Public Relations: Four 'Wow' Ways to Use It for Sales

"PR is an insanely valuable activity in early-stage companies," wrote venture capitalist Mark Suster on his popular blog for startups.
The problem is that most companies focused on growth are almost allergic to public relations: It takes a ton of time, it doesn't easily lend itself to metrics, and the people who work in PR are often big picture, strategic—or, if you'd rather, "fuzzy"—thinkers.
In other words, PR people don't fit easily into the world of the bootstrapped or venture-backed growth company.
Yet, founders and investors alike will acknowledge that a company's perceived lack of credibility is one of the silent killers of great sales opportunities: Big potential clients can circle and circle, but they are famously risk-averse. In this era of transparency, social proof, and infinite-pages-on-Forbes, a company that doesn't have great coverage or exposure is almost questionable—and that's enough to kill big deals.
Public relations and sales are perfect companions

Fortunately, with the right technology and tracking, public relations is the perfect support to a natural lead nurturing process. PR creates enough credibility so that you can...

1. Encourage starter customers to grow into enterprise customers
2. Reassure existing investors with social traction
3. Attract new investors for your next round
4. Build your qualified site traffic and Alexa score all at once

Here are four simple ways you can use public relations to enhance your sales—and track it.
1. Build qualified traffic through social media
Share the great coverage you've achieved: Highlight it in your newsletter (if you have one), on your LinkedIn and other social media pages, and in a running news feed on your website. Make it apparent that your industry is in love with you.
Here's what you'll get:

• More credibility (hard to measure)
• Lots more awareness (hard to measure)
• Attaboys from investors
• 10-20% boosts in qualified Web traffic (watch the inbound social link traffic to see it happen)

Here's how you do it:

1. Follow the journalists you want to cover you.
2. Read their work and reshare it with insightful comments, always providing appropriate attribution. Depending on your needs and profile, use a right-sized social media tool to make this easier, such as HootSuite, Radian6, Buffer, or (one of my favorites) Attentive.ly.
3. When they cover you, send the piece to your prospects and your customers, put it in your website, share it, and thank them.
4. Repeat.

2. Make lead generation events do double duty
There's nothing like having people who already trust you in the room—learning to trust you more and sharing that with others. That's why event marketing is ranked by B2B marketers year after year as their "go-to" sales tactic, according to the MarketingProfs and Content Marketing Institute annual study.
Your marketing team already executes trendy client development events, now consider inviting trade journalists, local journalists, and promising bloggers to come meet sources and learn the trends, too. You may even jump for a ticket for a writer who really gets your field and your company.
Here's what you'll get:

• Top-notch coverage of your event
• Better relationships with journalists—priceless over the long haul
• Inbound prospects from links in the articles (trackable!)
• Bonus points from clients and investors who see that you are the go-to company in your industry

Here's how you do it:

1. Go back to that list of journalists, and have your CEO invite them to participate on a press pass, all expenses paid.
2. Assign one person on your team, or from your agency, to help the journalists connect. See whether they can do briefings with a key client or two as well as a couple of your inside thought leaders.
3. Make sure they get a company backgrounder, possibly case study notes prewritten, and bios, ahead of the event.
4. Provide a quiet private room for the journalists to work with lots of power, coffee, and raging-fast Internet.

3. Hijack the smartest minds in your industry
What, you haven't written your book yet? Of course not! Growth stage companies are too busy for major campaigns like book writing. The next best thing is to develop a mutually beneficial alliance with a leading author or two in your field.
Authors are looking for ways to promote their books—and you'd like to reach their audience, too. Combing forces is one way to do both. Creating a webinar on a topic of interest both to the author and to you creates content that is twice as interesting. Moreover, the author's network enlarges the distribution footprint.
Here's how you do it:

1. Read books in your industry (you're already doing that, right?).
2. Pick three authors who speak to you or your team.
3. Reach out to them on their author website or LinkedIn, inviting them to speak with you about a webinar series. Ask whether they would be open to promoting the series to their own fans (you'll want to hear a "yes").
4. Offer to buy copies of their book for attendees, or for attendees who attend and ask questions. It's quid pro quo: This person needs to promote and sell books; make sure you help.
5. Mention your webinar series with the author when you are speaking with trade journalists.
6. List the author webinar in the trade calendars as an industry event.
7. Have one of your content developers write up the webinar with the author and your expert as a blog post or series of posts.

Here's what you get:

• Access to a new group of potential clients through the authors' distribution list
• Signups for your webinar consisting of people interested in the topic who are now on your nurture list
• More credibility

4. Put clients on commission
Few clients like to go on the record with a no-holds barred testimonial, so don't ask them for it. Instead, ask them to go on video with a short industry perspective at your next big tradeshow, where presumably you and the client will both attend.
Used properly on your website, these kinds of pieces showcase the kind of company you are by showcasing the quality of the company you keep. One example is the recent video by ENGAGE.cx, a CRM startup: Its video features thought leadership from a former VP of CRM at Oracle and at Intercontinental Hotels group.
Here's how you do it:

1. Look for clients who are building their personal reputation as thought leaders.
2. Ask whether they would provide a perspective on an issue that matters to you business and your prospective clients.
3. Provide 1-3 questions in advance for your client.
4. Send a video team to them. You'll find their perspective speaks for itself when they showcase their own strengths and insights.
5. Put the video on your website and develop a social media campaign around it.
6. Ask your client and your client's PR team to promote their point of view.
7. Send it to journalists and ask whether they'd like to interview your client and your internal expert on the topic.

Here's what you get:

• Enormous credibility kudos
• Nice soundbites for investors about why companies are working with you
• Jealous competitors
• Substantial inbound lead traffic to see what experts say on an important trend (thanks to your social media outbound and your media pitching—and perhaps that of your client as well)

* * *
Your public relations efforts pay off even more powerfully when distributed through your sales and marketing process. There are many more ways to do this—once you get started sharing your credibility, it's addictive. Let me know how it's going for you.
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Five Ways Marketing Technology Will Transform Our Industry

Though 83% of B2B marketers say creating buyer-centric marketing is a priority, only 23% claim to be advanced in its implementation, according to research firm SiriusDecisions.
This discrepancy isn't surprising when you look at the technology landscape in which today's marketers operate.
 Nearly 2,000 marketing solutions that specialize in search, email, social, events, webinars, videos, and much more are now available. Marketers have defaulted to building marketing strategies around these channels-focused investments rather than buyer interests.
But priorities are shifting away from rigid channel-based tactics toward holistic strategies that deliver a consistent buyer experience across all devices and outlets, and allow for adaptation in the face of inevitable change.
How will marketing technology help push us toward that brighter future?

Here are five ways.
1. Integration will rule
Integration is the key to supporting real alignment across teams, getting visibility into all your content and campaigns, surfacing insights that are otherwise locked inside tools, and ensuring your buyer's journey is clear and consistent.
If your investments in marketing technology are going to succeed, those different apps and systems need to "talk to each other." And that's where integration is critical.

Rebecca Lieb, industry analyst at the Altimeter Group, refers to a future model called the "content marketing stack," which combines eight specific workflow solutions around content and social.

This stack will not only work with technologies currently on the market, Lieb says, but will also promote integrations with future tools.
"There can always be new technologies that emerge, technologies we haven't even thought of or conceived of at this point," Lieb says. "But there is an immediate need for all of these point solutions on the landscape to start talking to each other and start playing nice with each other."
By opening up their APIs, marketing "stacks" will allow new technologies to plug into their environments seamlessly.
2. Marketers will become technologists
As the technology landscape shifts toward integration, marketers will need to become more tech-savvy than ever.

Mayur Gupta, chief marketing technologist at Kimberly-Clark, calls the future marketer who is not only technically driven but also creatively driven "The Unicorn."
"The Unicorn is a modern marketer who is a technologist," Gupta says. "But she is also a storyteller, she is also a creative, she is also a copywriter."
The Unicorns will cut across silos—both internal and external—unifying the customer journey from awareness to sale through retention.
The result is a closely integrated department, regardless of function, that can plan and deliver marketing campaigns based on both analytical and creative decision-making.
3. Silos will shatter
Most marketing teams today depend on static documents circulated via email for feedback or a sea of disorganized Google documents. As a result, multiple versions and conflicting edits throw a wrench in efficiency, confusing stakeholders and stalling campaign launches. There are no visible tasks or next steps, and things get very messy very quickly.
Visibility is the cornerstone of a customer-centric marketing process. Future marketing teams will depend on agile, adaptable processes that hinge on real-time editing and collaboration on cloud-based platforms.
This integrated platform will grant organization-wide visibility across all functions, channels, and tools.
4. New executive roles will emerge
Great customer experiences are human-driven, not technology-driven. Companies need someone to hold the reins on internal marketing technology investments, organizing and prioritizing them to deliver a rewarding customer experience.

Some 70% of companies today already have a chief marketing technologist (CMT). Soon, it will be more like 90%.
Research firm Gartner defines CMTs as "familiar with marketing techniques as well as technologies. They need to understand how to use technology to define markets, attract, acquire, and retain customers."
Their main job, as Scott Brinker puts it, is to enable a holistic approach to marketing technology and help leadership recognize how new technologies can open up new opportunities across all teams.
Technically fluent storytellers, CMTs are the bridges between IT and marketing. They work closely with the CIO and the CMO to establish the technological blueprint that allows companies to serve their customers at the highest level.
5. Insights will surface
Future integrated marketing technology stacks will provide real insights into marketing performance, surfacing data previously locked in separate tools.
These platforms will provide far more than vanity metrics like unique views and shares. They'll integrate with social, CRM, marketing automation, and Web analytics tools to reveal results across all channels throughout the buyer's cycle. The results then give marketers insight into which content and messages speed up the pace to purchase.
This vision of marketing technology isn't only a figment of our imaginations. There are centralized platforms already adopting this model today.

Google's Ridiculous AdSense Morality Police Strike Again

AP Photo/Andy Wong, File
Nearly a year ago, we wrote about an absolutely ridiculous situation in which Google AdSense threatened to cut off all of our ads (which they had just spent months begging us to use) because the ads showed up on this page, which has a story about a publicity rights dispute concerning a music video that includes someone dancing suggestively around a pole. The morality police at AdSense argued that this news story -- which was about a legal dispute concerning the video -- somehow violated AdSense's terms against putting the ads on content including "strategically covered nudity" and "lewd or provocative poses." Apparently, the AdSense team has no "newsworthy" exception to these idiotic policies.

TAGGED: Google, Ads

Optimizing for AdWord

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Optimizing for AdWords Display Campaigns: Demographics, Ads, Mobile

For campaigns running on AdWords' Google Display Network (GDN), advertisers will likely have various goals and results. For branding and awareness, ad impressions and reach will be the key metric to track. For sales and conversion goals, more targeted campaigns with higher click-through rate (CTR) and conversions will be the goal.
There are several other options, so optimizing display campaigns can make all the difference. Consider the following tips when rolling up your sleeves for optimizations:

Demographics

Layer demographics targeting into any campaign for more accuracy in reaching your audience. In the AdWords demographics tab, you will see a chart that shows the demographic stats of your audience based on clicks, impressions, or conversions. Pay special attention to how the stats change as the drop-down is changed. The audience may vary slightly from who is targeted (impressions) vs. who actually clicks or converts.


Based on stats and goals, there are several optimization actions that can be taken like exclusions, bid maximums, or destination URLs. Use this for improving campaign customization. For example, say your product has slightly different messages for men and women. Send each to different landing pages to see how that may impact results.

Text Ads on GDN

Text ads on the display network have evolved into a simplified format with easier readability for mobile users. Oftentimes the ads will be displayed with the title and description lines one and line two. With this, a dotted scroll area reveals a display URL when user clicks. There is also a large button with arrow. The clickable areas in the ad are the headline, button, and the display URL on "page 2" of the ad.

On mobile, it appears as you scroll down the page in the browser, the ad does automatically advance to the destination URL, otherwise it appears to be the same as desktop.

Text ads in display may need slightly different approach than text ads in search. To optimize for text ads on GDN:

• It may be more powerful to combine lines one and two into one-sentence messaging to get the key point across.
• If brand is important, don't rely on the display URL to provide brand cues. Instead, use it in the headline so it is most visible with the larger font and in blue.
• Likewise, since the headline is most visibly, try using the call-to-action or top selling point in the text ad.

Mobile Display and Mobile App Serving

As I noted in my post "5 PPC Settings That Can Sabotage Success," sometimes an influx of impressions in your display campaign and a reduction in conversion rate can mean the ads are appearing on mobile apps. This can happen in almost any campaign targeting, even campaigns that have a -100 percent bid modifier to opt out of mobile because the ads will still appear on tablets. Often the apps have little to do with your product or service. Typically users are busy actively engaging in the app, not in ads.
Mobile placements may not be appropriate for advertisers who do not have a mobile-friendly website and neglected to optimize for this.

There are a few ways to control this:

1. Site category options allow advertisers to exclude categories such as sensitive content or type of placement. In this area, look for "in-game" (online and mobile app games where ads are shown within the game) and GMob mobile app non-interstitial (banner ad slots in GMob mobile apps) and consider excluding them.
2. Using a -100% on mobile will exclude apps and mobile websites, so consider this as an option, too. It will not exclude apps on tablets.
3. In placement exclusions, entering in adsenseformobileapps.com should exclude apps on mobile and tablet without impacting mobile websites.
4. Exclude individual placements apps. Start with analyzing results to determine which are relevant to ads and which ones are not and exclude as appropriate. For example, children’s apps if they are not appropriate but all other app placements are OK.

The display network can be a challenging territory to traverse, but optimizations in based on goals for different campaigns elements can be very effective in fine-tuning results. Optimization possibilities are endless, so what are your tips and tricks to improve GDN performance? Tell us in the comments or tweet at @sewatch or @LisaRocksSEM.

Lisa Raehsler is the founder and principal strategist at Big Click Co. , an online advertising company and Google AdWords Certified Partner, specializing in strategy and management of SEM and PPC for search engines, display, retargeting, and social media ad campaigns. More than just passionate about search, Lisa has led strategy on dozens of PPC accounts and puts her experience into practice every day as a thought leader in integrating clients' search campaigns with ecommerce websites, behavioral targeting strategies, and web analytics.
In addition to agency work, she has led successful online marketing programs at Thomson Reuters in search marketing, merchandising, and ecommerce strategies at the enterprise level.
Lisa frequently lends her expertise to the search industry through organizational involvement, speaking, and writing. She has participated extensively in the local interactive community, as well as at national search engine marketing conferences. Lisa's recent speaking engagements include SES, OMS, MIMA, HeroConf, and SMX conferences, as well as numerous private and public training engagements. As a columnist for ClickZ, she writes on the topic of paid search. She holds a BA in Economics from Valparaiso University and is a Google AdWords Certified Partner.

Messenger Business

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Messenger Business: Facebook Turns Messenger Into Customer Service & Commerce Channel

Today at Facebook’s developer conference F8 the company announced, among other things, Messenger Platform, which opens up the app to third party publisher and developers. As one feature of Messenger Platform, Facebook also introduced what it’s calling “Messenger for Business.”
The objective is to “reinvent the way people communicate and interact with businesses.” Initial integrations include e-commerce sites Everlane and Zulily. Customer service software provider Zendesk is also supporting the platform.
Facebook isn’t limiting the program to e-commerce; it wants to make Messenger a customer service/live chat channel for all kinds of businesses. For now the focus, however, is on enterprises. Small businesses have access to similar messaging functionality through their existing Pages.
There are different technical integrations and specifications behind the scenes. But what Messenger for Business is intended to do is replace email and provide real-time business-customer interaction and rich notifications (see graphics above and below). Where Messenger is integrated and consumers are logged in to Facebook, they’ll see an opt-in prompt on partner commerce sites to receive shipping notifications.

If users agree they’ll receive Messenger updates tied to specific shipping events (e.g., delay). Customers will also be able to discuss anything with the enterprise or merchant, including the desire to buy more of something. Facebook told me that both Everlane and Zulily reps could address the potential sales opportunities.
I asked about automation vs. live human support. Facebook stressed that it was up to the partner but the company’s preference was for human customer service and support vs. chat bots.
In an ideal scenario Messenger for Business removes friction from the customer service process (now mostly telephone based) and could result in incremental sales for merchants. There are lots of interesting possibilities. As with all things, however, partner execution will mater to the user experience. Facebook is being careful to selectively roll out the feature to those partners the company believes will deliver a great experience.
One can imagine over time all kinds of interesting possibilities and interactions facilitated by Messenger around appointment inventory, products, product features and specs and so on. Say, for example, I’m getting ready to buy a major appliance. I could hypothetically ask retailers like HomeDepot or Lowe’s whether they have the item in stock, what the price is and what the various product configurations are. (HomeDepot and Lowe’s are not announced partners.)
I repeatedly Facebook about all kinds of small-business hypotheticals and scenarios and was consistently redirected back to Pages. Right now Messenger for Business isn’t available for traditional “offline” SMBs. Over time it could be.
If it becomes widely adopted Messenger for Business could rival or exceed Twitter’s vaunted customer service capabilities. Indeed, for those organizations that do a good job with it, Messenger for Business potentially represents a major advance over phone-based customer service, IVRs and the horrifying, but now standard recorded refrain: “due to higher than expected call volumes wait times will be longer than expected.

Facebook Launches New Video Embeds

Facebook Launches New Video Embeds & Comment Syncing From Site To Page

Wed, 25 Mar 2015 19:25:24 +0000

Have you found the perfect Facebook video to illustrate a blog post? Now you can embed it directly on your site without its supporting post. Facebook also has a beta test that allows comments on publishers’ sites to sync to their Facebook Page and vice versa.
Facebook announced the new features today at its F8 developers conference in San Francisco.
Previously, if you wanted to embed video on your site, you had to embed the entire Facebook post containing the video. So like Twitter before it, Facebook is enabling YouTube-like video embedding. That will please publishers, journalists and the creators of videos who should see greater distribution of their content. It should also increase the number of Facebook video views, which are already averaging 3 billion a day according to the social network.
The new feature is active now:

The update to the comment plugin will affect fewer publishers — at least immediately — but it could prove to be a major development. At launch in 2011 and until now, the comment plugin gave publishers the ability to host a Facebook powered discussion board on their site, but the conversation there is largely siloed. Commenters are given the ability to post comments on their News Feed, but any conversation on a site’s Facebook Page is separate from the discussion going on within the comment plugin.
Now publishers will have the option to mirror those conversations. The discussion thread from any link posted on a site’s Facebook Page will automatically pull in comments from the plugin and vice versa.
“The value here is we can unify the conversation in multiple places,” said Simon Cross, a product manager on Facebook’s platform team. “We think that’s going to increase engagement on your website because there will be more comments there.”
The new feature is being rolled out in the next few weeks as a beta test with six publishers: BET, NHL, BuzzFeed, Huffington Post, Elite Daily and Fox Sports

Uplifting Instagram Marketing

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Uplifting Instagram Marketing: Soffe Apparel's Paul Anderson on Marketing Smarts [Podcast]

Paul Anderson is director of marketing at Soffe Apparel, an apparel company started in 1949 as a distributor to the military. Over the years, the company expanded into clothing and became known for its signature athletic shorts. The shorts, made for men, became popular among cheerleaders, who would fold down the band so they'd fit properly.
In the fall of 2014, Soffe conducted market research into the young, female market for athletic apparel that yielded some interesting insights. Soffe learned that women felt more motivated to work out as part of a group, and that that sense of belonging was key to success when pursuing their fitness goals.
I invited Paul to Marketing Smarts to discuss how Soffe used those insights to completely rebrand the company to reach the underserved demographic of young, female athletes seeking inspiration and motivation from one another.
Soffe's "Strength in Us" campaign is a complete turnaround from the brand's previous marketing message. The company's willingness to act on sound audience data has turned its social channels into a destination of choice for its target audience.
Here are just a few highlights from our conversation:

Don't be afraid to rebrand if you're not reaching your core audience (03:23): "The Soffe brand has been going through a massive revamp over the past 18 months.... We noticed especially on the women's side that there was this massive disconnect with our core consumers. So, one of the things we wanted to do...was to go out and actually listen to that consumer. That really prompted [us to conduct] research."
Invest in research so you can truly understand your audience (04:00): "One of the big things we did was to bring on a new agency of record...and they've got some pretty interesting proprietary tools at their disposal [that] allowed us to set the stage for the research that we did. Being able to, at scale, understand and listen on social and through search, we were able to get an idea of brand sentiment.... That then prompted us to dig into the specifics around our core consumer.... Young women were connecting through exercise and these group-based activities.... 80% of young women said they were more motivated to exercise with friends or a team. 92% said they were more powerful as a group... It wasn't that they weren't competitive—they were individually competitive—they just felt that there was something more."
Look for opportunities to connect with audiences your competition is ignoring (05:35): "As we looked at the activewear market in general, we saw a big opportunity there to tell our story, a story that had been part of Soffe for a long time: our roots in the military, our roots in cheerleading, and then how that evolved to how...young women approach active now.... We're a smaller 'fighter brand' as I like to say, but as you look at the big guys that are out there, it's all a lot of the same—advertises and talks about 'lone individuals' with big campaign slogans glorifying the single athlete. We thought that this was an interesting thing that we'd want to hang our hat on, and talk to our core consumer and young women in a more realistic and authentic way."
Once you've reviewed the data, use it to better serve your target audience (07:41): "We did some early segmentation work and really looked at the different groups around dance culture, around gymnastics culture, Zumba and cardio barre—all these sort of new exercise movements that really are based around groups, and they all sort of draft off of dance in a lot of ways. We're really concentrating on messaging around those activity bases where we're building product and merchandizing around those things. It started with segmentation."
Go where your audience is (like Instagram) and give them content that inspires (08:53): "What we wanted to do as we launched for spring 2015 was to put a break between the brand's old and new content. We wanted to be pretty stark about it. To launch the 'Strength is in Us' campaign, we released a 24-word manifesto in 24 separate posts, and each post featured compelling statistics around our study, and it really just captivated—the statistics around teamwork, around the power of collective strength. It was interesting to see our consumer who was used to our 'old' content, and then seeing the reaction from our new 'coming out' party.... It's just about being a content source for our consumer and really to inspire and motivate young women around this idea of 'the power of we' and 'the strength is in us....' We were on Instagram before, but we're being more strategic and more channel specific about it. It is our most engaged channel."

Experiment, but not without a strategy; establish a baseline to measure against (12:18): "We can see Likes, comments; and as our audience grows, those things are all important. One of the things...we had seen through our initial research around the brand was digging down and understanding brand sentiment...and we're going to be paying attention, obviously, to that. We wanted to be a place to host the conversation around our positioning, sort of a content source of inspiration and motivation.... We want to be a brand publishing content that engages our consumer. It's one thing that we just didn't do when we lost touch with them.... We've established a brand-tracker base that we're going to use to measure yourself against quarterly, so that'll be really interesting to see where the needle moves there.... We have seen our followers increase at a rate that was higher than what we were previously doing, so that's a good sign."
To learn more, visit Soffe.com or follow Soffe on Twitter: @Soffe. And be sure to check out its Instagram feed: @soffegirl.
Paul and I talked about much more, so be sure to listen to the entire show, which you can do above, or download the mp3 and listen at your convenience. Of course, you can also subscribe to the Marketing Smarts podcast in iTunes or via RSS and never miss an episode!
This episode brought to you by CallidusCloud.

Special thanks to production sponsor Candidio, an efficient, affordable video production platform allowing marketers and communicators to collaborate and curate video content, with help from a team of professional, on-demand video editors for the finishing touches. Check them out!

Show opener music credit: Noam Weinstein.

This marketing podcast was created and published by MarketingProfs.

Kerry O'Shea Gorgone is instructional design manager, enterprise training, at MarketingProfs. She's also a speaker, writer, attorney, and educator. She hosts and produces the weekly Marketing Smarts podcast. To contact Kerry about being a guest on Marketing Smarts, send her an email, or you can find her on Twitter (@KerryGorgone), Google+, and her personal blog.