June 2009
16 posts
How do you know marketing is working?
Winston Churchill said, “However beautiful the strategy, you should occasionally look at the results.” Well said. I’ve seen scores of well-thought-out marketing and PR plans that were missing the most crucial element—a way to measure whether or not they worked.
And there’s always a way to measure—here are three of many strategies we use to track the results of our work:
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2 ways to get news to more journalists
Once you’ve identified information about your business that is newsworthy and you’ve written a news release, you can send it out to the local newspapers. But if your news is really newsworthy and you want a better chance of widespread media coverage, use a distribution service to get the information out to thousands of media outlets simultaneously.
One such resource is Business Wire....
Marketing tricks, delivered right to you
Once again I’ll be taking “DIY Marketing” on the road, this time to Crestview, Fla. on July 23rd. These workshops have consistently sold out and this particular one is limited to just 25 people.
We’ll be covering marketing and public relations tricks I’ve learned over the past 28 years in the industry, from using “new media” to getting your news covered...
Is it public relations or public education?
Sometimes it’s necessary to educate people about a cause or product before you can effectively use public relations to shape their opinions about your organization or company.
To illustrate this, I’ll go back to my early career as marketing director for a paging company in the early 90’s. Up until then, pagers had mostly been used by emergency personnel and service technicians....
Cutting to the chase
According to real estate expert John Burns the people selling homes for this builder know how to speak the language of their buyers. In this case, he says, money talks.
Burns writes, “On the billboard, there are no pictures of beautiful communities, or of seemingly happy people enjoying lifestyle amenities. There is no map, calling attention to conveniently-located transportation. There...
jewelry boutique gets Lucky with PR
Public relations is such a great marketing tool that I never get tired of using it. What’s not to love? We get to show off our clients to hundreds, thousands, even hundreds of thousands of their potential customers, and it doesn’t cost them an arm and a leg.
Yesterday, subscription holders of Lucky magazine received their July issue and there, at the top of the Local Breaks section,...
I have drunk, and seen the spider
—William Shakespeare, The Winter’s Tale, Act II, Scene I
This quote seemed like a great lead-in to search engine optimization, one of the most important elements of marketing. If you don’t understand how it works, you’re doing your marketing and PR budget a grave disservice.
In a nutshell, the major search engines use spiders, robots (‘bots) and crawlers to continuously...
Is this an eye test, or what?
In today’s email box I received a beautiful e-blast designed for an older target audience (50+) and for friends of the sending organization. (I’m a “friend,” by the way, in case you’re wondering).
The size of the type was so small that I had a hard time reading it. It made me think I should blog about this kind of thing, namely, to remind people to design ads for the...
“Social networking is a full-time job”
A great e-blast gone bad
I’ve touched on this before, but an e-blast project today reminded me how a well-designed, hard-hitting e-blast can be doomed to fail if there’s not a good, clean list of contacts to receive it. So before you start an e-marketing campaign, build your contact list.
I wouldn’t recommend purchasing an email list—better to gather emails from your current clients, friends, vendors,...
Rat droppings and such
In northwest Florida we have an amazing asset, The ZOO-Northwest Florida. Home to more than 1200 animals and the Safari Line Limited Train that winds through more than 30 acres of free-roaming wildlife, The ZOO saw great distress after Hurricane Ivan devastated much of the property in 2004. So what does all this have to do with PR?
Today, The ZOO handled a PR crisis. A reporter called because...
A picture is worth a thousand . . .
… dollars? Today I took part in a professional photo shoot, with an amazing photographer who took pictures of children in a school setting. A private school, the client didn’t have a large budget for photos but was very open to our suggestion of using “real” kids and teachers to tell their story on their new Web site. It was hot and noisy, not to mention it was the last day...