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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....
Something I’ve been thinking about a lot lately: Are we over-relying on media relations in PR?
I’m talking about the broader scope of PR here–media relations, content marketing, social media marketing, community relations, etc.
For many years, media relations has been one of the core aspects of PR.
But, a number of stats and reports lately (not to mention consumer behavior trends in general) have got me thinking: We may be well past the tipping point....
Consumers’ top purchase influencers are also their top sources of new product awareness, according to results from a recent Nielsen report [download page].
The study, based on a survey of 30,000 consumers across 60 countries, found that friends and family (56%) and TV ads (52%) are the leading sources of information about new products for consumers. These are also consumers’ top purchase influencers, according to studies by MarketingCharts and by Deloitte....
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…
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).....
Kelly Walsh and James Warren, chief strategy officer and head of digital at MSLGroup, set the tone in their keynote presentation, which argued that marketing comms and PR are pretty much the same thing these days.
Warren said: "If one analyses what a brand or organisation needs to excel at to deliver marketing success in a digital age, the result is a long list of PR outputs. In the new communications agenda, everything is PR.
"But they warned that PR is woefully behind competitive industries when it comes to adopting technology and innovation, adding: "The creative and media agencies have invested vast sums of money and effort towards meeting the challenge of change, head-on, and PR agencies haven’t."...
A brand new year is upon us. Before diving into 2015 and all of the promise it holds, it’s an ideal time to reflect on our experiences over the past year and what we have to look forward to in the upcoming year.
At this point, you’ve likely seen this comment in every business related article: Marketing became even more complex in 2014, with new platforms, users consuming media in new an exciting ways, and making purchasing decisions in drastically different ways than ever before.
We are indeed herding cats…...
It’s safe to say that PR has adapted to the digital world safe and sound. Some industries, like buggy whip crafting, just don’t translate to new technologies and fall to the wayside eventually, but PR has managed to survive the transition. While some things like press releases are in danger of eventually falling away, the industry as a whole is fine.
But a question then pops up: how much of the essence of public relations has survived? Is it still the same thing that appeared so many years ago in the wake of a train crash, or is it something completely brand new? Surprisingly, the answer is a little bit of yes and no...
The growth of online has changed the world of Public Relations dramatically. Online has given PR a number of opportunities – engaged and larger audiences, groupings online of like-minded people. But it has also created its fair share of head-aches – people criticizing the company on the company’s own media and a fast-moving world which requires resource to keep track.
So, is digital PR really so different from traditional PR methods? Well, yes and no! The principles of PR still remain, with reputation management, stakeholder strategies and managing the spread of information all being crucial in digital PR. But the methods by which these are achieved are different in digital. I think that there are three pillars of Digital PR:
Online readers may have a harder time remembering news stories than print readers, according to a recent study from the University of Houston.
The study got two groups of university students to read the news and recall what they read. For 20 minutes, one group of 25 read a hardcopy of the New York Times, while another 20 read the newspaper's online version. Both groups were required to abstain from the news for the day until the study session, and participants weren't told that they would be tested on their recollection of what they read.
The results: although both groups read similar amounts, print readers remembered an average of 4.24 news stories, while online readers recalled an average of 3.35 stories....
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:
Sometimes it’s easier to just follow the dotted line as you’re looking to ensure your digital marketing is balanced and complete. This infographic compliments of Two Legit aims to do just that, walking you through your web presence, mobile, ecommerce, outbound, inbound, content and social media marketing initiatives.+ One element lost in this infographic is the ability for all of the strategies to work with one another. For instance, utilizing your content marketing to power newsletters that are optimized for mobile devices. That’s not defined in this infographic but it’s an absolute necessity if you’d like to fully leverage email and ensure your emails are read properly. I’ve written before that the modern digital media consultant is more of a conductor, balancing the volumes of each strategy to make some sweet, sweet music!+ More often than not, we find that the key to marketing well isn’t doing everything… it’s balancing a combination of strategies, amplifying the impact by having them work together, and understanding how much of each strategy to initiate in order to maximize results. That said – this is still a great checklist to go down and ensure you’re not missing anything! This infographic also provides some statistics behind the digital marketing trends.
Back in 2007, when Twitter was taking off, the PR industry faced a pivot point. It was no longer effective to cold email as many journalists as possible....
What PR practitioners found was four key elements to getting their stories out there: - Tell a story
- Help journalists stand out among their competitors
- Create captivating content that customers and journalists are going to find valuable
- Do extensive research to find where the audiences are, and distribute your content there
In other words, they began doing content marketing. There are several other ways content marketing has changed the way we “do PR.” Here are a handful of examples:...
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In this volume of our biannual trend publication, we explore the theme of Evolution. Agencies, consultancies, brands and other industry thought leaders largely agree that 2016 is shaping up to be an evolve- or-die year. Or, to put a positive spin on it, we might say it’s a year to thrive through intelligent adaptation. While some agencies are going the way of the dinosaur, a forward-thinking cross-section of shops are reporting increased revenues and profits by partnering with clients in new and innovative ways, by bringing their own IP to market and more. Other industry players need to evolve as major shifts in the way consumers use technology, consume media and engage with the world around them are forcing massive changes. Throughout the 2016 editions of The SoDA Report, we’ll explore top trends and behaviors that leading practitioners in our industry won’t be able to ignore as the year unfolds, and we’ll cast a spotlight on brands, agencies and individuals who are flourishing in this environment. Within Modern Marketer, Industry Insider and via our Digital Outlook Study (conducted in partnership with Forrester Research for the first time), we’ll also explore how the landscape of creativity and the modus operandi for agency-client relationships are shifting in radical ways. Spurred by rapidly changing consumer expectations and behaviors, agency-client partnerships are expanding in incredibly exciting ways beyond the marketing realm to include business strategy, R&D, product development and customer service. We are so proud of the growth and development of The SoDA Report over the past year.
We recently took to all of our channels to gauge how you view the practice of public relations. In our article What Is PR? A Look Back, To Look Forward, we asked you to fill in the blank: “PR is now ____. ” and share how public relations has changed since we originally released our popular PR Is infographic in 2012.
We received close to 100 responses from around the world and across the industry — corporate communicators, agencies, newcomers, industry veterans, and everyone in between weighed in. We even received a video.
When our senior creative manager Jamie Heckler compared your replies to 2012’s infographic, we observed the following trends....
There’s been a lot of talk about how traditional public relations can help boost your SEO.SEO and PR go hand in hand. I’m really lucky to work with several PR professionals in my current position, and they all agree that SEO best practice is essential if your story is going to connect with its audience.
While still distinct disciplines, SEO and PR are now joined at the hip, and professionals on both sides can no longer remain ignorant of each other’s worlds. An SEO who is armed with top tier PR training can have intelligent conversations with clients in regards to branding and PR goals, and an expert public relations professional can optimize press releases, understand on-page elements and use tools beyond social media to make sure that their client’s needs are best served.
So, here are some tools that I use in my own efforts as in performing my outreach role:...
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!...
Did you catch that breaking story? Somewhere (anywhere), an opportunity for your brand just landed online. What did you do about it?
If you wrote a blog post, created a video, or launched a campaign and got press coverage, you’re already newsjacking.
More and more, inbound marketers are using newsjacking to create a tidal wave of traffic around their brand. The secret to their success? A powerhouse media monitoring tool.Newsjacking is impossible to completely prepare for, and relies on reacting as soon as possible. That means newsjacking teams need to know where to look for opportunities, and get updated on them before they’re old news. Not really possible when you’re manually searching for stories...
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.
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.
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:
Getting major media placements in outlets such as "NBC Nightly News" and The Huffington Post is every PR and media relations professional's dream—and if you can get 1 million or so people to visit your brand's website in response to the coverage, that's icing on the cake.
This year, The Ohio State University Wexner Medical Center pulled off this feat using a brand journalism approach. Here's how it attracted so much public attention to the news so quickly....
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.
... Gallup’s Poll shows that people trust newspapers the most, followed by the Internet, with television news bringing up the rear. However, the American Press Institute notes that this order is reversed in terms of how Americans actually consume the news.
Television, which reportedly has the lowest public confidence, is the most frequently used medium for getting the news, with laptops/computers ranking second and newspapers coming in last.
While trust in the Internet as a source is slightly lower than when Gallup first measured public confidence in 1999, this year marks the first time that another news medium (television, in this case) has fallen below the Internet in public trust.Meanwhile, in terms of news consumption, the Internet has made steady gains over the past decade. Pew Research notes that the more Americans these days get news in a digital format.
Working with media is a key part of our job, so how do the public’s changing news consumption habits and wavering confidence impact how we approach media relations?...
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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.