Top of Mind – John Hall
Top of Mind is a book by John Hall that provides a new perspective on marketing and offers strategies and habits to help readers stay top of mind with their target audience.
The book focuses on understanding the psychology behind why people choose to engage with certain brands, and how to use content to build relationships and drive conversations with your target audience.
It provides strategies to build an effective content marketing plan, and provides advice on how to create content that resonates with the right people. Additionally, the book covers the importance of creating an authentic brand identity, and how to use storytelling to connect with and engage your audience.
In short, Top of Mind provides readers with a comprehensive guide to building influence and engaging with their target audience.
What Consumers are Looking for in Brands They Trust
Trying to force another human being to trust you is both manipulative and counterproductive. You can’t make someone feel an emotion; you can only create the conditions for that emotion to emerge organically.
The following touch points are ways to create these conditions. Because we’re dealing with complex human emotions, don’t think of this as a rigid checklist that will guarantee a specific set of results. Instead, think of it as a fluid set of guidelines for carrying yourself in a way that invites people to trust you.
Likability
Likability matters. It’s hard to trust someone you don’t like. Because we are passionate, high-energy people, this is something that many entrepreneurs and executives struggle with, as the intensity of our passion can easily rub others the wrong way.
It’s necessary to find a balance between intensity and accessibility, one that neither suppresses nor sacrifices authenticity.
Finding that balance starts with understanding yourself and your personality and exactly what kind of “likable” you want to be.
Familiarity
Familiarity is the other side of the likability coin—it evokes a sense of closeness, a feeling of genuine connection. Familiarity emerges at its purest in face-to-face conversation.
Imagine yourself at one of those networking sessions where everyone you talk to is looking slightly beyond your left ear, scanning the room for someone more important. After a few of these interactions, you meet someone who is actually curious—not only about your business idea but about you as a person.
The questions are real without being intrusive. Where did you grow up? Where do you get your ideas? What do you love about what you do? Just imagine how this person would stand out from the rest.
Authenticity
You cannot trust what you don’t believe to be real. And yet so many of us contort ourselves into some premade mold of what we think we’re supposed to be. The introverted entrepreneur strains to be the life of the party, and the fun-loving CEO forces a constant scowl to come off as a person of seriousness.
What is true in your personal life is just as true in your professional one: bullshit derails relationships. When you pretend, not only are you putting distance between yourself and your next opportunity, you’re making yourself miserable as well.
Helping Others
If you’re still skeptical about whether it’s possible to create opportunity for yourself, try doing it for someone else. It might sound counterintuitive, but one of the best ways to help yourself is to help others.
It’s easy: each time you speak to someone, simply close the conversation by asking, “How can I be helpful to you?”
Being this direct will give you insight into the barriers that stand between this person and his goals—and how you can help dismantle those barriers. Sometimes doing so is easy and all you have to do is shoot off a quick e-mail or make a phone call to connect people to the resources that will help them meet their goals.
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