How To Extend Your Marketing

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RSS is still a powerful marketing tool, check it out

There are many ways pr clients and publicity agencies can extend the reach into markets and drive traffic to their sites. By using RSS Feeds you can distribute time-sensitive information. And if done correctly, you can control how consumers find you and land on specific pages in your site to increase sales.

An article I read discusses the 10 different ways to use RSS in e-Commerce. I just mentioned one above. I’ll give you a few more.

• If you are an advertiser, pr client, or a manufacturer, consider advertising on content providers’ feeds. This can be done through FeedBurner and Pheedo.

• Another suggestion is to create channels for affiliate communications to distribute marketing content. When you use RSS, develop links that allow you to automatically push updates.

• You can extend your awareness by adding feeds from other sites and blogs. This is actually using syndicated information to supply related content on your site. Search engines like this.

That’s a few more suggestions. When used, you can then see the power RSS can provide your company and pr clients to gain more visibility and build traffic to your site.

RSS is trackable, and most pr clients do not realize this. This tracking does not identify the customer, but reports available through FeedBurner and SimpleFeed can give you detailed analytics. And don’t get disappointed at first if the results a small. Like everything, it takes time to get higher rankings, and time to build traffic.

So get RSS Feeds on your site. Or create a blog within your site and start talking about how great your company is.

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Make Your PR Campaign Online Savvy

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Create a good RSS Feed to get more attention and recognition

By now everyone is realizing the power of online marketing. Although our agency has been doing this for over five years, I am now seeing publicity agencies, pr clients and the traditional media getting more involved with the Internet.

getting your releases publishedWe know that blogging has helped jump this attention to become a useful marketing tool. Now we are seeing how RSS Feeds can further expand your exposure. Whether you are a sporting goods company, an auto dealership, a retail outlet, a snack food company, you should consider adding RSS Feeds to your current web site.

Plus, a "press room", or Newsroom should also be part of the web site. Why, because it is becoming a place where the media can learn quickly about your company, the products and services you offer.

When you send press releases, articles or other important materials to the publishers, editors, or freelance writers, they will want to know more about you. The web site is a perfect place for them to update themselves. So make sure your pressroom has current information.

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Why Your Press Releases Are Not Getting Published

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As a PR Client you need to follow the rules

Publicity agencies and pr clients sometimes loose sight of how to write a press release for the media.

Get your pr release noticed by editorsWhen you submit a release to a publisher, editor, or a freelance writer, it is important to follow the basic rules when writing "newsworthy" releases.

All releases should follow these simple rules:
• WHO
• WHY
• WHERE
• CONTACT

Keep in mind WHO the publication’s audience is when writing. Sometimes it is necessary to modify a release if the audience varies even slightly.

Know WHY it is an important release. The product or service may be important to you, but what about the readers and your industry. Make it important to them and the editors will then not toss your release into the trash.

If the press release has a location, such as an event, seminar, or announcement of the unveiling, be sure to mention this. Otherwise, pr clients need to list the location as their main office, or headquarters. Publicity agencies need to also list the pr clients location, not theirs.

Finally, put the contact info for the pr client. The publicity agency should also include their contact info as the focal point. Be sure the person listed is available to respond in a timely manner.

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Your Online and Off-Line Efforts

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Too many cooks spoil the pot!

Every 15 to 20 years companies go through this cycle of hiring "specialists" to do the different functions for their marketing of products and services.

How to get pr, marketing doneThis can cause a juggling problem. For example, if you have a PR Agency, an Advertising Agency, then an Internet Marketing Agency, plus another company that handles all the printing for your sales and collateral materials…wow, that’s a lot of coordinating. Now just think of how all these different resources are going to work together. What, you mean they don’t? You haven’t invited all of them to have a general meeting?

Don’t panic, in this competitive climate of "we need to have it done today", pr clients as well as manufacturing company’s feel they need to hire a lot of experts to get the job done. Sometimes this can work. But more often, it gets to be a complicated and coordination nightmare.

I am not saying that one company can be all of these things, but maybe you need to seek a company that has the ability and connections to be the focal point for all your advertising, marketing, publicity and printing needs.

This way your time to do all the coordinating can better be applied to other internal job functions. Review your situation, tally up the hours and see if that justifies your efforts. If not, maybe it’s time to look outside for help. No, this doesn’t mean hire another company to add to the list of outside services. Rather hire a company that can streamline all these services, like us. Yes, we have the expertise to do many of the projects each department needs. And those we cannot handle in-house, we will then be your extension to coordinate the activities so that you don’t need to.

Being efficient is what we do best for our client, and yes, publicity is another major part of our many talents.

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Tips To Getting More Web Traffic

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Get Visitors To trust You

Get more traffic and trustSounds like a great idea to get visitors to trust you and your company, right? Not as easy as you might think. But when you see the list to getting trust, you will think, "hey, I already know this stuff". If so, then why haven’t you incorporated that into your publicity campaign, your web site and all the means of communication you now do for your company.

Pr Clients, public relations specialists know and use trust in the campaigns they develop. Now it’s time you implement these tips. Before you toss out the "easy tips" make sure you add those you are not already using.

1– Do you have a phone and contact info on the web site?
Right, you already have that, but is it easy for customers to find the contact info?

2- If you are doing any consumer marketing, consider registering the site with BBB and TrustE.org. These are recognizable non-profit organizations that can give your company that seal of approval in customers eyes.

3- Is your ABOUT US page current? Not everyone thinks of updating their site, especially this page. It is the first place most potential customers will visit to learn about you.

4- Press Room. Make sure you write press releases and place them into your press room on the web site. This also means anything of importance like, new people in the company, or civic events that your company helps to sponsor, etc.

5- Offer Refunds, and guarantees. Most people may not use these even if someting isn’t what they want, but it gives your site credibility and that feeling of TRUST.

These are but a few tips to make your web site more trustworthy by customers. To learn how your site can get more consumer friendly, give us a call.

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Is Your Brand Memorable?

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Building Brand Identity

Sometimes as Brand Builders and Marketing Professionals we have a difficult time in explaining to pr clients what branding is all about.

Make your brand memorableToo often, pr clients and other companies think branding is flashing your logo or company name over everything in sight. That WILL get you noticed, but it isn’t branding. Not really.

Think of branding as a person, not an actual human. A good article on branding written by Thomas Brown puts the perspective into human terms. Saying things like, if you have a mindset about branding as a human you will nuture it, rather than manage it.

In another view the Branding Camapign could be divided into three areas:  Mind, Emotions and Physical. All have their specific reasons and teaches you how to re-think your company’s image, brand.

Do you know someone who is exceptional, all knowing (in a good way) someone who is very helpful? Then imitate and apply some of these traits into your company branding program. You just might see something new take shape in your company as well as the people who discover you.

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Does Your Publicity Campaign Include Tagging?

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It’s not graffiti anymore, it’s pr

When you first hear or read the word TAGGING, you probably think of taggers who do graffiti on the walls. Well, think publicity and then think Internet, now you’re getting closer to tagging in today’s terms.
tagging and video publicity marketing
It is the linking of web sites. This old term is what describes how we use links to each other sites making search engines locate us faster.

It seems that this "linking" has been around in the earlier days of the Internet. Spammers were probably using this technique of marketing and when we were all hit hard with spam, search engines became more intelligent by counter acting their tactics.

You or your web designer, programmers often use tagging with your site. You have heard the words meta tags, keywords, right? Well, that is a form of tagging.

When a company wants to optimize your web site, this is one of the tagging areas that are often refined.

If you are in publicity and think this stuff is too deep in conversation and you don’t have an IT person, then use this handy tool for creating links. It is Yahoo’s Del.iclo.us. This is a tool bar that you can download from Yahoo’s site.

Tagging can help your publicity in many ways. For example, tagging can be done with pictures that are in your press release (which should be in your pressroom’s web site), or online video. Many sites have this available such as Yahoo 360, or Technorati’s blog that addresses tagging.

Publicity campaigns are no longer a list of releases or articles; it is your web site and making it SEO friendly with tagging, as well as other unique optimizing tricks. But that’s another subject.

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Is It Publicity or Marketing?

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YouTube and Google

Google and YouTube purchase Google likes being in the news and takes a lot of chances. But that is one of their marketing strategies, to keep in front of the computer user public.

I have read many articles lately about the purchase of YouTube by Google. Some good, some are not.

One interesting viewpoint was by Bill Wise of Did-It, a search marketing agency.

He tells us that Google could have made a blunder in the $1.6 billion purchase. Bill gives three reasons for his theory:

  • YouTube is still young and in a market that has attracted a young audience and still hasn’t turned a profit
  • YouTube has only 65 employees compared to Google with 8,000 and MySpace with 300
  • Last is the legal issues that YouTube and Google are facing with copyright infringement

No matter your perspective, Google will win in the long run. It is possible that YouTube could be a short lived fad, or be taken over (in the market share) by Microsoft’s version (Soapbox), or other networks like CBS allowing downloads of shows and who knows, maybe videos. What Google is gaining is a lot of Publicity. You cannot pick up a publication, newspaper or watch TV, listen to radio without hearing something about this acquisition.

So the question remains, Is google creating a major publicity campaign around YouTube? If so, I think they will get back their investment just by the fact that many new people will now be attracted to YouTube and be exposed to the advertisers that Google hopes to reap the profits from. I’m also sure that Google learned it’s lesson with the failure of the ad venture, GooglePrint. Maybe they can apply the right marketing with this new venture.

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Measuring Your Traffic

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Media can also be part of your traffic

Companies are always trying to justify the amount of traffic they get to their web site. And too often, CEO’s blame the lack of sales to the web site and that the amount of traffic is not being converted, so therefore, they cancel the web marketing or the web site entirely.

What about the traffic that visits to learn about your company or product? Don’t they have any value to your company?

Did you ever think that these visitors might be some of the media?

Measuring the brand awarness is someting new and most people are not familiar on how to go about measuring this cyberspace media.

In my quest to help my clients better track, or measure their web site, I recommend that they consider looking into SEM Director. I found this by viewing another blogger in our industry called BRITOPIAN Marketing. He has some good stuff to say. Check his views. I usually recommend people read other points of view on these types of topics, this helps to better understand how valuable it is to market your site and how to incorporate publicity into this mix.

It should go unsaid, but companies have this wall between the marketing departments and the publicity people. Even if you use an outside pr firm, I see a lot of non-communication with the publicity firm and the other marketing people. My guess is no one is willing to share their "secrets" in fear of not getting credit. That my friends is what causes companies to slip in market share.

I also read something of interest from Mr. Brito. He talks about the 6C’s. It is a good way to describe the different areas of marketing. He refers to them as:

  • Customer
  • Consistency
  • Creativity
  • Culture
  • Communication
  • Change

If you want to know more about these categories, give me a call. I’ll be happy to send you his article on them.
Call me at: 949-477-9400, or just send me an email at gcarson@carsonandcompany.com.
Put in the subject– Article for the 6C’s.

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Build an SEO Web Site

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Make your web site a publicity magnet

Do you currently have a web site? Is it attracting clients? What about the media?

If you are ready to launch a new web site, or about to modify your existing site, you need to do these things first!
What I am about to explain, is based on your site being SEO friendly. That means it has been optimized correctly, the use of flash is correctly displayed and that your site is NOT built with frames. Optimizing a site is more than placing a bunch of keywords into your HTML or in your main text. If you are not sure if the site you are about to launch, contact a company who understands web marketing to help you increase the traffic and publicity attention your company needs.

INCOMING LINKS
You have heard this many times before, but building external links is still a high priority with all the major search engines. Make sure the links you setup are with those who have a Page Rank in excess of 3/10.

PRESS RELEASES
I can’t stress enough that this section of your site can be a main channel to the media. Your site should include a "press room". In this area you should place all your press releases that are optimized. Yes, even press releases, articles and short stories about the company need to be optimized. If not, then your pressroom is only another page. Also, be sure to submit the releases to all the appropriate online media. If you need help with your publicity, hire a company that can help you.

PURCHASE TEXT LINKS
Yes, there are times that you need to make some purchases to get the site in a high position and to attract clients/customers. Be wise in your purchase. One company that can help is called text link ads.

LINK EXCHANGE
Another excellent marketing tip. Be sure to get as many relevant links exchanged. Make sure these are companies in your related industry.

BLOG SITE
I cannot say this enough times. A blog "company" site, or a blog site from the CEO, President, or other noteworthy person in your company can be another excellent marketing tool. It does require daily attention. This can be done with the assistance of other staff members of the company that the author can then review the blogs prior to posting.

Want more leads, more traffic? Try these tips and if you really want to jump start a Publicity program, give us a call.

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