Author Archives: speeder

Small Business Marketing: 3 Tips to Get Started

Posted on by
Reply

So you’ve decided to open a small business or start marketing the one you already have. Congratulations!


Whether you are just forming your ideas or expanding existing promotional efforts to include online channels, you’re about to navigate a journey that has the potential of taking your business to the next level – fast.


Although the techniques and tools for today’s PR and marketing may seem daunting, don’t be intimidated.


1. Create a Roadmap. Before you start almost any project, the preparation you do beforehand will be key to future success. Imagine hopping in the car for a cross-country trip without a GPS or map to guide you to your goal destination.


PR and marketing are the same. When putting together a plan, ask yourself these questions:

How much time am I willing to commit?
A PR and marketing effort can be as big or small as you decide. However, in an Internet landscape where content is king – you likely need to carve out time to create content, and connections online.

2. Go forth, measure and refine. Now that you have a plan, it’s time to take action.


One of the more important elements of any plan is ensuring to coordinate efforts so that you stay on message and can get more bang for your buck.


In addition, it is marketing and PR best practices to test a tactic at least 3 times before determining its effectiveness. Imagine if TV networks only ran one ad for a new sitcom premiering. The likelihood that the audience saw and remembered the concept, premier day/time and what they liked about it is miniscule.


So, marketers combat this issue with frequency.


Make sure your brand is visible in as many places as your target audience is looking including:

Signage outside your building (if you are a brick and mortar)

Before, during and after you launch your marketing plan, measurement is key. In order to define success, you will need to know where you started – i.e. your benchmarks.


As marketing plan components deploy, watch for spikes in traffic on the site from referring sources such as search engines, press release distribution services, ads etc.


After a frequency is established, you can compare tactics and messages to see which is working the best and which need to be refined or removed from the plan.


3. Don’t forget about local. Whether your location is critical to your business or not, making connections locally is still an important part in growing your business.


For example, when you become familiar with the news sources in your area, you can create relationships that make you the go-to-person for insight on your given area of expertise.


For a locally-driven business such as a restaurant, pet store etc., local is going to be a critical part of success as you need people within physical proximity to you to help the business grow.


However, companies that operate out of a city but serve national customers can also benefit from local connections. Don’t discount the affect you can have on referrals and even signing up local clients by attending networking events, sponsoring local charities, etc.


To let people nearby know you are there, try the following:


There is no limit to what you can accomplish with a well thought out and executed PR and marketing plan. Remember to be consistent in all your efforts. Maintain the same language, message and keywords in all tactics regardless of the channel. In no time you will be measuring noticeable returns on your small business marketing efforts.


View the original article here

Social Media Survival Kit For Small Businesses Part 3: Build Blogger Relations

Posted on by
Reply

Part 3: Build Blogger Relations

Inevitably, those that find themselves lost in any forest will happen across tribes of inhabitants that exist to help – and tribes that exist to hurt. And the social SEO forest is no different.


If you are preparing to journey through the social SEO forest, you must also prepare to come face to face with the bloggers – by far, the most powerful tribe in this space. Fortunately, if you are willing to listen, and to speak their language, they are almost certain to help you through. But be warned – any false step can stoke the ire of the entire tribe.


In part 3 of our Social Media Survival Kit for Small Businesses below, find five tips for building blogger relations:


Target Bloggers


1. Target The Right Bloggers


Not every resident of the social SEO forest is there to help you achieve your PR goals. Some are gentle residents, who are simply not a target for your pitch. Others are darker, and are just waiting to trap and expose a lost traveler who dares to cross them. (Learn more about this in tip 2.)


This most important tip for anyone seeking to build blogger relations, and one that will permeate through the balance of the tips on this list: target your pitch to the right bloggers – bloggers that are a vertical fit for your product or service, bloggers that are open to being pitched, and bloggers that offer the network that will help your story travel.


Listen to Bloggers


2. Remember To Listen


A good public relations professional would never dream of pitching a story to a large and influential media outlet, without first getting to know the publication from cover to cover, and journalist to journalist. This scenario should really be no different when building blog relations. And yet:


“It seems so simple and obvious, yet it is the biggest mistake made when pitching bloggers. Look at the categories of the blog and look at previous blog posts. Is your pitch REALLY relevant for the blog? For example, I get pitches about things like online advertising or creative interactive advertising campaigns and if you look at our categories or previous blog posts, we clearly do not cover advertising.”
(Lee Odden, TopRank Marketing).


The danger inherent in Odden’s quote above is that a blogger is typically unfettered by any editorial guidelines or time restrictions. If you happen to catch an influential blogger with the wrong pitch on the wrong day, there is very little that prevents your entire pitch being torn apart minutes later – in a blog post read by thousands.


Know the Bloggers writing style


3. Know Their Language


Bloggers don’t speak marketing-ese, a fact to which Cameron Chapman and thousands of other bloggers can attest.


The beauty of social media, of which blogging is a cornerstone, is the one on one and straight-forward level of communication that it’s defined by. Because of this, some of the purest bloggers will reject any sort of email pitch altogether.


Fortunately, the easiest way around this is to simply toss away the marketing language we’ve learned, in favor of the plain language communication style we inherently know. Unless, of course, the blogger in questions happens to LOVE marketing-ese. If your blog relations efforts have led you to such a case – pat yourself on the back for adhering to tip #2.


Understand Blogger Needs


4. Understand Their Needs


This represents the next logical step in building blog relations.


In the social SEO forest, not one of us is without a need. If what you need is a blogger to help you capture success in a new and unfamiliar environment, discover what it is they need – and offer it freely, without reservation. This is not simply the cornerstone of blog relations – this is the cornerstone of both relationship building and public relations.


And much like public relations, what the blogger needs to survive is a topic to blog about. If you’ve followed tips #1 through #3, and find yourself holding the content the blogger needs, you’re likely just an email away from achieving the coverage you need.


Join the blogging world


5. Join the Tribe


To truly think like a blogger, become a blogger.


All tribes of the social SEO forest share one thing in common: they live in a place that’s only recently become inhabited. You have just as much right to live in the online space as they do, whether you’ve travelled this forest for years or are just now making your first foray with a blog relations initiative.


And the best part of becoming a blogger is that it automatically transforms you into your own media and publication channel. Rather than counting on blog relations to get your story heard, you now have your own channel – where all you need to begin building online awareness for your product or service is the time to write and publish your own content. Of course, now that you have your own blog, you’ll be free to borrow time against your blog relations efforts.


Coming up in part four of our Social Media Survival Kit for Small Businesses, we show you how a tiny spark can become the fire that lights your way in How to Build Media Relations on Twitter.


Find more news release distribution resources from PRWeb.



View the original article here

Is it time to humanize your PR and marketing efforts?

Posted on by
Reply

Humanize your PR and Marketing


The Internet is an ironic place. With systems built upon social precepts of community, conversation and engagement, you’d think we’d all feel closer to each other but sometimes, virtual contact can’t replace the personal touch.


As a small business, it’s easy to get lost in the social media arena. You may have done a good job with your public relations strategy to establish a presence on the net, but does your brand stand out as one that customers are connected with?


The answer should be a resounding yes, but if it’s not, keep reading.


Look beyond the content you are creating such as press releases, whitepapers, webinars or video and ask yourself, “how am I leveraging that content to connect with my audience?”


In today’s digital marketplace, customer engagement is the name of the game. Consider these 3 opportunities you can use to humanize your PR and marketing efforts:


1. Create a team of marketers to extend your online voice. It’s important to some companies to have a primary spokesperson for the company but today’s digital arena requires more than what one person can typically accomplish in a day. Why not consider leveraging an extended team to help manage your social media presence?


You can create a core group of people to tweet, update Facebook / LinkedIn with questions and answers to topics others are engaging. Make sure you educate the team and keep them abreast of company messaging so that the risk of having inconsistent messages is mitigated.


In testing this approach, you may find that each person has their own voice, personality and helps establish a following of their own. It’s just like the old fishing metaphor – why fish with one pole when you can fish with 3, 4 or 5?


2. Expand your blogging. Create a content calendar that not only includes regular posts on your blog, but also pursues guest posts on other sites relevant to your industry.


With frequent guest posts offering compelling, useful information, you will likely be able to reach a larger audience and attach a voice to the brand in front of more audiences, than the one already reading your company-owned destinations.


3. Pursue community interaction. Find new communities that discuss your industry and become an active member. Your participation can reflect a number of aspects that can compel readers to become better acquainted with you and your company such as:
Expertise in your fieldTips and tricks to solving problems or accomplishing goalsLinks to resourceful industry content, stats etc.


When communicating online or offline it’s important that we remember that with every interaction, the ultimate goal is to be a company (or someone at a company) that they want to connect with. The icing on the cake of ‘likes’, ‘shares’, ‘retweets’, etc., is all bound to follow if you provide consistent and relevant interactions with people.


We all have that one small or local business that we love to support for maybe no other reason than we like the people behind it. Think through what keeps you going back and even referring them to your friends.


Then, create a plan that holds true to those same values, such as: being personable, answering questions or offering a kind word. Simple application of what we practice offline can help you create connections and ultimately brand affinity online.



View the original article here