & Co., I was constantly nervous that I’d be found out—I was afraid that I’d publish something poorly written, which would get me laughed out of the industry. My discomfort made me paranoid, and in time, it morphed into pretty severe anxiety about writing.

  Even as the company grew by leaps and bounds, I felt like a fraud. It was only a matter of time before our competitors—or worse, our clients—discovered my lack of writing talent and everything would come crashing down. The more I suppressed my fear, the worse it got.

  Finally, I couldn’t take it anymore. I decided that the only way to overcome my anxiety was to come clean. I drafted a piece called “Being a Bad Writer Isn’t an Excuse for Not Creating Content,” in which I copped to my fear of writing and discussed my own collaborative process for writing with my team. Once the piece was finished, I almost scrapped it—the fear of publishing it was overwhelming. But my team members reminded me of the importance of authenticity and that I’d have nothing to hide—I’d feel freer. So we published it.

  The post went live, and it wasn’t long before several business leaders of other companies picked it up and got in touch with me. Dozens of CEOs and entrepreneurs reached out to tell me that they felt the same way and appreciated the transparency. Other leaders who said they were OK writers but didn’t have the time to actually sit down and write reached out for suggestions about publishing content more consistently.

  I’d been worried that the article would be embarrassing for me—instead, I felt accomplished and helpful. I learned that my problem is much more common than I’d expected. And because I talked about my own process of involving other team members to save time, I’d been able to reach a segment of my audience who felt they didn’t have the time to write either. The article resonated with even more people than I thought it could.

  Like me, these leaders were living in fear of being found out as mediocre writers, so it was a huge relief to discover others who were going through the same struggle. Because of this article, I was able to engage in a meaningful, emotionally vulnerable conversation with my peers. And the connections that emerged from that conversation expanded our network and made us a stronger brand.

  This is why I am so passionate about content. It is a vehicle for doing everything we’ve discussed throughout the book so far—with good content, you can help others, provide value, and embrace transparency. All of this makes content a vital tool in your top-of-mind efforts.

  How Content Gets You to Top of Mind

  I’ve found that content is among the highest-impact ways to reach and actually connect with people in your audience and position yourself to become top of mind with them. Through quality content, you can practice and scale all of the interpersonal qualities that help you become top of mind. Through content, you can be helpful. You can educate or entertain and provide value. When you write that content yourself, you can be transparent and showcase your likability, and when you’ve got a good team behind you, you can keep it all going pretty consistently.

  Still, in many companies, a proposal to invest in content marketing will be met with fierce executive resistance. Why would we spend our time and money writing free articles?

  A leader who is hostile to the idea of content usually will demand hard data. If there’s no quantitative proof that content can help our business, then it’s not a worthwhile investment.

  The content advocate will usually respond that content’s benefits are immeasurable. We’re not going to chase vanity metrics here—you can’t reduce trust and thought leadership to numbers.

  Both sides make valid points. Just as it doesn’t make sense to invest in something with no demonstrable ROI, it isn’t possible to quantify the emotional connections that content creates.

  From a quantitative perspective, it’s important to recognize that content won’t generate an overnight spike in sales. That should never be the goal because that’s not how content works. However, you can absolutely figure out a content proposal’s breakeven points, anticipated ROI, and timetable for success. All you have to do is track the right metrics.

  These include analytics such as the traffic and social shares that your content generates, as well as the amount of time visitors spend reading it or the number of leads converting from it. By measuring these, you can create monthly percentage-increase goals.

  You can also measure the impact your content has on your search engine optimization (SEO) efforts by tracking search engine results page (SERP) rankings. The more content you publish, the more opportunities you generate to draw linkbacks and appear in relevant search results. This builds out more paths for your audience to connect with you and for you to stay top of mind with them.

  Metrics for measuring ROI change consistently as we adopt new technology, change our goals, and learn more about our audience’s wants and needs, and the ability to track these metrics is improving. Software such as Searchmetrics, Moz, SEMrush, and more (see Resource Library) can help you measure your ROI by monitoring and improving search results.

  Tracking these metrics will give you tremendous insight into your audience. What topics are they most interested in? What kinds of headlines do they click on? This knowledge can guide you and your team in making constant incremental improvements to your content so that it’s always relevant, helpful, and engaging.

  Ultimately, though, these numbers don’t tell the whole story. The real purpose of content is to build an emotional connection between you and your audience—and that’s just not something you can put on a chart and present as hard
evidence.

  Remember, good content that’s distributed correctly can position you as a credible thought leader and your company as an industry authority. It breaks down trust barriers, nurtures leads, attracts qualified candidates for hire, and invites people (within and outside of your company) to fall in love with your brand. By publishing articles and engaging your audience in meaningful conversations, you are creating real relationships with real people. Your audience may consist of only a handful of people, or it may be a network of hundreds of thousands around the world. Whatever the numbers are, content allows you to be everywhere at once—including top of mind.

  And when I say everywhere, I’m not only speaking in terms of geography; I’m also talking about the past, present, and future. Good content often has an endless life span and will continue to generate interest long after you publish it—a benefit that advertising and sponsorship opportunities just don’t provide. (In fact, I got a call from a reporter at a major publication seeking a quote. She had discovered me through an article I had written for Social Media Today—which was published years ago.)

  Content offers compounding benefits. And if you constantly publish a steady stream of high-quality content, you’ll be able to earn a place at the top of your audience’s mind as someone who is helpful and authentic and trustworthy.

  You can use that content as fuel to become top of mind with the audiences you value most, and by publishing consistently, you’ll be able to keep that top-of-mind spot (and take one step closer to the content utopia I mentioned earlier).

  Leaders sometimes say to me, “Isn’t this a marketing function? Doesn’t content fall under its umbrella?”

  The short answer is yes—for now. But truthfully, these tactics can and should be used by every department, in every function of your team. My prediction is that companies will begin investing more in content across the board because these insights, knowledge, expertise, and experiences are such a core part of the company, not just the marketing department. Although marketing might act as the control center right now, the products it creates can be used to recruit talent, build investor relationships, educate current employees and keep them engaged, and more. So yes, although it’s a marketing function, it needs the support of all your leaders.

  Thought leadership and industry influence aren’t tactics for a quick buck; they’re not one-and-done plans. If you’re interested in building a strong, trustworthy company brand, then authority positioning isn’t a marketing-only job. It’s companywide. And it starts with you.

  But maybe you’re not like one of those CEOs who ask me why they need to be involved. Maybe you get it. The question then becomes: How do I publish a steady stream of high-quality content when I barely have time to breathe as it is?

  Creating and Executing a Content Strategy

  Listen, I understand. The idea of effectively tacking on a writing career to your current leadership or management role (or adding this task to another key employee’s plate) is romantic but intimidating. I can almost hear you asking, “Where will I find the time? Where will my ideas come from? What are all the resources I need to do this well?”

  Relax. I’ve seen countless leaders (myself included) who felt at first that they would not be able to overcome these common content barriers but are now running a comprehensive strategy. If I can do it, so can you.

  We all work differently. Some leaders can wake up every morning and pump out a beautifully written article as they brush their teeth. Others (myself included) need a lot more support to translate our ideas into writing—and to do it when it seems we have no time. No matter how you work, if you want to engage an audience—and you want to keep them engaged—you need to create and implement a strategy to write and distribute content consistently.

  Putting a solid, responsive strategy in place is vital for achieving top-of-mind status. It ensures that you and your team are working seamlessly to create content that speaks directly to your audience. It guarantees that everything you produce will be distributed in ways that maximize its potential impact. And, most important, a good strategy infuses everything with purpose.

  What follows is a brief exploration of the best practices that have proved effective for us at Influence & Co. and for many of my peers to create and distribute content to the right audience. Whether you’re meeting with a potential partner or you’re developing a huge communication strategy, these steps can help ensure you’re engaging your audience in the right way.

  Like the rest of the book, this section is meant to be a guide, not a rigid set of rules. The content landscape is too fluid and ever-changing to treat it as an exact science.

  Best Practice 1: Setting the Right Goals and Documenting Your Strategy

  Good content serves a purpose. It connects to the audience because it’s written with them in mind. It emerges from an authentic desire to contribute to meaningful, engaging discourse. If you’re always intentional about writing to fulfill a genuine purpose, you’re on the path to long-term success.

  Once you have an understanding of your content’s core purpose, you can begin working on a plan. The planning process is an opportunity to think about your target audience, potential topics, distribution tactics, and scaling strategies. You should also be meticulous in figuring out work flows to make ideating, creating, editing, and distributing a seamless process. What will your creative ritual look like? When and how often will you create this content? Who will edit and liaise with external distribution channels?

  Now, it may be tempting to talk through all of your goals and processes in broad terms and then immediately dive into creating content; after all, you’re probably eager to start writing, so why wait?

  Here’s why: if you don’t document your plan—and the research shows that the majority of companies choose not to—you are preemptively derailing your content initiative.1 Without documentation, you may be able to stick to a publication and distribution schedule for a while, but the instant you hit a bump in the road, the content initiative will be moved to the back burner. And there it will remain until you have the time and motivation to get back on track, which rarely happens.

  Not only will a documented content plan help you remain focused and committed, it will enable the rest of your team to figure out how they fit into—and benefit from—the initiative. And widespread internal buy-in will help integrate a love of great content into company culture.

  I worked with a company whose leadership team was at one another’s throats about what they should be doing, and they could not reach a decision. For a year, everyone had different ideas about what would most benefit the company. I made a simple suggestion.

  I asked, “Do you have a documented strategy?”

  No answer. A few embarrassed guesses that maybe marketing kind of had something?

  So I took a look, made a few adjustments, and put a reasonable content marketing strategy in place. From there, the leaders added their own ideas about how these content efforts could help them out in their roles. The HR director pointed out that if the team had content about recruiting engineers, the HR team could use it to attract the right talent. The CEO brought up that certain major sites such as Harvard Business Review and Forbes would require more specific messaging. The CFO volunteered some extra budget that could be used to help other departments.

  I’m not saying this went perfectly, but honestly, the result was a content strategy that reflected the goals of the entire company—not just marketing. Now, marketing took over from there, but the team anticipated tasks for which they’d need to loop in other departments, and they documented that, too. If you want a chance at being successful at executing a strategy, it’s got to be written down—the big picture and the smaller to-do items. Some might argue that documenting every task that’s to be completed is micromanaging; it’s not.

  By listing tasks and assignments for team members to complete, you’re not exerting control over every step and detail, and you’re not limiting how someone performs a ta
sk. You’re just eliminating some of the burden on the brain that comes from not planning well enough before you begin an activity.2

  Best Practice 2: Knowledge Extraction and Management

  Once you have a documented plan in place, the next step is to create a process or system to extract the knowledge, insights, and experiences that, together, make for engaging content.

  Often, you’ve got so many ideas, topics, and issues swirling around your head that it’s hard to know where to start. Again, look to your audience for guidance. Remember content triggers? They’re those conversations that inspire aha moments about your industry or your clients’ needs. If vital knowledge is the treasure buried inside your mind, content triggers are the metal detectors that will tell you where to dig.

  Here’s an example. A few years ago, a potential client told me that high turnover and a shrinking talent pool were hurting her company’s bottom line. So rather than investing in content marketing, they’d be focusing exclusively on recruitment.

  Aha! Here was my target audience giving me direct insight into an issue that mattered deeply—all I had to do was listen. After the conversation, I sat with my team and we asked ourselves questions such as: What do we know about the talent shortage? What great articles have we read around strategic recruitment? Who are the thought leaders in this field? What ideas do we have for overcoming challenges like this one?

  It was a free-flowing conversation that produced a diverse body of knowledge and ideas, and the team entered everything into our knowledge bank in meticulous detail.