Public Relations Archives

The PR pitch or article pitch, while sometimes overlooked for more “sexy” marketing tactics, is a powerful mode of communicating brand value and establishing credibility in the marketplace. As shifts from traditional to digital marketing occur, the role of media outreach has become more critical than ever. In fact, surveys have shown that 80% of B2B decision makers prefer to get information on a business through an article (Content Marketing Institute).

Brands today are built by the consumer experience. The way in which those experiences are communicated and shared ultimately tells the value of any brand. To have value, brands must command attention, have authority and inspire a conversation.

Media outlets and editors are barraged on a daily basis by writers, freelance journalists, and PR reps seeking to have their stories told and their articles published. So, how do you write an effective article pitch that won’t be ignored, but compel a response? Start by following these four simple tips and tricks, and before you know it, you’ll be well on your way to becoming an article pitching pro.

Be Strategic

As with any marketing approach, it’s always best to be strategic and have plan for executing your PR pitch. The foundation of any good pitch is a strong story. Assess your company’s strengths, and select a topic that aligns with your capabilities and business objectives. The aim of article pitching is to position your business as an authority/thought-leader in the field and increase brand visibility. To achieve this, develop content that speaks to your areas of expertise, and offer real value to the media outlet and its readers.

Successful pitches are a result of careful planning. Whether it’s your first pitch or your one-thousandth, it is never a good practice to send a pitch to just anyone. Depending on the nature of your story, your target audience and your objectives, certain media outlets may be appropriate for your pitch while others may not. It is important to remember that not all publications are necessarily right for your story. A recent survey of industry professionals, including publishers, editors and journalists, showed that nearly 70% of them will reject or ignore a pitch if it appears irrelevant to their publication. So, make the effort to tailor your media list to each specific pitch. A pitch that aligns with the publication’s audience, coverage area, and subject matter is much more likely to result in a media pickup.

Make it Personal

If you want someone to take the time to read your pitch, take the time to develop and write it. Once you’ve established a content strategy and a list of media outlets, tailor your pitch to each reporter/editor and publication. Submission guidelines are provided for a reason, so use them to your advantage. They will often list the person you should get in contact with as well as provide some general tips on what they’re looking for and how-to pitch to them. Using a generic pitch may save you time upfront, but in the end, you’re not doing yourself any favors.

When you only have seconds to earn an editor’s attention, showing that you cared enough to learn about, and understand, their publication will help your pitch command attention. Consider leveraging a publication’s editorial calendar to enhance the strength of your pitch and media outreach efforts. This allows you connect your expertise to the focus of a future issue – demonstrating that your story is relevant to the specific publication.

Get to the Point

It is important to be respectful of people’s time. Recognize that they are also very busy and get right to the point. A MuckRack survey found that 58% of journalists consider two to three paragraphs as an ideal length for pitches. Make your case quickly, but provide enough details so they don’t need to look for further information to determine if the story is worth their time.

Read, Reread & Proof

This one may seem obvious, but in the rush to meet deadlines or get things done, the edit/review process can often be forgotten. You are trying to present yourself as an industry expert, so making a careless mistake like skipping spellcheck is one surefire way to get your pitch moved to the trash. Take the time to check, and double-check your work to ensure everything is spelled correctly, especially the name of the person you are contacting and the information you have provided is accurate.

Article placements are a powerful way to generate exposure for your business and establish yourself as a thought leader and credible authority in the marketplace.

About Millennium Agency

Millennium Agency is a nationally recognized, top woman led B2B branding, positioning, and digital marketing firm who knows how to create value that emotionally influences your customer’s buying decision, giving you the competitive advantage. As your trusted partner in B2B software technology and manufacturing, we provide the branding and positioning framework that make an impact – so you can focus on what you do best – run your business successfully. With offices in Boston and New Hampshire, and a worldwide presence, the professionals at Millennium Agency would like to learn more about your business.  Visit www.mill.agency or book time here.  

What’s Next in Digital Marketing?

2016 was a great year for digital marketing trends. From blogging to engaging with social media influencers, brands were able to boost awareness through many shifts in technology and social media.

New digital marketing trends will emerge in 2017. Expect videos to drive engagement and personalized content to mean more than ever before.

In a field that is constantly evolving, foresight is needed to dominate competitors. Find out more about what to expect next in digital marketing in 2017 in the full article published in Prime Women.

Do you need help with your digital marketing plan? Need to enhance your content to be search engine optimized? Contact Millennium President and Strategist Linda Fanaras at 877-873-7445 ext. 201 or connect via email at [email protected].

Email marketing is one of the best methods of communication in the B2B industry. It is less intrusive than phone calls and walk-ins, and the creation of workflows allows businesses to target qualified leads. A strong email marketing campaign is often 33% less expensive than other methods, and yields 50% more sales. Also, a 2% increase in customer retention actually equals a 10% decrease in operation costs when it comes to ROI. In fact, over 59% of marketers say that email provides their best ROI, and on top of that, 78% of marketers have seen an increase in engagement via email over the last 12 months. With the numbers in favor of B2B email marketing, are you effectively leveraging email automation in your business? HubSpot and SharpSpring are two of the top email marketing platforms, each with their own strengths for different types of businesses. Here’s a closer look at each to help you choose which solution is best for you:

Email Marketing With HubSpot

HubSpot is a powerful inbound marketing platform that enables users to easily manage content production, distribution, and analytics. Subscribers can access email and blog templates, and have the ability to track individual content promotions and highly-integrated campaigns. With portals for social media, email marketing, and blogging, HubSpot allows you to meet your audience via multiple communication channels.

HubSpot is the primary choice among companies that want to manage their digital and content strategies on a single platform. It can also help streamline practices already in place on your current website. For example, if you regularly write blogs, but they are not yielding the traffic increase expected, HubSpot can help optimize content before it is published. Also, the marketing automation giant recently unveiled a free Customer Relation Management (CRM) system that can help you manage over one million contacts.

A sampling of the tools available within HubSpot includes:

Keyword Research
Blog Template and Content Creation
Creation of Calls-to-Action
E-Blast Content and Optimization
Social Media Monitoring and Analytics

Email Marketing With SharpSpring

SharpSpring is another one of the top email marketing platforms that includes triggers, workflows, and reporting capabilities to nurture contacts. By implementing a comprehensive email marketing campaign to continuously engage customers, SharpSpring users are able to identify email recipients more likely to convert based on past interactions, such as clicking a link or filling out a form. Metrics can be set to score list members and update their stats from contact to lead based on these actions. As a result, SharpSpring is able to increase the likelihood of creating and maintaining strong sales relationships.

SharpSpring is ideal for businesses that are building their contact list with the goal of quickly converting them into sales. With competitive pricing options, SharpSpring supports ROI based on a proven method of lead scoring and email automation. Already have a comprehensive contact list in a different program? SharpSpring’s partnership with PieSync, a contact merging service, allows you to combine, upload, edit, and update contacts from over 30 third-party platforms.

SharpSpring users can implement and manage the following:

Lead Scoring
Content Creation
Email Templates
Trigger and Workflow Coordination
Creation of Calls-to-Action

Next Steps

Once your platform aligns with your business objectives, it is time to build out engaging content. An eye-catching subject line is only the beginning. After that, you need a simplified message, intriguing calls-to-action, and an intuitive workflow that nurtures contacts to leads to clients. Not sure where to start? Contact Millennium CEO and Strategist Linda Fanaras at [email protected] or call 1-877-873-7445.

Business-to-business (B2B) social media is drastically different than consumer-to-consumer or even business-to-consumer. For example, “you” are not an individual; “you” are an organization or a brand. How you write, when you publish, and what you discuss are ways in which you humanize your business, but it is important to maintain a certain level of professionalism. Social advertising is a powerful way to increase conversions and keep your brand top-of-mind if managed and implemented correctly. If you are on social media and not seeing the return on investment you expected, try incorporating one, some or all of these B2B social media advertising best practices:

1. Create and Maintain a Schedule

Social media is best executed when a six- to twelve-month schedule is determined in advance. This allows content managers to know topics and platforms that will need to be researched and developed well before a draft is due. It also provides a fallback for slow news and events months where a generic topic or retweet will fill the content gap. However, approving a schedule is only step one; setting the standard for sustaining consistent social media advertising is necessary to successfully leverage social platforms. Intermittent Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn posts reduce the likelihood of your overall campaign resulting in lead generation and improved audience awareness.

2. Use Paid Social Media

The average Facebook user has more than 150 friends, LinkedIn members at the CEO-level have around 930 connections, and over 500 million Tweets are sent every day. There is a lot of noise on social media, and the only way to ensure your message is being received is to utilize paid social advertising. All three primary B2B platforms (Twitter, LinkedIn, and Facebook) include advertising options that require a low minimum budget. The functionality is similar to that of Google AdWords wherein a user selects their campaign goal, bid strategy, and creative content. The platforms do the rest, and ROI is significantly easier to analyze and improve.

3. Leverage Social Media Targeting

You have no doubt seen the advertisements on social media that are sponsored by brands and promoters you have not explicitly connected with in the past. This is due to powerful social media targeting that allows marketers to tailor their ads to reach you based on your browsing history, social network, and general interests. By targeting both advertisements and boosted posts, you can reach the audience that is most likely to interact with your content and potentially convert in the future.

4. Engage Your Audience

Marketers sometimes forget that social media is a form of two-way communication. Rather than talking at your audience, start a conversation with them. Plan and execute a unique Facebook competition to generate buzz. Run a Twitter poll and learn more about user opinion on your product or service. Start a group on LinkedIn where you can talk with industry members and potential clients. With a strong strategy and innovative content, you can influence your audience to organically build brand awareness.

5. Track and Optimize Social Performance

Most social media platforms include tools for analyzing new followers, interactions, and audience activity. Like any successful advertising tactic, benchmarks should be set for social media advertising at which time the entire campaign is reviewed and improved. Creative should be updated at least every other week and calls-to-action should be rewritten based on the timeline of the campaign (month-long sale starts today vs. last day to buy discounted items). One of the most common ways social media advertising plans fail is set and forget; you activate a campaign and check back at the end to see how it did. Odds are, you missed out on several opportunities to better reach and engage your audience.

B2B social media advertising best practices are complex, and are constantly evolving and adapting to how clients utilize their platforms. If you are struggling to keep up or need holistic social media tips, check out one of our other blogs, 5 Reasons Why Social Media Is Crucial to Your Digital Strategy, and contact Linda Fanaras at Millennium Agency.

Growing Your Social Score

One of the latest trends in digital marketing and public relations is influencer marketing: the process of identifying and leveraging conversation leaders on social platforms.

Social scoring, made popular by companies like Klout, is one of the trending tools for influencer marketing that allows businesses to discover industry members with the best chance of perpetuating a brand message to a massive audience. However, this puts a piece of a marketing strategy out of the hands of agency and company members. Building your personal brand to influencer-levels is the better option that allows you to keep control of the message while growing your own social reach.

Find out the more about growing your social score in the full article published in Prime Women.

Do you need help building your personal brand? Need to transfer your strong person-to-person reputation to social media platforms? Contact Millennium CEO and Strategist Linda Fanaras at 877-873-7445 ext. 201 or connect via email at [email protected].

Building Your Personal Brand

You are your business, but are you devoting enough time to nurture and build your personal brand effectively?

Like any major company or organization, how your contacts and clients view your brand is essential to building positive, successful relationships. Your brand is the lifeblood of your company, so it is important to establish a strong online presence to impress your customers and gain their trust. Identifying your personal strengths, reaching out to past customers (both good and bad), and finding new ways to share your expertise are some of the key steps to creating a strong personal brand.

Read about the other steps on how to build your personal brand in the full article published in Prime Women.

Are you stuck on one of the steps in growing your personal brand? Not sure how to advance to the next step or make the most of the work you have already done? Contact Millennium CEO and Strategist Linda Fanaras at 877-873-7445 ext. 201 or connect via email at [email protected].

About Millennium Agency

Your business has been working to elevate its public relations profile and brand awareness by optimizing the website, engaging on social media and writing a blog. Now that you’ve “put yourself out there” you need to employ an appropriate online reputation management strategy which focuses on optimizing your website, engaging on social media and writing a blog. Yes, you read that correctly, the very things you need to do to establish and elevate your business’ online profile are the same tools you need to use to manage your online reputation.

It is not enough to simply open social media accounts, establish a blog and have a website, you have to use them, and keep content current. Word-of-mouth is still the most effective form of advertising and promotion, but instead of being face-to-face it has moved online where a customer’s praise of, recommendation for or condemnation of your product or service, is on display for the entire world to see. As the Huffington Post reports, 90 percent of customers say their decisions are driven by online reviews. How you engage and respond to your customers and other target audiences online will enhance or hinder your company’s reputation, both online and off.

1. Post

Seems obvious, but one of the best ways to positively impact your online reputation management is to regularly post on social media and your business blog. The more you post, the higher you will rank in feeds and search engines. In fact, every time you add to your blog it indexes another page on your website helping to increase your SEO and page rank. However, don’t forget about quality over quantity. What you post has to be timely and relevant, have meaning and add value to your brand.

2. Monitor

People are talking about your business. Do you know what they are saying about you? Monitoring what is being said about your business and where, is the second step of online reputation management. It is not enough to simply post. To gauge how effective your content is you have to track engagement with your content. Who is engaging? When? Where? And most important, what are they saying?

To effectively manage your online reputation you have to know where your audience is and what channels they use most frequently. You can set up alerts in the major search engines to be notified when something new about your business appears on the internet. You should also proactively monitor appropriate review sites (Amazon, Yelp, Trip Advisor, Yahoo) for your business.

3. Respond

Monitoring leads to the third step in online reputation management: responding. We’ve said it before and we’ll say it again, social media is a two-way conversation. Not only do you have to know what people are saying about your business, but respond to it. Say thank you, congratulate, ask for feedback—establish a relationship. The same is true with negative reviews and comments. How you handle negative comments can actually be a boost to your reputation provided you:

Acknowledge the customer’s/reviewer’s complaint.
Thank them for their feedback.
Show empathy for their situation.
Provide options for addressing their issue.
Reaffirm your business cares about their perspective and welcomes feedback

4. Listen

Step four of online reputation management is about listening. Once you have established your online presence and built relationships, you can foster business growth by listening to and acting on what your customers say they want, need or would like to see improved about your product or service. Listening can help drive your content with in-depth responses to customer questions or ideas and encourage user generated content and shared experiences. Listening can help shape the future of your company, product development, strategic affiliations and community engagement. Listening demonstrates your company is walking its talk and enhances reputation overall.

Take it One Step Further

Understandably, finding the time and resources to not only develop and post content, but monitor and manage online engagement and reputation, can be challenging. Whether you need help with your online reputation management or a digital strategy to enhance your reputation, Millennium can help. Call 877-873-7445 ext. 201 or connect via email at [email protected]

Benefits of Blogging for Your Brand

It may seem ironic to blog about blogging, but it exemplifies the very benefits of using a blog to build a stronger brand for your business:

Positioning yourself as an expert in your field.
Keeping abreast of industry trends.
Commenting on noteworthy topics.
Focusing your content development.
Building relationships and driving traffic.

Blogs have increasingly become a pivotal tool in the public relations toolbox to connect directly with consumers and journalists alike. The more conversational style of a blog cuts through the traditional “PR speak” and enables the writer to showcase the business personality, develop rapport with readers and enhance the online relationship. According to HubSpot, 60% of businesses that blog acquire more customers. Let’s take a closer look at how blogging can help your business build a stronger brand.

Establish Your Expertise

From airlines to finance, healthcare to zoology and every industry in between, businesses are blogging to share their stories, control their narrative and position themselves as experts in their field. Blogging is one of the fastest and most cost effective means of putting your story out there in the way you want to tell it. Your blog enables you to not only share your news, but also the personality behind the brand.

Blogs tend to take on a more conversational tone because they are written for the end reader, not a gatekeeper. A blog can help your business build a stronger brand through personalization, and position you as an industry leader through focused, timely and relatable content.

Focus Your Strategy

Once you establish your business blog, it will become the focal point of your content strategy fueling your social media and web traffic. Writing a blog forces your business to answer the important questions like who you are writing for and why. Committing to a blog also requires you to develop a regular posting schedule of topics that are relevant, relatable and responsive to your readers’ wants and needs. Remember, it is a two-way conversation and what you blog about today may just be the answer to a new client’s question months from now.

Build Relationships

One of the biggest benefits of blogging to build a stronger brand for your business, is that you speak directly to your target audience(s). Your blog can open up a whole new world of engagement not possible through traditional public relations and marketing. Through those that comment, follow and share your blog, you can build relationships and expand your reach. That dialogue not only allows you to share industry insight and a look behind the scenes of your business, it also helps you discern how consumers are using your product or service. By gaining awareness of questions, concerns or ideas consumers might have about the user experience enables you to be responsive and help build out your content strategy.

Media is another key audience. Increasingly, editors and journalists look to blogs for insight on trending topics and ideas for news and feature stories. Due to the more open and conversational writing style, your blog can “cut through the clutter,” so to speak, build trust and place your business front and center for the next big journalistic scoop.

Increase the Bottom Line

So you’ve established a blog, invested time in researching and writing posts, and have a following. What is the payoff? Increased traffic to your website through social media and search engines, as well as generating leads via calls to action. According to HubSpot, every blog post results in another indexed page on your website increasing the opportunity to be picked up by search engines and increasing web traffic through organic search. And as mentioned earlier, your blog feeds your social media which can expose your business to new audiences while expanding your reach in established social circles. Add in the compounding effect of a blog, which is to say the post you write today can still be generating leads six months to a year from now, and your relevance in the marketplace continues to rise.

Ready to Breakout Your Business Blog?

Now that you are ready to add blogging to your business’ public relations strategy to build a stronger brand, Millennium can help. Talk to one of our digital experts to get started developing your content strategy and search engine optimization. Call 877-873-7445 ext. 201 or connect via email at [email protected].

It all starts with a headline, and according to PRWeb, a strong headline is key to making your press releases stand out, grabbing the right person’s attention, getting clicks and having others write about your brand. But before you have the right headline, you have to have news to share. Getting coverage relies on news that is presented as clear, concise content and optimized with data, keywords and photos that can be shared online, in print and on social platforms.

Make It Newsworthy

The purpose of a press release is for sharing company news, getting the media to cover and distribute it, and elevate brand awareness through:

your events
product launches or new services
staff announcements
awards/achievements
sponsorships/stewardship
expert commentary on issues in the news

You need to make sure you have genuine news to share to be viewed as a credible and reliable source to journalists. Your press release needs to be about a single topic directed at a target audience that elicits a desired response or ideal outcome. Keeping it real and noteworthy is critical as quality of news is much richer than quantity.

Get to the Point

The headline got their attention, the dateline indicates from where and when the news originates, now you need to make your point in the opening, aka the lead, sentence or paragraph. This is where you answer the classic who, what, when, where, why and how. These are the facts and you want them right up front so it is clear what your news is about. Or as one news editor once said to me: answer who cares and why.

Following the lead is all of your body copy with supporting information, the boilerplate, or information about your company, and contact information. Make sure you write your press release in such a way that is engaging to your target audience. How you write about your company’s sponsorship of a traveling circus and encouraging parents to bring their children is going to be different than releasing the latest financials aimed at investors. Regardless of the story you are telling, brevity is key. Keeping your press release to 500 words or less is ideal.

Have a Call to Action

In addition to the facts included in your lead, PRWeb says you also need to tell people what you want them do with a call to action. BusinessWire recommends highlighting key text—bold, italic or underline— so it is clear how readers can initiate the next level of engagement with your brand. It also cuts through the clutter, and gives visual clues to the most pertinent information, making it more easily digestible to information skimmers.

Optimize

Links, keywords and multimedia are all key elements of your press release, making them easier to share on various mediums, including news wires, website and on social. As noted by BusinessWire, links to additional information such as FAQs or backgrounds drive traffic and provide engagement metrics. Keywords associated with your news help maximize SEO with your target audience so that it gets read and shared through social media.

Additionally, photos and videos provide context for your content and, according to PRWeb, are more likely to get shared on a publication’s social media, which can have as much value as their printed and online pages. It should go without saying that all press releases include your company logo at the top of the release, but consider this your reminder, as it is the primary image associated with your brand.

Make Contact

Finally, make sure journalists know who to contact. Be sure your press releases have appropriate names, phone numbers and emails for follow-up. If you use Twitter, include that as well, but only if you are regularly responsive to it.

After your release has been sent, decide who you want to pitch further. Tailor your follow-up to these journalists with a more personal approach and by offering more detailed information, a unique angle or the opportunity for an exclusive. Journalists love a good scoop.

Start Spreading the News

Armed with the nuts and bolts of a successful press release, you are ready to get your company’s news out there. Need help with media contacts, news wire distribution or crafting a specific pitch? Millennium can help. Call to connect with us at 877-873-7445 ext. 201 or email [email protected].

About Millennium Agency

Millennium Agency is a nationally recognized, top woman-led boutique creative branding, storytelling/messaging and digital marketing strategy firm with a passion for accelerating your business growth. By uniting creative branding and data analytics, our expert teams combine your vision with our marketing expertise and methodology to deliver exceptional results. With offices in Boston and New Hampshire, and a worldwide presence, the professionals at Millennium Agency would like to learn more about your business.  Visit www.mill.agency or book time here.

What is Public Relations?

Public relations (PR) is more than just talking points, press releases and media relations. To achieve success with public relations, you need to set your sights on the “ideal PR outcome,” then develop, nurture and engage in relationships that support and meet the needs of that outcome. What does that mean?

If you are interested in getting your PR efforts to pay off, then it means you need to look beyond the basics. While components of PR are tactics for carrying out the larger strategic mission of reaching the right audience, in order to achieve success, you need to be consistent and persistent. Working toward the big picture, even incrementally, will pay off. So every move you make, every connection you attempt —even any networking event you go to— should support that end goal of your “ideal PR outcome.”

Determining Your “Ideal PR Outcome”

So how do we get there?

First, decide what you want to achieve, write it down and build out a plan.

Next, develop messaging that resonates with targeted audiences and elicits a desired response (purchase, donation, attendance, vote, etc.) in support of your company. To hone in on your message, focus on key questions: Who are we? What do we offer? What makes us special? How do we want to be perceived in the market place? Once you answer these questions, put together your messaging and talking points, which become your public relations Bible, and the foundation on which to build your communication strategy.

The art of achieving the “ideal PR outcome” is in the message itself, the story, how it is packaged and delivered. Just as in marketing, it is a dance between creative messaging, digital and traditional outlets, and that knack of consistent communication – you have to marry all the components to be effective.

Connecting with Public Relations

Storytelling: People connect with people. The art of PR is to craft messages or stories that connect people with ideas, products and services. Data has to be translated in a way that is interesting and responsive to your target audience(s) need for information. This could be internal (employees, boards of directors, investors) or external (reporters, editors, customers) audiences. How you tell and deliver that story is going to be different for different audiences but the message will be the same for every medium you touch: social, email, websites, publications, video and/or talk radio. Consistency of message is key, regardless of the communication channel.

Keep Listening to the Press: Online and social media make it easier for today’s PR professionals to zero in on what’s hot and what’s not. In addition to traditional media monitoring (print, broadcast, radio), PR taps into what’s trending on social, Google search and keywords. This “listening” presents opportunities for relevant messages, conversations and content to be injected into the digital realm that connect your brand with consumer needs, desires and passions. This is the convergence of media relations and digital visibility as traditional media relations, including press releases and inquiries still have their place, but incorporate and are enhanced by today’s digital channels.

Stay Connected with Everyone: Being present is key to PR success. PR has to have a face for any company to demonstrate it walks its talk. This is where company culture comes into play in recognizing it is not just up to the C-Suite or PR professional to build relationships, but every employee at every encounter in-person, online and on the phone. Employees are your company’s ambassadors and having them engaged in the community, trade shows and even networking events will pay off—as long as they are pushing “your message”.

Reputation Management: In additional to tapping into trends, media and social monitoring also enables PR to know what is being said about the company and respond accordingly. Relationships after all are based on two-way communication. This is amplified when a company faces a crisis and needs to respond quickly, responsibly and honestly. Again it is walking the talk and addressing the issues head on. These are the times to put your relationships to work provided they are built on trust, integrity and mutual respect.

Putting PR into Practice

PR is not marketing but they work together for the benefit of company. PR builds, cultivates and maintains the relationships that marketing targets. PR reinforces the company’s commitment to its product/services and intended user/supporter. PR demonstrates it is many people working together to achieve your company goals. And the best PR comes from the inside out.

What’s Your PR Strategy?

Need help developing your public relations strategy to support your company’s success? Millennium can help, whether you are looking for a solid foundation to build on or ready to expand your influence in the marketplace. Call or email to connect with us at 877-873-7445 ext. 201 or [email protected].