Tag Archives: content syndication

How to Increase Content & Messaging Visibility with a Multi-Channel Distribution Strategy

Posted on April 16, 2013 by | Leave a comment

We’re all creating content today, but how do we do it right?  Jon Miller(@jonmiller), co-founder of Marketo, along with Michael Pranikoff, PR Newswire’s director of emerging media, seek to answer that question in this webinar.

Jon began the discussion by talking about how marketing has changed in recent years.  Back in the ‘Mad Men’ era of marketing, a buyer would have to talk to a sales person to obtain information on a product, but with the abundance of information available on the internet, the sales person is no longer needed until much further along in the buying cycle. According to Forrester Research, at least in a Business-to-Business setting, a buyer is 65% to 90% finished with their sales cycle before they actually connect with a salesperson.  This has profound implications for marketers.

3 Main Benefits of Content Marketing:

1)      Increased Brand Awareness – Buyers are online.  When someone shares your content on a social network, that action gives you free brand awareness in a more powerful way than purchased advertising.

2)      Better Brand Preference – People are more likely to choose the product from a company they feel they have a relationship with.

3)      Risk Reduction – In Business-to-Business purchases especially, avoidance risk and fear tend to be the most dominant motions in play.  A person may make decisions out of fear of losing their job.  To reduce fear for your buyers, your trusted content and thought leadership will help you gain trust from your buyers, which is important.

Creating content for the buying process:

To create an effective campaign, you need to create compelling content for the appropriate stage of the buying process.  You don’t want to give late stage content to an early stage customer because it’s not relevant to them at this point.

– Early Stage:  By far, the majority of content is early stage – usually educational or entertaining content. It’s all about appealing to the audience before they become a customer.

– Middle Stage: the tools that will help a buyer when they are already thinking about a purchase, such as  a buying guide, ROI calculator or analyst data.

– Late Stage:  is about the product or service specifically, such as pricing, demos and case-studies.

No matter what stage, the content must always be relevant and helpful to the buyer.

The power of visuals

best press release format tips multimedia news release

Press releases that offer readers a variety of multimedia options (e.g. video, images, downloads) generate almost 10 times more views than plain-text messages.

Another trend that Jon talks about is the rise of visual content.    Not only does adding multimedia give you more views, there is also better engagement in content with multimedia elements than plain text.  Marketers need to create content that people want to share.  Michael Pranikoff sited a PR Newswire Web Analytics study that showed syndicated content gets more views as more multimedia elements are added.

Customers want to have fun.  With early-stage content, the more you can do to entertain, the better off you will be.  Jon talks about the jingle created to promote ‘The Definitive Guide of Marketing Automation’, an e-book available on the Marketo website.

As I was watching this webinar, I pulled up Marketo’s youtube channel & watched the video Jon referred to, as well as some other fun & informative marketing videos, and I can see why these videos would be shared & re-shared.  Jon said he believes humor and personality are way underused in b-to-b sales.

Don’t panic – this isn’t as daunting as it may seem

You don’t have to have all your content on Day 1.  Just keep creating something new all the time.  Think big, start small, move quickly.

Think about how you can take the content you have and cut it in different ways – re-purpose your content.

  • Promote your content on different channels:  including paid,  owned (such as your own website or blog) and earned.  On social media, don’t promote too much of your own content.  Build an audience and a following, which will build your presence and will get more impact for the content that you do share.
  • Syndicate & Connect – Michael Pranikoff shared a story about a client of PR Newswire’s that issued a short news release to online publications with a link to their blog post.  After syndicating the release, they found a 54% increase in blog traffic and higher search result ratings.  A little content syndication can go a long way. 

Social media can give you a boost on every other type of campaign.  You don’t have to run a social campaign, but make every campaign that you do social.  Give people a reason to share your content.

If you missed the live webinar,  you can assess a recording here: Connecting the Content Dots

Author Jillian Courtright is a Senior Customer Content Specialist at PR Newswire.

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3 Ways to Capture (& Keep) Audience Attention

Posted on December 27, 2012 by | 6 Comments

Emerging naked from a roaring fire with a baby dragon on your shoulder is one way to get people’s attention. (Thankfully, there are some easier ways to capture your audience’s attention, which we discuss here today.)

Yesterday we published part one of this two-part post on capturing audience attention.  Today, author Ken Dowell offers thoughts on approaches that rely on utility and relevance, rather than diversion, to garner the attention of your organization’s constituents.

Creating great content that will capture attention and truly engage audiences is a new imperative for communicators.   But how exactly do you do that? One approach is to be so brilliant that you can produce staff that is so good an audience will congregate around it.  Since that option isn’t open to most of us we need to think of quality in terms of who it is we want to reach.  You can, for example, be writing on behalf of a accounting standards organization and you know you’re stuff isn’t exactly going to go viral.  But quality in this example means producing content that will be informative to the professional accountant audience who you’re trying to reach.

If you don’t have something that’s of interest, it isn’t going to much matter how you distribute it.  But the definition of what’s of interest is in the hands of the audience and your job in distributing information is in finding the appropriate audience, positioning your content to be discovered by the very people who would find it valuable.

The 3 S’s of content strategy

To do that you need to take into consideration the three S’s of modern content distribution:  search, social and syndication.

Search is still probably the ultimate consumer tool to filter out the noise and go directly to what you want.  In fact a whole industry has been built up around SEO.  And SEO practice became so prevalent that the search engines, led by Google, tweak their algorithms almost weekly to neutralize the practice of manipulating headlines and keywords and links, etc.  What would Google advise?  Create good content and post it on good sites.  Not a bad option.

Social replaces the diverted eyeball approach with the implied endorsement of being recommended by friends, followers or connections.  It’s a kind of discover mechanism that does for content what talking to your friends and acquaintances does for say restaurant recommendations.  My advice here is similar to what it is for search.  Worrying about “optimizing” through use of hashtags or optimum time of day or repetitions is not going to be nearly as important as producing content that your audience is going to want to share.

Syndication is perhaps less commonly thought of, but it’s a powerful content discovery tool that needs to be considered in determining how you are going to distribute your content.  Specific interest is trumping general interest for information consumers and syndicators that address that need are going to get you where you want to go.  (For example the PR Newswire widget that is deployed on hundreds of Web sites and blogs worldwide delivers to each site only the content that meets their description of what their readers want to see.)

New media, new devices, new tools have opened up new opportunities in marketing and public relations to be publishers and talk with audiences instead of at them   But there’s a crowd of others doing the talking and the listener is more and more fine tuning the message stream.   Only good content available in the right places will get through.

Author Ken Dowell is PR Newswire’s EVP of social media & audience development.

Image via i09.com

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Content Marketing Case Study: It Sure Looks Like PR to Me

Posted on October 29, 2012 by | 5 Comments

Wordstream’s infographic that supported their campaign generated fantastic results for them. (Click on the image to see the full size version.)

A blog post on search engine authority SEOMoz titled “How I Got a Link from the Wall Street Journal” offers some real instruction for PR pros on linking content – and public relations outputs – with measurable, top-line business results.

It’s worth noting that the author of the post – and the content marketing campaign discussed – is Larry Kim, the founder and CTO of Wordstream, a search marketing firm.  (There’s another link for you, Larry – I know you’re counting.)  In short, he is a data-driven quant, C-suite denizen and SEO guru.  And within his case study is some very important guidance for public relations pros.

Think strategically (and holistically) about online pickup.

The first lesson to be derived from Larry’s post is this:  PR should think more deliberately about the value to be had for the organizations we’re promoting in the online mentions and “pick up” we generate — and not just in terms of PR outcomes.   In this day and age, the content we publish digitally can provide a variety of benefits to an organization.  The content, for example, can be mapped your customers’ buying process by your marketing team, and re-purposed.  And the content can generate potent search engine visibility – if you manage the language and linking correctly.  Optimizing press releases and other content can certainly help, however, it’s important to think beyond one granular message, and think instead in terms of how messages can improve web site search rank and provide content that aids potential customers as they make buying decisions.

Defining SEO benefits

What do I mean by “good link” and “significant SEO benefits”?  Search engine optimization is the art and science of fine tuning a web site’s content (among other things) so it shows up on the first page of search results for specific, targeted keywords and phrases.

A “good link” is one that includes one of those target terms, and links back to related pages on your web site.   Here’s how Larry defined his objective of garnering a “good link” from the WSJ.

“Real, editorial links from the WSJ. But not just any link. Ideally, links in an article that:

  • In some way mentioned WordStream (my company) so that we could get a bit of media exposure out of this effort
  • Links to both our homepage and contained to a deep page on our site with relevant anchor text.“

Now, as we all know, the sort of placement Larry in talking about – real, editorial placement – is right in PR’s wheelhouse.   How many of us are working with our web marketing teams and thinking about search terms and deep links when we’re developing our PR campaigns and planning our tactics?  Anecdotally, from the many conversations I’ve had with PR teams over the years, I’m going to venture to guess that the answer to that question is “Not many.”

A good link from a high-profile, high-authority news site – whether it’s the Wall St. Journal or an important niche publication – can provide lift in search rankings for your web site, which is a proven driver of business results, as well as fuel for social conversations.   The content we publish, and the results it generates across the enterprise – is all connected.

Newsworthy content & a good news hook

As one continues reading Larry’s post, it reads more-and more like a modern guide on how to get more PR pick up. He emphasized the need for newsworthy, unique content that was written for the WSJ readership, not a bunch of search experts.

Further on in the case, Larry also addresses the vital necessity of a solid news hook, and how he went about identifying the hook for his “content marketing” campaign.

Finally, by now we know that press releases with multimedia generate better results than plain text.  Larry knows the power of visuals too, and made an infographic central to his campaign.

This *really* sounds like PR now, doesn’t it?

The importance of high-value links & a new definition of “pick up”

I’m prepared to argue that generating high-value links from credible media and blogs should be a key goal of many PR campaigns.   This is a new facet to that old standard in our business – achieving editorial “pick up,” and it’s one that our peers in marketing are really good at measuring.  The teams who manage web marking, in particular, generally have really good insight into the performance of different web site content in terms of the generation of qualified traffic and leads, conversion rate and search rank.   There’s no reason why the content PR deploys can’t be tweaked in order to work in tandem with other content deployed by the organization.  This ‘tweaking’ isn’t onerous.  It just requires a little collaboration with the web marketing team, getting organized, and then being sure to use target terms in PR content, and linking those terms to relevant web site pages. In addition to synching publishing strategies, the same should also be done for measurement at well.  It’s not unreasonable to imagine a scenario in which a press release, for example, is measured in terms of resulting high-value media links, leads generated and search marketing value.

Borrowing a few pages from Larry’s playbook is a good idea for PR.  Simply put, we can leverage the press releases and other content we produce, publish and syndicate to impact far more than the goals set for the PR department and the outcomes the organization usually expect from the public relations team.

Author Sarah Skerik is PR Newswire’s vice president of social media and has written extensively on how public relations, content marketing and search intersect.

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The Cross-Platform Consumer: New Communication Imperatives

Posted on September 3, 2012 by | 6 Comments

A new study titled “The New Multi-Screen World: Understanding Cross-Platform Consumer Behavior” from Google suggests that reaching your audience on one device isn’t enough.  The research reveals that 90% of people use multiple devices – mobiles, PCs, tablets, smart phones, TVs – to accomplish a goal.

The study concluded there are two modes of multi-screen media consumption:

  • Sequential – where we move from one device to another to accomplish a goal.  An example of this would be researching a destination for a day trip at your PC, and then using your smart phone once you got there to make decisions about which restaurant to visit. According to the study, 9 out of 10 people use devices sequentially.
  • Simultaneous – when we use two or more devices at the same time.  The simplest example of this is watching TV, and tweeting about what you’re watching on your tablet. 77% of people watch TV with another device in hand.

 So what does this mean to marketers?  If anything this underscores the necessity of increasing our clock speeds and adopting an agile approach to engaging our audiences.  This reality is central to why PR Newswire has long advocated a multi-channel approach to distributing press releases and multimedia content.  It’s simply not enough to rely upon a web site or two any longer.

Additionally, Google makes several important conclusions about how consumers interact with information across devices:

  • Search is the connector between devices.  People use search engines to “pick up where they left off,” according to Google.
  • Turn “spur of the moment” activity into valuable opportunity.  The study suggests that 80% of searches from smart phones are done at the spur of the moment.  A great mobile presence can be instrumental in converting that opportunity into a sale.

Imperatives for communicators:

  • Ensure that your web site is not only search friendly, but formatted for mobile devices too.  Be sure your phone number, location and other information people access most frequently on your web site (business hours, menus, products, special offers, etc.) render quickly and prominently for mobile users.
  • Coordinate online and off-line campaigns.   One famous example of a brand failing to do this is the Snickers campaign that featured made up words such as “hungerectomy” printed on a Snickers wrapper.  This campaign was purely analog, appearing on billboards, the sides of busses and in print.  However, the ad’s creators overlooked the fact that offline messaging drives online behavior.  They have any digital presences designed to capture online interest in the campaign, and they didn’t buy search engine ads against the very words upon which the ad campaign centered.  Understand that offline messaging will trigger online activity, and plan accordingly.

The Google study is interesting reading and underscores the connectedness of our audiences and how the advent of mobile devices has significantly changed the decision making process.  It’s critical for brands to develop intelligent presences everywhere their audience is going to look – from search engines to social networks and from print to mobile.

Author  Sarah Skerik is PR Newswire’s vice president of social media, and is the author of the free ebook Unlocking Social Media for PR.

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Posted in Agile Engagement, Content PR & Marketing, Tools & Tactics

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Mapping the Reach of Content Distributed by PR Newswire

Posted on August 1, 2012 by | 1 Comment

Press releases and other content distributed by PR Newswire reach audiences via news media, search engines, social networks and a huge global content syndication network.

 

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