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When it comes to sales, PR has always been thought of as a "top of funnel"; contributor. While PR's impact on the top of the funnel cannot be denied, this association does not fully encapsulate the impact PR has throughout the buyer's journey in today's digitally-driven landscape.
The most critical ingredient in virtually every sales funnel is content, which is something PR produces and owns in droves. From earned or owned media, to analyst relations and social media, PR has an arsenal of assets at their fingertips that can influence potential customers along every touchpoint in the funnel.
Below are three places where the work of PR can be harnessed to usher potential customers through the funnel to maximize the chance of conversion and ultimately, stimulate a continuous flow back into the top of the funnel....
What is Hey.Press?
It's a search engine for startup journalists. You search for a keyword, e.g. 'Oculus Rift', then we scour the net to find the most relevant journalists.
You can easily build small, highly targeted press lists. How much does it cost? Search is completely free!...
Google is constantly changing its algorithms. We all know about Panda, Penguin, and Hummingbird, but what people often forget is that each one is periodically updated, often without any confirmation or announcement by Google.
The latest known Panda update is Google Panda 4.1, according to the Moz Google algorithm change history log, which has had a profound effect on PR agencies.
The Panda algorithm, in particular, has made huge waves across the PR industry. According to the article ‘Did Google Panda 4.0 Go after Press Release Sites?,’ industry expert Barry Schwartz launched a study which revealed prominent PR agencies like PR Newswire, BusinessWire, and PRWeb lost up to 85% of their visibility within a matter of days.
Studies like this demonstrate that PR agencies are intertwined with the SEO industry, and must adapt or perish in a changing environment....
I tried to explain public relations to my grandmother once ...
This was many years ago, back when PR pros cut press coverage from publications we could actually hold in our hands, and few marketers talked about SEO in everyday conversation.
“So, it’s advertising,” she’d say, and I’d try again to explain that, no, it’s not.
“Advertising is about paying for attention; PR is about earning it.”
I don’t think she ever got it, and she’s not alone. Most people still think PR is some kind of black magic flacks work on the press -- you sprinkle a little witch’s potion, and TA-DA! You’re in The Wall Street Journal. But PR is a more strategic, sustained practice than that, and it’s a field content marketers need to understand as owned, earned and even paid media continue to intersect.
Below are seven PR lessons for content marketers (and for my relatives who still don’t understand what I do).....
We often hear Sanjay Dholakia’s quote, “Marketing has changed more in five years than the past five hundred.” What we don’t hear as much, however, is how public relations needs to transform itself to adapt to a changing world.
Here are three trends that are forcing PR agencies and professionals to step up their game, and what your organization can do to wield them to your advantage....
Amid widespread year-on-year increases across the US, three regions in particular saw notable spikes in median salary compared with last year.
The Northeast region saw a 12.9% hike (from $91,000 to $102,700); The Central region increased 21.2% (from $78,000 to $94,500); and the Plain States rose 9.8% (from $76,500 to $84,000).
Industry leaders from each region shared their explanations for these boosts...
“Today PR often encompasses everything from social media to content marketing andeven native advertising in some cases,” says Rebekah Iliff, chief strategy officer ofAirPR, the PR marketplace and technology platform.
While once the stepchild to its more glamorous sibling advertising, PR today can in fact far surpass the performance of advertising thanks to its ability to turn more traffic into leads.
For example, AirPR's data show that PR generates conversion rates 10 to 50 times that of advertising conversions.ahead
A recent Nielsen-inPowered study showed that earned media--which is just a fancy word for PR--is more effective than branded content at all stages of the purchase funnel. If you...
Brands and advertising agencies get all the credit for Super Bowl ads, but it's the PR teams behind the ads that should get the MVP trophy.
...It really is the Super Bowl of advertising (and PR, and social media, and search engine marketing, and insert other marketing disciplines). So while the ad agencies get all the credit for coming up with the actual ideas (though many of the ideas for this year once again revolve around getting ideas from creative consumers like you and me – Doritos and Coca-Cola both tapped the wisdom of crowds for their spots), the PR teams deserve equal praise for making those 30-seconds last for a couple of weeks....
What is PR today? Depending on who you talk to, it's either stuck in the prehistoric era of the dinosaurs or trapped in the social media Twilight Zone.
Smart PR pros recognize a foundation of traditional PR integrated with a new social media toolbox, content marketing and new digital channels is the recipe for success.
Will “Old PR” go extinct? Brian Kilgore doesn’t think so though, if you read his recent The Huffington Post article Don’t Insult PR People by Calling Them Marketers...
An op-ed from The Huffington Post draws clear lines between the marketing and PR fields, but the reality is those distinctions are getting blurrier.
...PR people shouldn’t be offended by being perceived as marketers any more than marketers should be offended by being seen as public relations pros. We should all recognize that the lines are blurred in the new paradigm—it’s only when the efforts are coordinated that the best things happen.
News today from down under that Qantas Airways is closing its Twitter PR account. What are they thinking? This is like going back to the media relations days of the caveman. Australian marketing magazine mUmBrella reports Qantas will shutter its Twitter news account on April 19th. It expects it’s online newsroom to deliver the news.
There are companies that talk about becoming a social enterprise. Then there are those that invest in it. Dell’s investment has resulted in multiple patent applications for technologies designed to be used just internally. The tool—Social Net Advocacy (SNA)—was on display last month at Dell World 2012 in Austin.... It’s simple to click through layers of data (topics, media providers, authors, and posts) to find out what people are saying about products, components, stages of the customer journey (for both commercial and consumer customers), and business functions. Each category and subcategory includes a breakdown of sentiment—positive, negative and neutral, along with the number of posts devoted to that topic and the change in SNA over the past week....
VideoWho can keep track of the myriad year-ending media and marketing predictions posts? ...Over the past year, I’ve been keeping tabs on the “strides” PR agencies have made in social media and the analytics/measurement game. Unfortunately, the picture isn’t all it’s framed out to be. With a few exceptions, I believe that agencies are losing their birthright in the battle to lead in social media communications and measurement. Other “marketing”entities have eaten the PR industry’s lunch through their ready embrace and leverage of new digital content strategies, channels, and data analytics tools. The big global firms certainly have invested in departments focused on brand-building and consumer engagement via the primary social channels (mostly prodded by their forward-thinking, marketing and measurement-driven clients at CPG companies). But I’d opine that the rank and file of those toiling on the agency side of the PR services equation, including those at the cool-sounding “digital boutiques,” continue to offer as their primary deliverable (and measure of success) earned editorial media placements....
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Good quotes are like tiny poems.
They can inspire a feeling or drive you to action, describing more in a sentence or two than paragraphs of text from lesser writers.
There are a plethora of quotes that are applicable to PR pros, including pithy sayings about publicity, simplifying communications and improving skills. Paired with pictures, the best quotes become even more inspiring.
Here are 15 of the best quotes for communicators....
A piece of great content is an asset that has value; the sharing of it should be given appropriate attention and care.
Strong content deserves a strong PR plan.
Never thought about it that way? Not convinced your content is worthy of a PR campaign? Ask yourself the following question: Is your content marketing as worthy as your last strategic partnership or personnel announcement?
Don’t make the mistake of under-estimating your content. Content connects and content converts....
At Onalytica we have been looking closely at the transformation of PR as we know it. Our vision is to evolve media relations into influencer relations professionals by managing relationships with hundreds of key influencers rather than just journalists.
Think about the numerous analysts, politicians, bloggers, thought leaders, industry professionals, stakeholders and influential consumers that all have big audiences that you want to reach. Influencer relations is a truly essential part of modern PR (we also offer a B2B influencer relations platform for PR practitioners)
One of the most time consuming parts of influencer relations (or influencer marketing) is identifying the right thought leaders. What if you just wrote a new blog and you have no idea what influencers would be interested in your content?
We’re here to help! We built a new tool to do this. Before it took up to an hour to find 10-20 relevant influencers, now you can do it in less than a minute…
Given the job PR has done to support the growth of the tech industry, it's time to celebrate the top tech PR executives globally. And there are 100 of them.
We have therefore decided to celebrate the top tech PR executives that have played their part in supporting some of the now household names in the tech industry and developed the sector as a whole.
To do so, we have again put the decision in the hands of the Hot Topics community and asked them to nominate the 100 top tech PR executives globally.....
PRWeek's Global Agency Report launches on April 27: Here is a sneak preview of the trends agency bosses identified as defining 2014 and shaping the year ahead....
Today, editorial voices are outnumbered by public relations professionals by almost 5:1. In order to grasp the big picture, the first thing you need to understand is a publisher’s capacity.
On average, 45% of writers publish one story per day. Meanwhile, 8% of writers get pitched more than 100 times per day, 11% more than 50 times per day, and 40% more than 20 times per day. In other words, these writers get 100, 250, or 500 pitches a week for only five story spots!
When you take into account that only 11% of writers said they “often” write a story based on content that was sent through pitches, you quickly realize that the amount of email waste rises well above a person’s threshold to tolerate it....
...PR needs to figure out how to automate some of its capabilities and keep up with the changing trends affecting their clients. The major trend is in helping companies become media companies simply because there are fewer reporters around to help tell the stories of clients.
I’ve worked with Intel on its Intel Free Press and other media projects, for example. And PR firms need to do the same, help every company to be a media company and how best to use the media technologies available....
But the publishing, etc, is not enough. There needs to be a large technology component inside the future successful PR firm. It needs technologies of promotion that can scale the work of its practitioners in the service of its clients....
Public relations was born in the days when train travel was still a novel and exciting thing.
Things have changed since then – businesses, consumers, and the entire public relations industry. It’s gone through many ups and downs and opinions from the general public, both good and bad. But like all business models, is the use of PR obsolete in this tech day and age?
Definitely not, and it’s potentially much more important than ever before. This is because traditional means of reaching the public are going away and PR is stepping in to fill the cracks.
On top of that, roles traditionally performed by other departments are starting to fall to public relations pros. All this just means PR is practically vital to every business out there right now....
Real-time social media are transforming marketing and public relations. I recently visited two firms in Chicago that are responding to the need for speed within the flow of online conversationconversation.
...Content and storytelling are at the heart of how we help our clients build meaningful relationships with their audiences," said Mark Hass, president and CEO, Edelman U.S. Edelman's plan focuses on client partnerships with five U.S. newsrooms and one in the U.K.Edelman newsroom "trend spotters" identify trends and events, collaborate with account leaders and design creative concepts. Ideas are shared with clients, and then decisions are made about posting or not.Real-time PR and marketing content frequently is covered by traditional media -- television, radio, newspapers and magazines.
News organizations, too, are now in the business of conversation monitoring and engaging. In this sense, the news model shares with PR the goal of creating viral videos, flashy graphics, photographs, memes and other popular social media content. Everyone is competing for measurable engagement that may translate into new revenue....
Do people quoted in newspapers review the stories before they run? Can advertisers legally lie? Are PR people the biggest liars of all? How much does it cost to get a story into The Globe and Mail or the Toronto Star?
Just a few questions that show people do not understand public relations.
...Why, then, does PR still exert power in a world we were are constantly told it’s *all* about engineering, product, and design?
Let me count the ways. The current pace at which new companies form or launch makes it difficult for the crowd to sort these signals properly, and makes it difficult for tech reporters (hence, Techmeme) and investors (hence, AngelList) to keep tabs on ones that (may) matter. This pace creates enough noise to sometimes positively impact efforts around fundraising, recruiting, or partnerships. Engaging in PR, then, merits serious consideration. However, early-stage tech startups aren’t often keen to hire non-technical folks with PR-like experience to join their teams full-time, so engaging with an agency on a retainer-basis — while not cheap — becomes a viable option. To boot, many of the best VC firms funding these startups also invest in their own PR because it’s critical to their business in today’s climate, so why shouldn’t portfolio companies do the same? It’s easy to stop here and proclaim it’s all about “product, product, and product,” and to blame the PR firms and professionals, but that would be a lazy and misguided conclusion. For many startups, PR definitely has a seat at the table. PR firms aren’t to blame. The fact is, there is real economic demand directly from entrepreneurs and investors for their expertise, so we must then ask, “Why is there demand to begin with?”...
Public relations (PR) or media relations has long been treated as its own world, separate from marketing. It was viewed as being about name recognition and industry credibility, not something as mundane as lead generation. But as the world has shifted from marketing brochures and printed trade publications to everything online, the connections between PR and marketing have become more apparent; that white paper may be a lead generation asset, but it can also be used to pitch a bylined article. An online ad may be marketing, but the credibility built through PR makes prospective buyers more likely to click on it. A news release may be designed to get media coverage, but it can also create valuable backlinks for SEO. In the online realm, PR, search engine optimization (SEO), social, advertising and marcom are all vital and intertwined elements of web presence optimization, and as such need to be measured and managed to coordinate efforts for maximum online visibility. So how exactly does PR support SEO efforts? How can media relations skills be leveraged in social media? What do PR pros need to do differently to support online journalism? What are today’s best practices for B2B PR? Find the answers to those questions and more here in seven recent expert guides to social and online PR.
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