Mediastreet
Tag

PR

Browsing
In News

Boost Your Bottom Line With PR And SEO

No Comments

By Lis Anderson

Public relations is changing. The media landscape looks very different than it did just two years ago, and savvy PR leaders should be adapting to the modern world.

PR professionals know how to generate interest in a brand and develop trust. Part of this is achieved through writing excellent content that resonates with an audience and placing it on relevant websites.

Search engine optimization (SEO) professionals understand how good content helps a website shoot up the SERPs (search engine results pages) by using carefully planned keywords. Good research means good content that can secure quality backlinks from external outlets.

Combining PR and SEO achieves great and, most importantly, measurable results. Even Google’s John Mueller backs the power of digital PR.

We’ve seen the results for ourselves. We boosted our PR with SEO and have seen the change in the quality of sales leads coming through. So, how did we do it? Here are some of our lessons learned:

First, look at your website. While this is your shop window, it’s also so much more than that. It’s how you attract people to find out more about you, how to establish yourself as a thought leader and how to create trust.

It’s also what Google analyses and decides to place you in search results for keywords. This is where combining PR and SEO can really work. Content is one of the main links between PR and SEO. It is an essential part of SEO to ensure you are found on Google. The higher up the search results you are, the more likely you are to get in front of your target audience.

Well-written content is highly valued by Google. And so are backlinks to your website.

Deliver what your audience wants.

Find out what works for your target audiences by tracking their behavior. Then, create more of the content that is doing well. Some of our metrics include:

• Number of visits to a blog post or service page.

• Bounce rate.

• Time on page.

• Next page that visitors go.

Use Google Analytics to understand how your content is performing as well as the behaviors of your audiences. This is where your SEO team can help. The PR team can take the information and rework the content on-site to ensure it appeals to the audience.

Create copy that resonates.

Boosting the amount of content on-site will help bring in traffic. Google wants to see plenty of fresh content and defined fresh content as:

• Recent events or hot topics.

• Regularly recurring events.

• Frequent updates.

New blog posts are helpful but so are updates to previous blog posts. SEO professionals can review blog posts, analyze backlinks and make suggestions for updating keywords. Savvy PR writers can ensure blog posts are high-quality written content.

This can be done for clients’ websites and also with media outlets. Identify the keywords that drive traffic, review articles to see their traction, and then work with your PR team to create even stronger content.

Turn your website into an important source.

This is another area where the SEO and PR combination can make a real difference. Backlinks are a crucial part of improving the domain authority of a website and, therefore, increasing visibility in search results.

Backlinks come in two forms: dofollow and nofollow. SEO values dofollow links, as these tell Google that the website is happy to share its domain authority with the origin of the link. Nofollow links tell Google that the websites aren’t sharing domain authority. It doesn’t mean that websites with nofollow links should be ignored, however, as they often come from high DA media outlets. Use them to build brand awareness and trust in the brand and website.

Together, they are powerful. Your PR team can be strategic in securing backlinks in the right places for the right audiences.

Research effective content.

PR professionals have close relationships with journalists and editors and know what their contacts are looking for. Many outlets have their own engagement and reach/view targets to hit. PR professionals work with them to produce content that resonates with their audiences.

SEO teams can help research keywords and topics that have value to target audiences. The crossover between the two is the sweet spot and can enhance relationships with media outlets. Your content will bring them the hits and reach they need.

Get techy with your content.

PR can support SEO work on the wider website as well. Meta descriptions are such an important part of SEO. These are the descriptions under the URLs that appear on search engine results pages. They’re important because they can sway someone to click on your link over another one.

Getting the tone of voice right and choosing the right language to communicate key messages is where your PR professionals will excel.

Choosing the right image to illustrate the blog post is also something that PR professionals can help with. PR people are well versed in sourcing images, arranging photoshoots and more. Journalists and editors often expect images, videos, links, etc. from PR professionals as part of a pitch.

Choose a powerful combination that gets you results.

A combined PR and SEO strategy is a long-term strategy that can increase brand awareness and improve the number and quality of leads as a result. They complement each other perfectly and help boost the quality and success of each other’s work. While there is crossover in skills—used in different ways for different ends— they can absolutely support each other.

Feature Image Credit: getty

By Lis Anderson

Lis Anderson is founder and director at PR consultancy AMBITIOUS and an agency MD with over 20 years in the communications industry. Read Lis Anderson’s full executive profile here.

Sourced from Forbes

Read More
By
In News

Branding’s Perfect 10 – The PR Afterthought

No Comments

By Glenn Matchett

When considering the future of branding and brands, it is important to properly understand that Communications is now a fractured, complex, and diverse discipline. The challenge for a PR and brand team – and, indeed, for an entire business – is to get everyone working as one. The overarching task is to impart and nurture genuine empathy and understanding for what a brand stands for, along with the overall business goals. The next step is to plan on how that gets communicated effectively to the outside world.

In Communications, working in silos doesn’t cut it anymore. It requires complex, interwoven, and often co-dependent messaging played across advertising, branding, packaging, PR, digital, customer service, and more. Symbiotic, interlocked, and constantly evolving, there is no solitary lens for PR. Instead, there is a brand kaleidoscope that acts as an ever-changing window into how a brand is perceived through the entirety of its communications.

Social media perfectly illustrates how interlocked communications channels can be for brands. A misplaced tweet or a tone-deaf post can quickly catch fire as a PR disaster that can lose customers or have a negative commercial impact on a business. When Dulux became the sponsor of Tottenham Hotspur Football Club this year, one of the first things the paint brand’s social media manager did was engage in some Twitter banter about the club’s lack of trophies. This quite quickly whipped up into a PR storm about how a new commercial partner was making a major faux pax by denigrating its new partner. There were questions asked about the suitability of the partnership and it has resulted in the commercial relationship getting off to an unsteady start.

With an improved lens on PR, the brand would have anticipated the potential problem here. In a future, more perfect world, PR fails can be mitigated by ensuring those who are in charge of social media are adequately briefed and aware of the power of social as a communications channel.

In a future world, this sort of mistakes would be stopped at the source because companies would understand how interlocked all their messaging is with the perception of their brand. A misjudged post on social media has the potential to be just as damaging as Gerald Ratner’s quip in 1991, that the jewellery he sold was “total crap”. His tongue-in-cheek remark in front of the Institute of Directors promptly wiped £500 million from the jeweller’s valuation and nearly took the company to the wall. Reflecting on the incident in 2021, Ratner tweeted, “It is 30 years today when I made ‘that’ speech. It seems like yesterday. I wish it was tomorrow. I would cancel it.” A PR blunder can have a lasting impact. Lessons for the future are often gleaned from what has happened in the past.

In a perfect future vision, PR would always have a board-level seat at any business – helping inform and shape decisions as they are made. PR is not an afterthought. PR is not the red phone to ring in a panic when the shit is about to hit the fan further down the line. Nor is it a cherry to stick on top of a cake with a positive business announcement or new launch. It is not enough to position PR and marketing at the end of a business process. That does not work anymore and brands who do it will often come unstuck or fail to properly connect with their customers.

Another great example from the world of football this year is the abortive launch of ‘The Super League’. As the breakaway scandal unfolded, it was revealed that the organizers only decided to appoint an agency to look after PR on the day of the announcement. What they fundamentally misunderstood is that PR cannot be an afterthought. It’s not about managing a few negative headlines with the belief that today’s newspapers will be tomorrow’s chip papers. PR is vital to monitor the pulse of a brand or an idea. It is about fully understanding and communicating effectively with your customers.

PR is a pre-emptive tool that is as much about anticipation as it is about activation. Like the tip of an iceberg, with PR there is much more to it beneath the surface than you end up seeing in public. As soon as the tsunami of negative responses hit, The Super League brand was dead in the water. If the clubs had effectively engaged PR earlier in their process they would have realized the whole shebang was a bad idea a lot sooner. This whole episode serves as a lesson on why engaging with PR early is a necessity for any brand.

In recent years, technology has seen brands become more and more efficient in how they target their audience. Data-driven intelligence hoovered up from our online activities means that advertisers often seem to know us better than we know ourselves. In the early days of this tracking technology, this was hailed as new nirvana. We’d be served better because we’d get shown what we want rather than things that weren’t relevant and of interest to us. We were heading to a perfect world of branding and advertising. With minimum wastage for advertisers, you would only see the products you’re interested in.

More recently, however, that dream has turned somewhat sour. The dystopian vision in Steven Spielberg’s Minority Report, of being relentlessly targeted with ads, looms larger like a tangible reality. Documentaries like Coded Bias, The Great Hack, and The Social Dilemma each portray a dark and damaging heart at the center of this technology, purely focused on milking and manipulating consumers for all that they are worth.

From a PR point of view, consumers are waking up to how their data is being used and brands need to be mindful of this. Customers don’t like it and the resulting bad PR for their brands may be commercially damaging. From a brand perspective, we may end up shifting in a different direction, with more organic, transparent, and authentic connections being a prerequisite of brand communications. Privacy controls will be placed back into the hands of the customer and, as a result, the PR wildfire that is burning about privacy and data may start to recede. We’ve already seen this come to light with Apple’s new privacy feature, intended to put the brakes on the sharing of customer data across multiple sites. By preventing the targeting that is the bread and butter of many brands online, its introduction may be a catalyst for a dramatic change in the entire online advertising industry.

From a brand perspective, we may end up shifting in a different direction, with more organic, transparent, and authentic connections being a prerequisite of brand communications.

Brands need to continue to adapt and change in step with the world in which we live. Many cultural commentators believed that, after COVID-19, the consumer’s relationship with brands might change dramatically. Our values would shift away from a disposable, frivolous culture and brands would need to follow. The jury is still out on whether this will, in fact, come to pass. If the queues at the UK’s high-street stores, when the lockdown was lifted in April, is any barometer of a new consumer consciousness, it may not, in fact, be the case at all. The hunger to spend on a wide range of goods still appeared to be firmly intact.

It is fair to say though that brands continue to become more socially aware. As part of a brand strategy, CSR is often now firmly embedded into many companies. However, CSR is only really effective when it is integrated properly and not just used as a PR badge to appease a target market or drive sales.

In the future, unpicking the relationship between CSR and PR will be a great step forward for brands. If you consider a brand like Dove, which has ‘body positivity’ at the heart of its brand purpose, you can see how powerful this can be – not just part of a marketing strategy but an entire business philosophy. It’s not just a PR badge adopted in order to shift their products.

In summary, I feel that it is worth addressing the elephant in the room.

“What is the perfect future version of branding and brands?”

Well, there isn’t one, of course. We live in an imperfect world and nothing ever stays still. When Brandingmag launched, 10 years ago, the world was a very different place. Fast forward 10 years from today and I expect, fuelled by technology, that change will be even greater. PR, as a profession, continues to evolve and it is now part of a larger, more integrated, communications ecosystem. The days of fluffy ‘Ab Fab’ PR – with boozy lunches and ‘it’s not what you know, it’s who you know’ dynamics of doing your job – are long gone. The future vision for perfect PR and brands is to refine and adapt to the broader, interlinked way in which communications operates. It’s also imperative for PR to be positioned at the heart of every business operation. Perfect? No, it will never be perfect, but that’s what keeps the craft of communications such an engaging challenge.

By Glenn Matchett

Sourced from Brandingmag

Read More
By
In News

How VW’s polarizing ‘Voltswagen’ prank went over with everyday consumers

No Comments

By E.J. Schultz.

Ad Age-Harris Poll shows VW did not help itself, but it did not hurt itself, either

Despite a wave of negative headlines about its April Fools’ Day prank, Volkswagen is not any worse off with everyday consumers—but the automaker also did not help itself by pretending to rename itself “Voltswagen,” according to a new poll.

Fifty-nine percent of consumers who were aware of the stunt said it did not change their opinion of the brand, according to the Ad Age-Harris Poll. Just 20% think better of VW, while 21% said they now hold a worse opinion of the brand.

The poll was conducted April 2-5 among 1,125 U.S. adults ages 18 and older.

While brands have been pulling April Fools’ Day stunts for years, VW’s joke was more elaborate than most. The campaign, which was handled by Johannes Leonardo, played out over several days and was notable for the involvement of top-level VW execs who were quoted in press releases and used their own social media handles to push the notion that the storied auto brand would rebrand itself “Voltswagen” in the U.S. to push its electric vehicle ambitions.

Several mainstream media outlets, including USA Today, Associated Press and CNBC, reported the name change as fact after being assured by sources inside the automaker that it was not a joke. When it was revealed to be untrue, some of these same outlets ran stories that questioned the automaker’s credibility, while conjuring the automaker’s 2015 emissions scandal in which it was caught cheating to evade regulations.

“The use of deceit is really dangerous. If you’re Volkswagen, it’s doubly dangerous,” Erik Gordon, a University of Michigan business professor, told USA Today. “Volkswagen is the last company that should be playing around with deceiving people, even if it’s for two days. It doesn’t play well when you have admitted guilt to having tricked us before.”

But the saga went unnoticed by a majority of consumers, according to the poll, which found that only 21% of consumers had heard about the “Voltswagen” announcement by the time they were polled. Of those who heard of the news, 73% said they were aware that it was an April Fools’ joke (perhaps because the poll was conducted after reports came out that it was a stunt).

The goal of the prank was to raise awareness of VW’s electric vehicle ambitions, which include the ID.4, a compact electric crossover that the automaker is marketing as “the electric car for the people.”

The poll found that 19% of respondents were more likely to buy a VW after learning of the prank, but 69% said it had no impact on their decision. Only 12% stated that it would make them less likely to buy a VW.

The poll reveals a division on whether brands of any kind should participate in April Fools’ Day pranks: 54% said they should not, while 46% said they should. For those who said yes, the most commonly cited reason was “it’s a creative way for brands to advertise.” The naysayers said the pranks “create confusion for customers.”

But younger people are apparently more into the jokes—64% of millennials and 61% of Gen Zers say brands should partake in April Fools’ Day, but only 38% of Gen Xers and 35% of baby boomers agree.

“Holiday promotions can be a powerful and effective tool for brands to engage with customers and build buzz, but not all holidays are created equally,” states Will Johnson, CEO of The Harris Poll. “April Fools’ Day is polarizing because it gets at the heart of the brand-customer relationship—trust. As our research shows, consumers are divided on April Fools’ Day marketing stunts, so brands must carefully weigh the benefits against the risks.”

Feature Image Credit: Stefanie Loos/Bloomberg 

By E.J. Schultz.

E.J. Schultz is the Assistant Managing Editor, Marketing at Ad Age and covers beverage, automotive and sports marketing. He is a former reporter for McClatchy newspapers, including the Fresno Bee, where he covered business and state government and politics, and the Island Packet in South Carolina. He has won awards from the Society of American Business Editors and Writers, the Jesse H. Neal Awards, the Association of Capitol Reporters and Editors, the California Newspaper Publishers Association, the South Carolina Press Association and Investigative Reporters and Editors. A native of Cincinnati, Schultz has an economics degree from Xavier University and a masters in journalism from Northwestern University.

Sourced from AdAge

Read More
By
In News

Can Out of Home ads really create PR fame – or will high expectations hurt the industry?

No Comments

By John McCarthy

Rarely a week goes by without an inspired billboard, bus-shelter poster or bus livery going ‘viral’ on social media. You’d almost think the work was made for that purpose. Social media’s provided somewhere for impactful out of home ads to further resonate but is the congratulatory feedback loop blinding marketers to the true value of the medium – reaching real people?

If you are in the smallish circle of social-media active marketers who gleefully share nice ads with captions like “clever that”, you’ll have noticed last week a clever exploding ‘dynamite’ Marmite ad, complete with a huge scattered lid, and a mocked-up ad for KitKat from One Minute Briefs contestant Sam Hennig, who was absolutely struck by the warm reception for his idea.

Both ads drove applause and debate. Only one ran in the real world.

Some onlookers questioned whether you even needed to run the physical OOH ad. Why not just mock it up and tweet it? More questioned whether the top of class OOH executions are supposed to reach real people – or merely awards juries.

In the last decade, the medium’s purpose has evolved, The Drum explores why.

Pain with gains

UK out of home ad spend was 61.5% of 2019 levels, even buoyed by a huge government comms drive, according to the IPA. Meanwhile, industry body Outsmart said the revenue decline in the first half of 2020 sat at 44.8% year-on-year. Lockdowns swallowed OOH footfall and strangled marketing budgets. Similarly, marketers were obsessed with finding at-home screens however they could.

Alistair MacCallum, chief executive of out-of-home specialist agency Kinetic Worldwide says footfall didn’t fall as low as many assumed. Only 30% of people could actually work from home, for example. “19 million people still went to work every day, 30% of school kids were still in school. Many of us went to supermarkets once or twice a day just to talk to someone.”

Not all regions locked down equally. Anonymised mobile data tracked population activity to offer helpful heat maps and work out worthwhile sites. Meanwhile, OOH networks worked to digitise their networks and buying platforms. Buyers can now run hyper-local campaigns within the hour without even lifting a phone. And digital out of home sites, have doubled in number in the last four years in the UK. They also account for a third of spend in the US. Marketers are also excited about the creative opportunities afforded by the outdoor screen.

There’s more incentive to show off, too. Over the last two decades, most people acquired phones, with cameras, linked to mass audiences through social media. People on ’active journeys’ could suddenly, and immediately, share good outdoor creative. In the moment they could be promoted to search a homepage or buy something. Some sites even had QR codes to encourage camera activity.

MacCallum says: “The role of out of home is far more multifaceted than it was. The ways you can utilize the channel is increasingly much more varied.”

Stunted growth

As we saw from last week’s examples, good OOH creative can inspire PR fame.

Real people engage with and share good OOH ads. They interact with said brand on social and even inspire earned media. If people are talking about a billboard, there’s a news story there.

MacCallum says: “There is no other channel that has the level of creativity and innovation. Nobody is taking pictures of banner ads are they?”

Kelly Taylor, head of new business and marketing at creative agency Creature, believes tighter budgets forced marketers to be more effective with the medium. But with the closure of the real world, marketers “finally grasped that social and digital are not add-ons to campaigns, but intrinsic parts of the comms, reach and amplification.“

Any outgoing’s on quality OOH would need to resonate beyond the street. Taylor says: “With the amount of time people are spending online up by 32mins compared to pre-lockdown, there are plenty of eyes looking for content to get them through the groundhog days. And OOH and social is the perfect pairing. Both rely on the ability to tell a story in a single impactful post and both want to grab as many eyes as possible.”

One example that cropped up several times was The Drum Out of Home Awards Grand Prix winner ’#MyHeroes’. It gave the public a platform to thank the NHS, bringing social content onto the big screens, and sometimes, back on to social.

It is a modern opportunity that understands that OOH, like memes have to resonate with a mass audience in a single frame. But Taylor warns: be wary of “viral success,“ and be wary of “brandter”.

“There’s a fine line between nurturing engagement and forcing it”, she says pointing to Marmite’s try-hard social team, which she says unfortunately “diminished the original work”.

An OOH campaign “must be able to work in isolation and deliver real results for the client to be successful, not just fame”.

BBC Creative’s award-winning Dracula placement evolves as day becomes night. It won headlines and drove a halo effect around a wider, multi-faceted campaign. It was more than a billboard.

Great ideas

Nick Ellis, creative partner and founder of brand agency Halo believes that OOH is the “pinnacle of the advertising craft, a single idea, executed with the acuity of message and creativity.” The best work is appreciated even outside of industry circles.

He talks up executions that create unmissable moments like Carlsberg’s beer tap billboard. Few people may have seen it in the flesh, but on social, we felt the reactions by proxy.

“These moments transcend what we expect from advertising. And advertising itself becomes art. Instead of being intrusive, it reaches people in a truly creative and disruptive way.“

McCann’s Fearless Girl may be the ultimate example, he says “part of the fabric of a city and a significant cultural moment”.

It is because the idea was executed in real life that it “gives the brand a tangible solidity in a way social channels can’t“.

Jay Young, head of creative solutions at Talon, says the “the world literally is your oyster with OOH. You’re not confined to a certain number of pixels on a page”.

He’s used to thinking outside the box with the medium. He says it is big, unskippable, and real. It has power. And impact. And it reaches 98% of the British public (usually).

Extra love on social or adds value and “boosts the credentials” of OOH. In another broadcast media, TV, extra reach is sometimes wrongly called waste. Young’s sector clearly has a form of that too now.

He’s not worried that marketers will be photoshopping up billboards any time soon.

“You really do need to create something in real life for it to achieve the ‘Wow, that’s clever’ moment and escape our industry echo-chamber. People care far more about things that actually happened. They want brands to be honest and authentic.“

To show the impact of great work, he referenced the reaction to his Pepsi Max ‘Unbelievable Bus Shelter‘ campaign (we‘ll allow it). He acknowledges that bespoke builds are “tricky” to get right. They have to be bold and impactful, and people need to live with them. More often than not, they‘re worth the sleepless nights.

“We’re not working on a closed movie set. We’re likely working on the side of a busy road, in the middle of the night with multiple stakeholders to please.”

This old-school movie magic might clash with the industry‘s new hope, a reinvention around real-time buying for a generation of marketers raised on Facebook ads rather than 48-sheets.

But even in DOOH, PR and reactive marketing could play a larger part.

Young says: “You can see a cultural moment blow up on Twitter at 9am. You‘ll get a reactive ad on DOOH across the country by the time you log off for the day. I still love the Specsavers campaign we ran in reaction to the Moonlight Oscars blunder. We could never have achieved the same impact with static OOH going live days later.”

Marketers are giving real thought to optimising OOH creative based on location, time and the weather – there’s more opportunity for impact ahead. But they‘ll need to remember, real business outcomes are more important than LinkedIn shares.

 

Feature Image Credit: The Drum explores the relationship between social, PR and OOH. Above: Playstation‘s own OOH effort

By John McCarthy

Sourced from The Drum

Read More
By
In News

Why And How To Jumpstart Your Brand Strategy With The Power Of PR

No Comments

By Lydia Vargo

“What is the difference between branding, marketing and PR, anyway?” People regularly ask me this question, and although the lines have been blurred in recent years, there is an easy way to differentiate between the three:

Branding: Who am I?

Marketing: What am I telling my customers about myself? (This could be through ads, bulletin boards and marketing materials.)

PR: What are other trusted sources saying about me?

Although all elements are key to securing brand success, I’ve found that the one that speaks the loudest to those looking to invest in your brand (like a customer, retailer or investor) is a third-party endorsement. That includes awards, testimonies, a genuine social community and press. In other words: PR.

Although branding is the foundation of any company, people confuse marketing and PR the most and frequently question their purpose.

Large enterprises are often guilty of siloing PR and marketing teams, which makes it more difficult to unify the brand’s real message. That is why PR and marketing have to work together using a holistic approach that keeps both teams on the same page. When done right, the synergy between PR and marketing can give your brand a lot of horsepower.

The digital world makes the differences between PR and marketing less clear; however, there are two sides to every coin, and they need to coexist in order to build a balanced and longstanding business.

The Differences Between PR And Marketing

So, how is PR different from marketing? It comes down to three major points.

1. Press Versus Consumer Relationships

Traditionally, PR was about forming relationships with journalists and media outlets. Marketing, on the other hand, focused more on product promotion, ads and a brand’s relationship with shoppers.

But we have to keep in mind that PR has evolved quite a lot over time. It’s not uncommon for a PR team to oversee influencer marketing, social media and customer-facing content. This is where PR and branding teams tend to overlap and need to collaborate.

2. Reach

Marketing is the art of creating an identity: It’s your logo and colors, as well as the mood and feeling behind your brand. Good branding, however, can’t bring in customers by itself.

PR is where brands actually increase their reach by putting the product or service in the hands of their consumers with well-placed messaging. In an ideal world, branding and the way you market yourself attracts customers to you. PR, on the other hand, entices them to stay.

3. Identity Versus Perception

Marketing creates your business’s identity, but PR shapes public perception of that identity. When you need to create, maintain and protect your perception in the public eye, it’s PR you need.

Three Ways PR And Marketing Should Work Together

PR and marketing are separate disciplines that often bleed together. But good PR can give a big boost to marketing, remove obstacles and solidify your presence in the market.

Even if you’re a small business, you can create a strong, unique brand with a little help from PR. Score more coverage, amplify your efforts and spend very little money doing it with these three brand-boosting PR strategies.

1. Audience Amplification

Who are you speaking to? Audience is everything when you’re trying to make a name for yourself, and who you’re engaging with matters. Your audience should dictate everything from your content format to your language choices.

Your marketing is your message; PR gives your story a stage, a microphone and “puts butts in the seats.”

Your PR strategy should ensure your brand stands out to the right people in the right place. It is the foundation that the brand is built on and the reputation that makes you proud and trusted.

2. Perception And Image

You’ve created a brand, but how do your customers really feel about your brand identity? After all, there’s a reason why some shoppers adore brands like Trader Joe’s and feel lukewarm about big box stores.

Your PR should tell the right story — the one that showcases your values and sets the right tone with shoppers. Instead of crossing your fingers and hoping your audience loves your brand, create a PR strategy that gives you more influence over your place in the market with powerful storytelling.

3. Brand Authority

Authority is hard to measure, but it’s still incredibly important. Make sure your PR strategy boosts the authority behind your brand. It should establish you as a thought leader and trusted investment.

Marketing alone isn’t necessarily strategic and thoughtful. PR, however, is all about strategy and creating a communication plan and playbook to grow your influence methodically. Brand authority will not only net you more press and boost trust with shoppers, but it can also prevent image issues before they happen.

The Bottom Line

PR and marketing make it possible for businesses of all sizes to compete in a dog-eat-dog world. While marketing makes your identity and values clear, you still need a solid PR strategy behind it to boost your influence. Understand the three ways branding and PR should work together so you can forge a positive image in the public’s mind from the start.

Feature Image Credit: Getty

By Lydia Vargo

Lydia is a key contributor to brands’ ongoing success as VP of Global Strategic Accounts at ChicExecs. Read Lydia Vargo’s full executive profile here.

Sourced from Forbes

Read More
By
In News

Why The Best PR Works Hand In Hand With Sales

No Comments

By Leslie Licano

You might think that public relations and sales are two separate facets of your business, but you may be surprised to hear that PR works best in direct collaboration with sales to create one congruent experience for your customer. Here are a few ways in which PR and sales can work together.

Sharing Information: Your sales team is out in the field every day getting tremendous feedback and insight into your target market. Why let all that good information remain siloed? Let your sales team help inform the PR strategy by sharing insights, such as what your target market cares about, what they’re reading and what resonates with them. This might help develop a pitch, drive story angles and even identify new media outlets.

Exposure Is Good For All: It’s hard being a salesperson, especially when initially getting in the door to introduce the company. However, PR can lay the groundwork by helping your company get exposure. Instead of getting, “You’re calling from where?” from customers, how refreshing would it be for your salespeople to reach out to a target market that’s already familiar with the brand?

Building Credibility: Thought leadership is the name, and credibility is the game! When your leaders are featured in reputable publications, it can open the door for sales, as it proves that the company is at the top of its game and knows what it’s talking about.

Following Up: Coming up with a reason to follow up can be a struggle for your sales team. However, a PR win, such as a placement in a publication or thought leadership feature, can be a great lead-in to reopening a conversation. Sales teams can forward these wins with a note saying they thought the client might be interested in the information.

Creating Social Content: PR wins are also a great item to promote on social media. Because they provide such valuable third-party credibility, most companies will share their media placements online to increase exposure for wins. Many also invest in “boosting” the posts to reach specific target audiences or decision-makers. Right message, right audiences, right time.

Website Content: Any articles that don’t secure placement in a publication can be featured on your website. This type of content can become a part of the lead generation funnel, guiding potential customers to your website, helping to collect emails and providing more leads for your sales team.

As Seen On: When a PR firm secures a placement that has a big name attached, such as being featured in Oprah’s magazine or on The Ellen DeGeneres Show, the company will be able to include that in their marketing. This can be a very high-performing strategy that can really help the sales team tie everything together for the customer.

PR And Sales, Unite!

Gather the team, and start generating some business. These are just a few ways in which PR and sales can work together to help grow revenue and build business. Make sure that your sales team knows what placements are at their disposal and how they can use PR content to their advantage. Additionally, any insights your sales team would like to provide will surely be appreciated.

By Leslie Licano

Co-Founder of Beyond Fifteen Communications, a SoCal PR and communications firm known for taking clients beyond their 15 minutes of fame.

Sourced from Forbes

Read More
By
In News

Budgeting for Advertising and PR for a Small Company

No Comments

Sourced from Inc.

It’s a testing and assessing game.

As the old question goes, “If a tree falls in the woods, and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?” Well, I want to update it: “If you have a great product, but no one knows about it, then what’s the point?”

I’m proud of my e-liquid, so I want to get the word out to my demographic. How else will they know about it? But budgeting for marketing can be tricky, especially for a small business, so I have to switch my trucker hat for my thinking cap or else I might rush into spending too rashly.

So what is the right amount to budget for marketing when you own a small business? Should you focus on ads or public relations? I’m going to break it down for you.

Advertising vs. PR

Before I get into how to budget, let me define my terms. Advertising is what you project to the world, as in a social media ad that says, “Hey, check out my new e-liquid.” PR involves more of a subtle dance with the community. You want to interact with your consumers and get them to fall in love with your product, and then they can tell the world how awesome it is.

Case in point: Spending money on a billboard at a music festival is advertising, but showing up at the festival and giving out samples is PR. By interacting directly with the public, you can create a buzz. Who knows? You might even make a splash in the local paper, which creates another wave of PR momentum.

Setting Your Budget

When it comes to marketing, you usually get what you pay for. It’s a numbers game, and it scales to fit the size of your business and the scope of your growth. According to marketing communications consultant Caron Beesley in a post on the U.S. Small Business Administration’s blog, many businesses set aside 2-3% of their revenue for “run-rate marketing and up to 3-5% for start-up marketing.” The percentage can vary by industry, the size of your company and what stage it’s in, of course. Retail businesses in their early years, for example, spend as much as 20% of sales on marketing. After all, you’ve got to create a spark before you can ignite your dreams.

Setting a marketing budget can be different for small businesses like mine. “As a general rule, small businesses with revenues less than $5 million should allocate 7-8% of their revenues to marketing,” Beesley writes. That number might even double when you’re first building your brand to account for trial and error, video production and other ancillary factors.

PR is an entirely different beast from advertising, even when it comes to budgeting. Ideally, PR and advertising should each have their own individual budget. I recommend testing some advertising and PR strategies to find out what works best for your brand before you decide how to divvy up your budget. Try putting a small advertisement in a magazine that shares the same customer base as your product.

Or better yet, think of some free or low-cost PR options. In my case, extreme sports events, car shows and concerts are all places where I’ve created some word of mouth by showing up and introducing my product to attendees.

Is It Working?

This is a question to ask early and often as you determine how to allocate your marketing budget. Check the data on where the traffic to your website is coming from and how much of that traffic is converting to sales, and then assess your return on investment before heavily investing in any specific advertising channel or form of PR. If people are seeing your social media ads but ignoring them, for example, then they’re worthless. Ditch the lower performing ads, and determine where your advertising dollars may be better spent.

In conclusion, budgeting for PR and advertising is a testing and assessing game. Some products resonate with people through PR better than they do through an advertisement, but in my experience, trial and error is the best way to find out where you should be spending your money.

Feature Image Credit: Getty Images

By Young Entrepreneur Council @yec

By Colbey Pfund, co-founder of LFNT Distribution

Colbey Pfund is co-founder of LFNT Distribution, a leading international distributor of premium eliquid.

Sourced from Inc.

Read More
By
In News

How to Use Content Marketing for PR and Social Media Success

No Comments

By Wendy Marx    

The value of content marketing for PR and social media has become a slam dunk when it comes to digital marketing. And as new networks and platforms emerge, it becomes even more essential.

And if we had any doubts, a new  study from Brunswick shows that investors and analysts are making decisions based on the digital content of executives and companies.

The consultancy’s annual Digital Investor Survey tracks the digital behavior of investors and analysts around the world in terms of communications, research and information-gathering.

How Important Is a Digital Presence?

In a word…Crucial.

For instance, according to the survey, 90% of investors use digital platforms and channels to investigate companies and the issues surrounding them. Another 70% reported that they have made investment decisions based on digital research. These statistics prove a direct link between your content and communications and how willing people are to invest in your brand — aka, your bottom line.

You can almost guarantee that others who are looking to do business with your company will do the same. You need a digital presence to greet them at the door, so to speak, and give them a good first impression of your company.

And we do not mean just a static website. We are talking about a rich digital identity that make your brand stand out, such as a regular blog, social media presence, and search engine optimization.

“Building an effective individual digital profile is not just an essential component in a successful investor relations strategy, it is now a necessity for maintaining shareholder value and competing with peers that are more active in digital and social media,” Brunswick partner Marshall Manson told the Holmes Report.

If your brand is not available on a digital platform, such as a blog, to not mince words — you’re impacting your bottom line.

“As an industry we’ve always wondered, Mason continued, “but the research makes it absolutely clear: there’s a line between great communications and business performance.”

What Should You Do?

Knowing the crucial role of digital marketing, it’s essential to maintain your digital marketing and social media channels. Which translates to solidifying your content marketing.

Search engines and online publishers like blogs are the most used digital sources for investors. Social media platforms are also important with LinkedIn the favorite with 63% of investors using the platform for research, and Twitter the second most used platform at 55% of investors.

Wherever you go on the internet, you can’t ignore the role that content plays — whether it’s a blog shared on social media, visual graphics in your PR campaigns, or a video that you use to promote your brand across multiple channels. All of this and more falls under the content umbrella.

But this involves more than just creating content. You need to pay attention to content marketing trends, from blogs to social media, to public relations and ROI.

Brunswick provides three recommendations for communicators:

  • Ensure senior executives use digital and social to reach and engage investors, particularly LinkedIn.
  • Expand your digital universe to include podcasts, which are underutilized.
  • Maintain your SEO and content materials.

To give your content marketing a leg up for social media and public relations, we’ve expanded these three areas into 4 easy ways for you to

We’ve laid out 4 easy ways to use content marketing for social media and public relations. These methods will help you strengthen your communications strategy.

4 Ways to Use Content Marketing for PR and Social Media

1. Write and Maintain a Blog

For the past decade, businesses and entrepreneurs have been urged to maintain a regular blog. Not only does it show evidence of expertise, but it also directs people back to your brand time and time again.

And we now have even more proof of the value of blogging. The Brunswick survey showed that 61% of investors and analysts used blogs to make investment decisions and recommendations.

Blogging helps to boost your digital presence, not just on your site, but also on social. For instance, it gives you original content to post on your social media profiles. This original content bolsters your reputation and points your audience back to your website for more original content.

Note: Because of the very visual nature of social media, you need to include visual graphics when you post to social media. This includes blog images, infographics, and even videos to attract your audience.

Your blog is one of the top places where you can promote all of your media gems. This includes media interviews, major company-wide news, and awards. It is a great in-house platform to allow your audience to share in your brand’s triumphs. As a side perk, posting this kind of news strengthens your reputation as a top-shelf brand.

2. Invest in SEO

Search engines are one of the most heavily-used platforms for research — as proved by the 65% of people who use it to research investment opportunities, according to Brunswick. This makes sense, since who hasn’t tapped into engines like Google or Bing to find answers to questions or learn more about a brand?

Because of the heavily-guarded algorithms that ensure top-quality content on search engines. these platforms have gained a level of trust that few other platforms match. In fact, in Brunswick’s survey, search engines were trusted slightly less than The New York Times but above CNN when it came to trust.

Audiences know that not just any joe-blow with a computer can make his or her way onto that first page slot — it takes domain authority, link-building, and other strategies to get there.

SEO is a crucial part of today’s content marketing trends — and can be used to empower your PR and social media. Think of your latest bit of news or your campaign. When you build up your site’s authority through SEO and use the right keywords, you have the potential to expand your visibility and gain the trust of your audience.

3. Create a Podcast

Brunswick’s survey reported that 48% of investors said that they used podcasts for information about a brand. But sadly, podcasts are often forgotten when we discuss content marketing trends and strategies. And what a loss that is.

Podcasts were listed as the third most popular content (after search engines and blogs) used to make investment decisions.

While podcasts are among the most powerful pieces of content a brand can produce, they are also one of the most under-utilized. As a brand, you should give serious consideration to how podcasts could fit into your

Podcasts are a great place to promote your PR and social media. For instance, why not discuss a subject on your podcast and point your audience to your social media profile for more information? Have some company news or a PR campaign that you would like to promote? Use your podcast to get your audience excited about it.

4. Leverage LinkedIn in Your Strategy

In the past, many brands have relegated their LinkedIn maintenance to their HR teams. But what once started as a simple professional networking site has blossomed into a lot more.

Brands are realizing the far-reaching value of LinkedIn in the business landscape. It is now used as a publishing platform, to share company news, and as a place where prospective buyers and investors vet companies.

What makes LinkedIn so valuable? It’s trust factor. Indeed, Brunswick reports it to be the most trusted social network with a score of +26, which is on par with media outlets like CNBC. In an age where fake news is talked about seemingly all the time, this shows just how valuable LinkedIn is as a platform and a resource for your brand.

And if you’re still not convinced, consider that 48% percent of investors said that they used LinkedIn as part of their research into companies.

Take the time to familiarize yourself with LinkedIn’s best practices. This includes engaging with groups and communities and publishing regular content on the network’s publishing platform.

By Wendy Marx    

Sourced from Business 2 Community

Read More
By
In News

Trust: The PR Theme Of 2018

No Comments

By Beth Monaghan

The PR theme of 2018 will be informed by the tumult of 2017, the year we unearthed all the dirt and eroded all the trust. Where to begin? While Facebook was testifying in Congressional hearings about how a company with Kremlin ties spent $100,000 in ads during the 2016 presidential campaign, the #MeToo campaign was raging in the wake of sexual harassment and abuse allegations against Harvey Weinstein and then, it seemed, almost every other white man in power.

Uber’s CEO Travis Kalanick was pushed out, VCs faced accusations ranging from putting their hands up female entrepreneurs’ skirts to sexual slavery (OK, that one was 2016, but still). It got so bad that some VCs signed a decency pledge. I wish I was making this stuff up. Meanwhile, Dove put out an ad that appeared to be blatantly racist and President Trump accused both sides of being at fault in the white supremacist march in Charlottesville.

Equifax experienced a massive data breach, Wells Fargo suffered a fake accounts scandal. United Airlines characterized what looked like an assault as a “re-accommodation” of the passenger. Sean Spicer asked the Washington Post for a correction because he said he was not huddling “in” but “among” the bushes before a press conference about the Comey firing. The Department of Education issued tweets with multiple misspellings, and the folks at the National Parks Service (supposedly) created their own social media handles so they could tell the truth, birthing the “alt-” social media movement.

Women marched. Immigrants marched. Scientists marched. I could go on for pages, but you get the idea. We have alternative facts to go along with our fake news. Did a shark really swim down the road in Houston after the hurricane? Did Hillary Clinton really run a child sex ring from a local Washington, D.C., pizza place during the 2016 campaign? No and no.

Trust is uncertain. Ev Williams, Twitter’s co-founder said that tech firms will compete for trust. He’s right about tech, and it goes further than that. Trust is at stake for every single organization in America, which means it will have an impact on every single PR strategy for the coming year.

These will be the factors at play:

Businesses will take more stands. As InkHouse Chief Content Officer Tina Cassidy and I wrote earlier this year, businesses are the new battleground states. Customers, employees and investors are speaking with their values as well as their wallets. While they care about cool features and great customer service, they care more about what matters.

Crisis plans will get overhauls. Response times have shrunk from hours to minutes, and statements have gone from paragraphs to tweets. Truth matters. Authenticity matters. Words matter. And timing is everything. If you wait, you might not be in business much longer.

Data will be required to back up ideas. We’ve been enthusiastic about data storytelling for a long time, and it’s more important than ever. The marketing surveys that can be skewed will undergo more scrutiny as reporters and customers favor the certainty of real data about real customers.

The sales funnel is collapsing. Decisions to buy or to hate are made in seconds, in one click, especially for consumer products. Business-to-business companies still have time to work on the sales funnel to move their customers from awareness to interest, engagement and finally purchase. But those attention spans are waning. We have too many things to scroll through on Facebook and Instagram and, oh look, President Trump is tweeting again. Marketers will need to make a connection, make it fast and make the decision to purchase as mindless as a click.

Validation will come from affiliation and authenticity, not dollars. On social media, we’ve long known that audiences cannot be built organically anymore. The algorithms have prevented it in favor of the ads that produce revenue. This doesn’t mean we should throw earnest and honest strategies out the window. It means that we should find like-minded people and organizations and support one another by sharing content. We should use paid strategies with integrity to amplify honest content with real data, not to trick people into clicking.

PR people have always had a responsibility to tell the truth. We’ve gotten bad reputations as spin doctors and shills, but those strategies never worked in the first place and they sure won’t work in the future. Good PR strategies must be based on real data, real stories and authentic points of view. They have to matter to the real people each organization contains within its orbit. It will be about connection, not convincing. It will be about truth, not alternative facts. It will be about what’s real, not what we imagine might be real in the future. Facts. Proof. Validation. Connection. Amplification.

By Beth Monaghan

Beth is the CEO of InkHouse and has been recognized as one of the “Top Women in PR.”

Sourced from Forbes

Read More
By
In News

Creating Your 2018 Marketing Budget [Guide]

No Comments
By

Where to Focus Your Annual Marketing Spend

It’s never too early to start working on your company’s marketing plan for the upcoming year – just ask the accounting department. For B2B and B2C marketers alike, there are many conversations to be had about the impact your budget will have on your marketing capabilities and strategy.

Use this guide to assess your company’s current marketing practices and discover the marketing methods you may want to introduce in next year’s plan. After all, your 2018 budget is likely an untapped resource for your marketing team and might allow for optimization, integration and innovation. Did we overdo it on the buzzwords? In any case, use this guide to get a jump start on your 2018 marketing budget and determine what tactics you should incorporate to make the year a successful one.

Step 1: Analyze and Benchmark Past Marketing Successes

Marketing is a balancing act and when you’re trying to increase qualified leads, it should never be a guessing game. To develop a truly successful marketing plan, you first have to look back at marketing plans from years past.

Use data from Google Analytics, your email marketing service and your marketing automation system to understand what sources are driving the most leads. Once you have tangible numbers, you can identify which sources contribute the highest percentage of total revenue via leads and conversions.

After you’ve collected year-over-year analytics data from each marketing channel and their corresponding sales metrics, you should ask yourself two simple but important questions:

  • What’s working?
  • What’s not working?

Unfortunately, each marketing tactic cannot be evaluated in the same way. While print ads offer circulation data, you can’t determine the exact number of readers who flipped through a publication’s pages. On the other hand, display advertising can provide definitive findings as to the size of the audience, the amount of impressions and click data.

Do your best to prioritize marketing tactics based on an unbiased review of their performance each year. When analyzing performance, try to maintain a holistic view of your business. What outside factors are influencing business development besides marketing? The loss of a key employee or the emergence of a new local competitor could be to blame.

Return on marketing investment (ROMI) can be tough to navigate, but with persistent research, you can optimize the channels that are working in your favor and pull back marketing spend on the tactics that aren’t.

Step 2: Determine 2018 Marketing Goals

Once you’ve familiarized yourself with the success of your past and current tactical marketing plans, it’s time to determine your 2018 marketing goals. After all, you can’t take a road trip if you don’t know where you’re headed.

Your marketing goals should be strategic objectives that are quantifiable and specific.

Define your goals on multiple levels; start from the top by determining your short and long-term business objectives. With this information, you can understand the amount of revenue you will need to achieve those goals and therefore the number of new leads you will need to generate. This is where the fun starts. Armed with these numbers and your data from step one, you can begin to break down these goals even further, setting success measurements for each marketing channel and tactic.

For tactical goals, be specific in terms of budget and results. How much are you willing to spend on this tactic? How many clicks or new leads do you expect this tactic to generate? Here’s an example:

  • Channel: Digital marketing
  • Platform: Google AdWords
  • Tactic: PPC campaign
  • Spend: $3,000/month
  • Goal: 500 clicks, 30 conversions

It’s important to establish objectives, but there should be some element of flexibility. Many factors that will impact progress toward your goals are constantly in flux, such as the cost associated with certain keywords  and ad groups on Google AdWords.

Keep in mind that circumstances may change throughout the year and budgets may have to be adjusted. If your current structure does not allow for budgetary changes, your goals and expectations should be altered accordingly.

Step 3: Consider Marketing Channel Options

There are multiple marketing channels to choose from when creating your 2018 plan, but most marketers will recommend an integrated approach. If your budget is tight, it may be in your best interest to focus investments on one or two channels. Here are a few channels that every modern marketer should consider:

  • Digital Marketing
    • Website development: Investing in development can go a long way. Whether you’re starting from scratch to create a new website or you’re improving an existing one, users can always appreciate a site that has top-notch UX and updated features.
    • Display advertising & pay-per-click (PPC): Advertising via search engines and partner websites is becoming increasingly commonplace as technology advances. Display advertising is an economical online advertising method, offering the opportunity to display graphic banner ads on website categories of your choosing. PPC, while more costly, is extremely customizable; advertisers can specify bids, ad copy, display time of day, location targeting and more.
    • Email marketing: A standard among most companies in 2017, there are still realms to explore in the world of email marketing. Experiment with email workflows to capture leads and incorporate responsive elements to heighten engagement metrics.
    • Social media advertising: For marketers who have established a strong social media presence for their company, social media advertising is an excellent tactic to incorporate. LinkedIn is the most beneficial for B2B marketers (especially its new InMail advertising option), while Facebook suits B2C marketers.
    • Search engine optimization (SEO): Optimizing your website for search engines is becoming increasingly important. How many times do you Google per day?
  • PR & Social Media

Public relations and social media marketing are standard for most B2B and B2C businesses. To take your editorial calendar to the next level, put down the press release and consider adding a new method to the mix.

Content marketing is a tactic that has grown in popularity in the past few years; this avenue allows companies to produce in-depth industry content that draws in a new, more targeted audience.

Content marketing is especially useful in the B2B space because industry content may not be as readily available to interested consumers. This content not only serves as quality editorial copy on-site, but it also has the potential to be leveraged for lead nurturing and demand generation purposes.

  • Traditional Marketing Channels

Traditional marketing methods have been a staple in the industry for decades and most are still in use. Direct mail, event marketing, television spots and print advertising are just a few tactics that are still a core focus for many marketers.

But be wary of opting for traditional methods unless you can prove that the tactics will result in strong leads. If not, they may not be worth the significant investment.

Step 4: Prioritize Your Needs

This is the hard part. Marketing on every platform is be the ideal circumstance, but for small to medium sized business (SMBs), this may not be realistic.

To prioritize your marketing needs, start with the most costly endeavors. Choose the tactic that is the most effective at driving leads and go from there.

Once you’ve incorporated the tactics that require the most spend, you can balance the rest of your budget with more cost-effective tactics.

Most B2B and B2C marketers find that working with an agency is helpful in determining the best marketing mix. For most of our clients, the marketing channel priorities that garner the most online success include:

  • PPC campaigns
  • Content marketing
  • SEO

Ultimately, there’s no magic formula. Your marketing budget should be a mix of different methods, based on the resources you’re working with and the audience you’re trying to reach.

This guide should serve as a starting point for your 2018 marketing planning and help you bring increased exposure for your business in the new year.

Sourced from Marketing Insider Group

Read More
By
Load More