John Hall, the author of Top of Mind, is a serial entrepreneur with several successful companies under his belt, who writes for Inc, Forbes, Fast Company and is a company advisor to firms like Calender.com and Relevance.com. He joins Jeromy Sonne to talk about building trust and relationships to develop Top of Mind Awareness among clients, users and audience.

What is Top of Mind Awareness? 02:15

John talks about how he started thinking and writing about Top of Mind engagement – what felt like natural habits and activities to build trust and relationships is actually an effective strategy.  Creating natural habits of engaging people in your professional life so you can engage people more consistently and move from their short term to their long term memory so that when they need something you can do, there you are.

Awareness Focused vs Performance Marketing 05:40

Awareness isn’t just awareness – it’s a combination of different strategies that all lead to positioning yourself in the minds of your audience by building trust and relationships over time. When you’re doing things related to content, it’s tied into everything else you’re doing – it’s the whole package that creates awareness.

High Level Marketing Strategy: Owning Your Industry 08:10  

Jeromy asks “when is it the time to use an awareness based strategy?”  John gets into how top brands own their industry. Top of Mind awareness plays a huge role in this. If you want to have a similar position in your market that Apple has in theirs, you have to start small and invest in it consistently over time. The SEO strategy is about making sure they show up when related terms and even competitors are searched for.

Jeromy notes that the real value of Top of Mind strategies is that not everyone is ready to buy at a given time -  the trick is to be what they think of when they ARE ready.

When Ready isn’t Fully Ready  12:05

John talks about Trust Barriers that increase the chances of clients bouncing and dropping off early in a relationship. Trust is so important to demand generation. If someone trusts a company, it affects how they review them, how they feel about problems and challenges, if they refer. So do everything in your power to get people to come in after the right buyer's journey with a level of trust that sets you up for success. They get into some specific strategies for building trust and awareness.

Developing Content Based on Relationships 14:00

There is a strategy called Content Triggering, where you’re training your brain to gather data while you’re talking to people. When people mention things to you, you can use that as a queue for what content you need to create to build trust. It helps you create better content, but it also helps you communicate more effectively and that builds trust, too.

How do you begin this process? 19:15

Step 1 is sitting down and auditing what you’re doing right now, and asking yourself how you’re going to personally make things better. Ask people how you can help them or add value in their life. Once you start identifying the best ways – do it more, and over time you’ll identify the best ways to engage people which can become processes, which in turn become content – all which results in a successful marketing strategy for a company.  

Resources

John Hall on LinkedIn

Top of Mind

Calendar.com