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Are you ready to give content marketing the time, money and resources it deserves?
While your answer may be yes, it’s never easy to get up and running with a new marketing strategy. There are questions to answer, challenges to overcome and various tasks that need addressed.
With 88% of B2B marketers currently using content marketing as part of their overall strategy, neglecting to do so will put you in the minority.
As you get started, you’ll soon find a variety of ways to better research, plan, create and distribute content.
What I’ve created here is a list of content marketing tools that you’ll want by your side as you roll out your first campaign.
These tools cover the most important details you’ll need to address before you get started, as well as in the early days (and weeks) of running your campaign....
So, how is it possible that so many businesses (especially small or online-based businesses) are failing to utilize social media for PR? After all, it can only be vastly improved by the use of direct engagement with both customers and the press -- and social media is perfect for both.
Here are a few tips to get you started.
Some things in the world of public relations will always stay the same: Be authentic. Strive for credibility. Build relationships. Create storylines. Act fast. Achieve thought leadership.
But, the ways in which we achieve some of these still-critical elements have changed greatly over the years.
From circulation numbers to embedded URLs, from event attendance to social presence, and from direct mail to SMS, the PR world is evolving. Here are five outdated practices that have undergone a modern makeover with successful results:
With each passing day, PR is being nudged away from the familiar comfort of text-based communications to more visual forms of communications, especially in digital campaigns.
Today, among other platforms, Pinterest must be part of your social PR campaign strategy, especially if your target audience is female. It’s easy to dismiss Pinterest as a site where women just share pictures of fashion and food, but do so at your peril. Consider this: • One-third of the women in the U.S. use Pinterest, according to Pew Research Center’sSocial Media Update 2013.
• 85 percent of the estimated 40.1 million monthly Pinterest users in the United States in 2014 are female.
• New data from social sharing service ShareThis shows that for the first time, Pinterest outpaced email to become the third-most popular sharing channel in the fourth quarter of 2013.
• Pinterest is the channel of choice for moms, who share three times more than the average user, according to MarketingLand.com.
Still need to be convinced? Here are three examples of creative and effective PR campaigns using Pinterest as a central communications hub:
Looking to plan an earned media strategy? Here are 7 essential questions that you need to answer.
Earned media strategies are the bread and butter of effective content promotion, and creating and promoting a successful piece of content comes with a lot of work.
If you fail to construct a solid strategy, your content may miss the mark—and more importantly, it may miss your audience all together. But how can you be sure you’ve built a foolproof strategy? Before working on your next campaign, ask yourself these seven questions....
One of the big focuses in social marketing today is influencer marketing.
The idea being that if you can get one person to tell something to their large audience, their audience will listen.
For organizations this is seen as less effort and potentially high response.
In reality, things aren’t that simple.Let’s take a look at a few things to keep in mind when you approach influencer marketing....
The demand for visual news has changed the way the media reports the news. Digital PR can provide the images, audio and video for their websites.... a recent Q & A with top journalists and bloggers from major publications they all said that their editors demand visuals with every story.
Why? Analytics of viewer behavior shows that when a story has images, video or charts to support and enhance the text, it can increase views by as much as 9.7x.The L.A. Times calls it “No story left behind.” All of them agreed that they use outside video. The only caveat was that the images and videos have to be original, good quality and relevant to the story.
“Visual information reigns supreme, from video to images to infographics. Overwhelmingly, marketers plan to add more video to content marketing initiatives, necessitating increased investment in both technology and production resources. Marketers’ confidence in and reliance on content marketing is beginning to diminish their reliance on print and broadcast advertising, as well as public relations.” - Altimeter Group: Content, the new marketing equation
Think like a publisher. Get your Digital PR team trained to produce excellent visual material that extends the story. And learn to do it fast. Work with the media and help them to tell stories that capture people’s hearts....
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Greg Daniel AM, national practice leader of KPMG SR7, discusses how social media has changed the way people respond to advertising and PR.
In 1997, direct marketing guru Lester Wunderman talked about a new definition of brand: “It represents a cluster of consumer needs. It is each customer who is becoming a brand. I am a brand – and each of you is a brand.”
At that time, he said there were 260 million individual people brands in the US alone. More than 15 years later, the rise of social media has seen Wunderman’s prediction become a reality – in ways no-one expected.
This new reality represents the biggest single opportunity the PR industry has ever had – at the expense of advertising.
According to Nielsen, only 16% of people are influenced by advertising they see on the Internet while 84% are influenced by what people tell them on social media. While the growth in online advertising is dramatic – it is still advertising!...
In other words: change becomes more manageable when you understand what's going on, how long it will last and whether you are on course to conquer it change becomes more manageable when you understand what's going on, how long it will last and whether you are on course to conquer it. Within companies, "change management" is generally a focused effort; but within industries, there is less support and less understanding of these changes without centralized leadership to navigate.
As an industry undergoing massive changes — with journalists fleeing to brands and budgets shifting to data-driven metrics — PR stands at a fork in the road, which requires both a new way of thinking and new, diverse skill sets.
A new study from the University of Houston does sort of throw a wrench into that line of thinking, though: it found that readers are more likely to remember things like, say, your client’s name and the products they sell when this information appears in print.
Here’s the key finding: after reading for 20 minutes and being asked to recall as many articles as possible: - Print-only readers recalled 4.24 stories on average
- Online readers recalled an average of 3.35 stories
Interestingly, the gap grew even wider when it concerned the topics discussed in those stories and the main points made. Vox turned it all into a graph if you want to check out a visual representation....
Don't act surprised. You knew it was coming, and the brands knew it was coming. The bad-on-purpose Sharknado 2: The Second One premiered last night on Syfy, and people watched it.
You start with an idea, create an explainer video, spend a minimum amount of money, and 8 weeks later you've got more than 17 million YouTube views, thousands of quality links, 900,000 registered supporters and coverage in many of the world's leading media. And to cap it all, one of the world's top cell phone companies, Motorola contacts you to explore a partnership.That's the story of Dave Hakkens and his concept Phonebloks – not yet a finished product. It's a story that has much to teach SEO professionals about online public relations....
Your website is the hub of your inbound marketing efforts. Every piece of content you create or campaign you run should be designed to drive traffic to your website and landing pages, giving you the chance to convert visitors into leads and customers. It makes sense, then, to start by looking at insights from your web analytics platform, such as Google’s free Google Analytics, or a paid platform like HubSpot .
Let's review the 8 essential metrics you should be tracking on your website and its landing pages, and how you can use these metrics to optimize and improve your website’s performance....
I'm always fascinated by organizations that embrace brand journalism, hiring reporters to create content that serves as marketing and public relations. For almost a decade, I've recommended that companies of all kinds model their sites not on their peers' boring old brochure-like approach but rather aspire to becoming like a media site such as Forbes, the BBC, or The New York Times and that they actually hire reporters and editors, not marketers and copywriters, to produce the content. One look at the Raytheon homepage shows they do exactly that. There are real-time news, images, and a top stories section. And Raytheon is a B2B (and B2G) company! "You can see our homepage is very much a news operation," says Corinne J Kovalsky, Director, Digital & Social Media at Raytheon. "We've got feature stories and trend stories about cool products."...
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If you're new to content marketing or just starting up for your business, Neil Patel's list of tools is a great place to start.