Archives for December 2015

How to Pitch Media And Actually Be Heard

If you’ve ever witnessed a little kid birthday party you know about being on the wrong end of a person to person ratio. It’s a lot of noise with you begging, “For the love of sprinkles, someone listen to me!” Not pretty, but it’s exactly what’s going on in PR these days and company reps (and owners) are feeling it.

Recent data says that media relations professionals now outnumber reporters by nearly 5 to 1. With numbers like that the only way your company message is heard is if you’ve cultivated relationships with reporters. That way when you have news, there will be someone who can pick you out of the crowd.

Key to your development of relationships with the media is providing reporters, producers and editors with quality, dependable content in a timely manner. Your company blog is your best PR tool. Instead of trying to manufacture relevant company news for a press release, your blog can give you industry related news and thought leadership pieces to share with the media. It’s like a gift for a reporter covering your industry – but only if you make sure it has the nuts and bolts the media are searching for:

Statistics and data related to your industry
Information on new products, services or ways of doing business
Tips and how to’s
Human-interest stories that get the adrenaline (or tears flowing)

If you need some help getting your company blog going, click here for a free resource.

If your marketing team (and maybe that’s you also) has got the blog down, you’re ready to start connecting with media. Here are a few ways you can pitch your blog to the media:

1. Don’t push a mass release. Send an engaging personal email.

Before you fire it off, ask yourself, Why is my news important to this person? It’s about them, not you. (Feel free to spend as much time composing your subject line as you do the email. It’s that important.)

In the body include a few sentences about your topic, why it’s relevant to the news source you are pitching (please do your research), a link to your blog and a file of related high-resolution images suitable for print and web. Lastly, include your contact information.

2. Find your reporter or editor on social media and act social like.

You sent the email, now follow them on Twitter and continue to communicate with them without straight up pushing your news. Don’t stalk them. They have a job to do and responding to your tweets is not their priority. It’s best to just let them know you appreciate their writing and share their content often. That will help you stay top-of-mind. If you read or watch one of their pieces related to your industry make a relevant, intelligent comment that furthers discussion on social media. Be authentic.

3. Throw the Hail Mary phone call.

If you’ve made a specific, personal pitch through email and tried to connect on social with no response, a call can be in order. Email can occasionally end up in spam and, like you, reporters, producers and editors get overwhelmed by their inbox. It’s ok to call, once. “I’m calling about XYZ and if you need any other information, my contact info is on my email…”

4. Be patient.

You’d think that our crazy fast paced news cycle would mean media people would get back to you instantly when they’re interested in your news. Not necessarily.

I just received a reply on an email pitch I sent on behalf of client in June. June. That was six months ago. The magazine is well known and influential in my client’s industry so it was worth the wait. Because the email contained a relevant pitch and helpful collateral, in this case, a spec sheet and an ebook about a product, the editors had the information they needed to include the client in an upcoming feature about new design and building materials. The response wasn’t on my timeline, but the result is pivotal for this client’s product launch, and certainly for our agency securing future work.

Being the voice of your company is a powerful position.

If you’ve developed those key media relationships and built a track record as a dependable industry news source and used your company blog to establish thought leadership, you have the power to change the way people think about your industry. And that will change how your company thinks about you. As Gini Dietrich of Spin Sucks says, “Be an investment, not an expense.”

Photo by Minda Haas

PR Reps: How To Turn Your Blog Into Free Press

You’ve been told by marketers (and Google) that cranking out blogs can be the way to drive traffic to your site. True.

But did you know blogs are great content for pitching the media? As a PR professional, blogs can be your ultimate resource for sharable, newsworthy pieces that will get your company press and stand out in the industry.

First off, let’s be clear. Blogs are not a collection of press releases. They are your company’s unique and relevant content based on your company’s expertise. It’s the place where you show thought leadership, and offer how-tos and problem solving directly related to your industry.

What that means to the press

Blog posts are sources for potential producers, editors and reporters searching the Internet for quality content and stories to meet their next deadline. To give you two very different examples, one of our clients is an attorney in the railroad industry who represents injured workers. He spends most of his blogging year answering their pains and problems related to on-the-job injuries and suits against their companies. After this year’s Amtrak disaster the national media turned to him as a source for caps on victim payouts.

Another of our clients is in the natural stone industry and uses its blog to answer the technical questions of fabricators and give inspiration to designers. When a well-known design magazine was looking for a feature on innovative building materials, it turned to our client for technical advice and a product feature.

In the first case the media sought out our attorney client because he ranked high on the web for the keyword phrases railroad injuries and railroad injury lawyer. In the second case, I used content from our client’s blogs and ebooks to pitch the magazine via an email.

We got to thinking about the relationship between blogging and PR again this week when our own Stephanie Eichmeyer listened in on a Cision webinar with Gini Dietrich of Spin Sucks who had a host of tips on how PR reps can leverage their blog. Here are the most relevant tips she pulled on how to use your blog to attract the media. (Our thoughts in italics.)

Be deliberate with your editorial calendar

Don’t create content without the end result in mind. Have a strategy and build themes and content around holidays, pop culture, trends, etc. Ask yourself, How do we have that conversation with not only media, but the audience that is most affected by the theme?, and push that out to get excitement out there. At the same time assume of-the-moment topics will pop up. Having some evergreen content built into your calendar will help you swap out blogs as needed.

Know your audience’s keywords

Don’t just leave it to your SEO professionals doing things on the back end. You need to write from a content perspective to drive traffic and interest. What kinds of content do you need to create to ensure that you rank well when people search your main keyword? Be strategic and sophisticated. To do this we use tools like Yoast and HubSpot to tell us which words are key to searchers we’re going after but also are not so competitive that they’re not worth going after. Like Christmas. You’re not ranking for that one. But Christmas gifts for pets with three legs, you may have a chance there.

Think of your larger campaign focus

First identify your priority keywords and phrases around what people are searching for as well as around your strategic plan. (We discussed this in more detail last week here). From there, build a series of pieces targeted to those keywords. A few different posts on the same topic will give your more priority in search rank, and create more opportunities for reporters and producers to use you as a source.

Repurpose your content

Stop creating everything from scratch, reuse it. I think deep down we think this is cheating. It is NOT cheating. It’s a smart use of your time. Compile shorter blog posts into something larger. Compile blogs into an ebook. Take a speech and create a visual story around it and put it on Slideshare. Go back through your posts and do a content audit of the last year to see what you can repurpose. Example, we wrote this blog after giving an hour of free advice to a new business owner. Using it as a blog post gives us a chance to help other new small business owners while not using up our time or doing free work.

If your company has a blog, use it as a tool to help you do better PR. The result will be twofold: Your company leadership will 1) see you as an asset rather than an expense and 2) be encouraged to invest more in blogging, which will in turn make your job easier.

Photo by Roger H. Goun

Google Ads Are Ineffective At Wooing Buyers. Here’s Why You Should Use Them Anyway

If you use Google Adwords for your business you probably know two things: You definitely pay for the service every month. And you definitely don’t know if it’s working.

The effect is very similar to the direct mail campaign. Design a nice flyer, letter, coupon etc. Send said ad and wad of cash to direct mail company. Wait by phone for customers. Without a crush of new business it’s hard to assess if the campaign worked. Yes, you got a few new customers, but why? Did they come from other sources? Hard to tell.

What would be more effective to know is why didn’t the ad bring you a crush of new business. Was the ad design bad? Was the mailing list not your target market? If you had those answers you could pivot your strategy for next time. And that’s where Google’s power comes into effect with a side benefit to using its Adwords service – keyword data.

Today we’ll cover three points on Google Ads. One, do they work? Two, if they don’t work, then why bother? And three, how to influence Google search.

People are always clicking on Google ads. Right?

Contre mon fre. A report presented by the National Bureau of Economic Research shared the results from a series of large scale field experiments done at eBay to measure the causal effectiveness of paid search ads. It was also reported on by The Atlantic. The data wasn’t pretty.

Because search clicks and purchase behavior are correlated, the report shows that returns from paid search are a fraction of conventional non-experimental estimates. As an extreme case, they show that brand-keyword ads have no measurable short-term benefits. For non-brand keywords they find that new and infrequent users are positively influenced by ads, but that more frequent users whose purchasing behavior is not influenced by ads account for most of the advertising expenses, resulting in average returns that are negative.

Take away: Using your company name Widgets R Us isn’t going to generate short term sales. Savvy, frequent online shoppers are ignoring your ads anyway.

People are becoming numb to advertising of all kinds – even the ones that pop up when you’re searching for the exact information they have for you. We question more and do more research before making a purchase. Shoppers are on a buyer’s journey way before they make the decision to click and buy. (Unless, like me, you just had to buy that Votivo Blue Pine candle that you fell in love after smelling for hours at your mother-in-law’s home over the holidays. Click. Buy.)

According to MineWhat.com, eighty-one percent of shoppers conduct online research before they make a purchase. Sixty percent begin by using a search engine to find the products they want, and 61 percent will read product reviews before making any purchase. On average, a consumer will visit three stores before making their purchase.

Google ads have become the direct mail of the Super Highway. Intrusive and clogging our lives with junk as we do our research and try to get to know a business.

If Google Ads don’t work for sales, why bother?

Here’s an important note. Buyers might not click on your ad to purchase your product. But people are clicking on reviews and organic (non-paid) content like blogs.

There is still HUGE value in advertising with Google even though those ads may not get the powerhouse clicks you seek. Google gives its advertisers access to more analytics like the keywords people were searching for when they found your website. With that info, you can give people more of the content they crave. That’s the good stuff. If you knew that there were buyers out there looking for widgets like yours that charge phones AND brew coffee, wouldn’t you write a blog about it to capture those online searches? Of course you would, because you are smart.

And if you do advertise with Google as many of our clients do, be smart with your ads so you’re not wasting your money on keywords that are highly competitive. We frequently find with new clients that use Google Adwords that they don’t know the exact keywords around which they are paying for advertising. And they definitely don’t know if those keywords are reaching their target markets or if there could be more specific, less competitive words to go after.

Have a professional marketing team with Adwords experience analyze your last month’s report to tell you if you are actually reaching the customers in your target market. Most agencies will do this for a small fee and give you a report to keep.

Ads or no ads, you can still sway Google

Ads should never be your only marketing. They should be informed by keyword data and nestled strategically inside a larger marketing campaign that includes proactive content marketing. You have an opportunity to insert your company into the content people are using in their research.

Blogging is your key to search. The more you blog about the topics and things people look for, the more users will be directed to your site. Google rewards those who write. Keywords should also be incorporated into your website content including image alt text and on-page copy. Our blog on SEO can help you get a handle on this. You’ll want to use short keywords like “widget” and “phone charger” and long-tail phrases like, “How do I get my phone to charge by drinking coffee?”

Those long-tail phrases are perfect for blogs. In fact, go ahead and make them your titles. The best blogs for capturing search are evergreen pieces that answer questions and solve problems of the people to whom you’re selling. Use your brand platform to build trust with your audience and inform them of solutions to their problems. You know from your own internet behavior that helpful service like this is way more clickable than one of those top three ad search results we’ve trained ourselves not to click on.