Leveraging Email & Social Media for PR Results
Journalists and PR professionals are increasingly using all forms of media in their day-to-day reporting and now see them as legitimate channels for communication. MyPRGenie, a leading PR and marketing platform, recently conducted a research survey to see which of these channels are most popular among reporters and how they can be used effectively. The findings of this survey, to which over 2400 journalists and PR professionals responded, clearly point out that most reporters prefer to receive releases through email. Here are some tips for making sure that your email pitch stands out among the thousands of emails reporters receive Read More
Rethinking Print in the Age of Social Media
The corner newsstand may be a vanishing symbol of a bygone era for many of us, but printed materials remain a staple for most marketers. Business cards, direct mail, flyers, brochures, point-of-sale, forms and other printed items need to be produced and delivered to prospective customers, local offices, third-party fulfillment houses, trade shows and distribution centers. Once upon a time, that meant guessing how many pieces might be used, printing them all at once, and shipping huge bales of collateral to local offices which had to store them, manage the inventory over time, and ship them again to other places where Read More
What is distributed marketing automation?
I was talking to a prospective customer the other day, and he wanted to know exactly what I meant when I said that my company delivers multi-channel distributed marketing automation solutions for companies like his in regulated industries. “Just what is distributed marketing anyway?” he wanted to know. The simplest way to explain it is to say that distributed marketing is the business model where a corporation with one or more brands sells its products and services through a network of regional or local channels. The channel might be a local branch, an independent distributor or reseller, a franchisee, or an Read More
5 PR Pitch Mistakes to Avoid
Around Christmas time, I helped a friend who is a columnist for a well-known national magazine cull through a large volume of pitches he was getting from a request for information that he’d posted on HARO (Peter Shankman’s great Help a Reporter Out service that matches sources with writers looking for experts). It’s possible that the task of culling through HARO looking for media opportunities the week before Christmas fell to the most junior staffer in the shop. But don’t they teach the basics of PR pitching in college anymore? I work with an undergraduate marketing intern who knows better Read More
5 Steps to Take Before A Social Media Campaign
Have you ever had an audience member ask one of those questions that seems out of context at first, but it nags at you until you realize how important it was? That happened to me several months ago when I was a presenter at a webinar with Christy Campbell of Socialware and Stephen Selby of LIMRA. We were talking about social media, and how marketers in a regulated industry could implement one without compliance problems. Christie Campbell was showing a slide on the social media lifecycle, and offering excellent advice on the pre-planning that implementing a successful social media campaign Read More
Turning Google Analytics Data into Dollars and Sense
Since its release in November 2005, Google Analytics (GA) has continually provided marketing teams with a wide range of data to help them understand just how users interact online with their business. GA now offers everything from real-time analytics, multi-channel funnels to social media and mobile tracking. More often than not, marketers approach the Vertical Nerve Analytics team and just want to know, “What terms, numbers and metrics should I really focus on?” Although the answer varies from business to business, these are some of our top tips for success in Google Analytics. Regular Account Auditing When was the last Read More
Four Signs You Need Marketing Automation
Marketing is a complex process that relies on many systems, people, and resources to function smoothly. If one part of the system breaks down, it creates a bottleneck that slows down the whole process. Add in the layers of complexity that come with a multi-channel distributed marketing environment, and the results can be a maze that is hard to navigate and costly to manage. Often, marketing automation is the cure. But how do you know if your marketing processes need a marketing automation fix? Marketing automation may be the cure for what ails your marketing operation if more than two Read More
5 Easy Pieces of Content Marketing Advice
After a recent article on content and influencer marketing, a reader asked for a set of rules they could follow to create their own successful influencer or content marketing campaign, so here they are. These five easy pieces of content marketing advice work whether you apply them to content published in a blog or on a website, to your social media campaigns, or to your email marketing. In fact, we think they’ll work with almost any marketing initiative. Some of them might seem obvious, but you won’t have to look farther than any search engine to find examples of marketers Read More
DAM It All: Automating Content Marketing
Content marketing – that is drawing prospective customers to your site with well-written, valuable audio, video, text or images – is all about delivering the right message to the right customer at the right time, and in the right way. Your marketing content is as much a strategic asset as any other intellectual property your company owns. So it makes sense to treat it like the valuable asset that it is. That’s what digital asset management is all about. A DAM system allows digital asset management through a web-based platform that can be accessed by authorized users. Sometimes called a marketing Read More
Go Google Yourself!
Once upon a time, in the days before social media became ubiquitous, entering your own name into a Google search window was a guilty pleasure called “vanity surfing” or “ego searching”. Everyone did it, but no one talked about it. Today, it’s a requirement for anyone who needs a job, a credit card, or even a potential mate. That’s because if you don’t check out your own online reputation, it’s a dead certainty that other people will. And if you don’t know what’s out there, you don’t have a prayer of correcting a problem that can ruin your reputation for years Read More
