Category: Marketing - General

How to Leverage Your Good Publicity for Added Marketing Value

Did you recently parlay a press release into a full feature story?

Was your company favorably showcased in an important trade journal or business publication?

Improve the marketing impact of this strong public relations by extending the reach to your prospective customers by using a variety of marketing tools.

Email: If you have an email list of individuals who have purchased your products and services in the past, consider sending an enews announcement about the recent article to your e news mailing list with a link to the recent article. You may want to pull a quote that specifically addresses your product or service’s unique benefit and highlight that information.

Reprints/Clippings: Julie Wassom, marketing expert for child care centers and alpaca farms suggests ways to use reprints and clippings:

  • Send a copy of your article in a special mailing to prospects, customers, and referral sources, as follow up to your Guess Who’s In The News? notification.
  • Include it in wave mailings in your direct mail marketing program.
  • Mail it to local affiliate members who can kite-tail on the good industry promotion it provides.
  • Insert in a rack in your show booth with an accompanying sign that says “Take One!”

Read her entire article about how to Extend Your Audience After Good Publicity.

Blog about it: If your company has a blog, this is the perfect place to write an article about the article. Don’t pull the published piece into your blog in its entirety. Instead, pull sections and briefly quote the article with links back to the publication’s website. You don’t want to miss the implied endorsement of the publication that wrote about your business, or it will just be another blog post written by you instead of by a knowledgeable staffer at the industry or consumer publication. Remember to optimize your blog post for Local SEO. This helps potential customers discover your business. A lot of local searches originate from non-locals who are searching for a business like yours, and with local SEO done right, your business can capture that audience. This is important for all businesses who are looking to appeal to locals. For example, it is a key aspect of dental marketing. Your URL, title, headers, meta description and the article itself should include your city or region and the target keyword of the page they describe. This tells Google what geographical location the page is relevant to and helps them index your page accordingly. Need more help optimizing your online content for search engines? Contact an seo optimization company, they’ll be able to help you with any SEO-related issues! SEO can be a complicated thing to get your head around so don’t be afraid to ask for help. If you are looking to use local SEO for your local business, you may want to look into Google My Business, paired with a service similar to HVAC SEO Bros you can bring your business new customers, from your local area.

Link on Social Media: Use your company Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn account to post links to the article. Make sure you select the proper thumbnail before you hit submit. I find that it is better to log into them separately rather than trying to save time and posting once for all three mediums. It’s just that what LinkedIn can show, versus Facebook — or the 140 characters of Twitter — is vastly different. Also the make up of the audiences on the three mediums also varies. While the subject and message is the same, you’ll want to modify the actual comment before you link to match the medium.

If your business markets to consumers in your local area, don’t forget Yelp, Google Local, Yahoo and other sites like Zagat, and CitySearch. Find out which type of links can make a big difference.

Website links: Your website could add a new page under the about us tab that features Customer comments and pull testimonials out of a favorable article with a link back to the actual publication.

How will you use favorable publicity to improve your marketing efforts and speed up the sales process? Leave a comment below with a note about what has worked for you. Include a link and I’ll moderate the comments to make sure it’s a “real” example.

Why Marketing your Market Research Makes Sense

market research by surveying customersSome businesses consider market research a luxury. They pass it over when reviewing budgets in favor of a new website or a printed brochure or some other marketing services.

I’m wondering if using market research in several ways helps justify the budget and therefore makes a lot more sense for a company who views market research as too expensive and relys on “gut instinct.”

In a perfect world, you wouldn’t think twice about researching a new product or existing service and knowing that the research money is well spent! But I believe that marketing your market research can help you to improve customer relationships and even speed up the building of a relationship with a new customer by marketing your company as a business that cares what customers think. If your positioning strategy or company mission is “a company who cares”, you may find this concept something your company will embrace.

Posible Results of Marketing Some of Your Market Research Insights:

  1.  To help all the stakeholders get insights into your customers’ preferences
  2.  To share insights with potential customers as testimonials
  3.  To provide current customers with the good feeling of being involved with a company they care about.

Of course you have to make sure you follow best practices when gathering your information.  You don’t want to gather results that are not accurate and then base your decisions on information that  was tainted by your desire to market the information as testimonials for potential clients.

Isn’t it the Hawthorne Effect that says just by involving employees in decisions in the company, moral improved?

Perhaps there is an official psychological term for asking customers what they think as well.  It makes sense to me that asking customers what they think will improve your product.  And certainly good testimonials helps you tell your company’s value story!  But will the customers who were surveyed gain a stronger, better relationship with the company as a result of the survey?  

Examples of marketing your Market Research:


It’s win-win isn’t it?

When you get favorable responses from the survey, it can become a testimonial.  It will help your marketing efforts. When you get unfavorable responses,  you have your insights for improvement and a great “to do” list.

Either way your current customers feel involved in the outcome and build a stronger bond with your company. And you’ve figured out a way to leverage your market research dollar across your marketing budgets.

It is a balancing act.  Remember to always get permission if you’re going to use the results from the survey as testimonial.  And make sure that the information you gather is actually representative of your customer’s feelings. 

Have you ever leveraged your market research? Tell me about it in the comments below. Or if you think it is a bad idea, tell me why in the comment section below.

Creative Commons License photo credit: OnTask 

Radio Interview: Marketing Your Business with a Blog

This morning I was a guest on the Us Media internet radio show radio show with Deborah Chaddock Brown and Candace Benson.

We talked about building awareness of your business with a blog. Here are some of the questions they asked me:

  • How did you get started with Blogging and what was your original goal?
  • How has blogging helped to build a community?
  • There are many themes or templates that you can use, thousands that are free.  Why have you chosen to use Thesis, a theme that you have to purchase?
  • There are lots of plug ins and widgets to chose from, which are your favorites and why?
  • What is your opinion about monetizing your site with ads and sponsorship posts?
  •  Blogging is about sharing in a discussion so what is your process for seeking out other blogs to read and comment on?
  • What about the time strategy? How often do you blog and how long does it take?  Do you have a strategy?
  •  Is there any advice you’d give to a person starting out or someone who wants to resurrect a blog they’ve abandoned?
  • How have you built relationships with your blog?

You can listen to the 30 minute Us Media radio show on Blogtalk radio by clicking this link or by using the widget below.

UPDATE: I removed the widget on Friday because it starts even if you are reading a different post. Please click the URL highlighted above to listen.
There is a 15 second commerical in the beginning, but it gives you just enough time to grab your coffee!

Google Guru Offers 4 Marketing Trends at Cleveland Marketing Association Meeting

Ted Souder and Chris Brown June 2010 at Cleveland American Marketing Association meetingTed Souder visited Cleveland’s American Marketing Association meeting last week on his way to his new assignment in Paris.

When he came to Cleveland in May 2008, I really enjoyed his 10 Best Marketing Practices. This time he shared 4 main points. Here they are, together with my notes & comments!

1. Mobile Marketing Advances - No Turning Back

With 240 million mobile browsers sold compared to only 200 million PC browsers sold, the PC will never, ever again overtake the phone for the number of browsers.

So, if you’re not involved in mobile and mobile marketing now, you should start to figure it out. How fast does your website load in the mobile browser? Does it show up in a smart phone at all? Note to self: B-B and B-C businesses should pay attention, it’s not just for ordering a pizza or picking out a restaurant anymore. Some companies find themselves using cdn performance software to help monitor the loading speed of their sites and networks in order to help them improve.

People use their mobile phone to take a picture of where they are on a city street and by using Google Goggles the GPS in the phone will let them know where they are. Never get lost again! In fact, the mobile device is very close to us. Ted says many people sleep with their phone (maybe using it as an alarm?!) It has a voice, eyes, skin, ears and location with a speaker, a camera, a touch screen, GPS and a microphone. Smart phones really are smart…
Ted Souder explaining the ability for small companies to advertise on prime time cable with the use of Google's new advertising tools

2. Advertising Formats are Changing

Site Links are available inside AdWords now, so people can more quickly dig deeper to find what they want with just a click on the + box in the ads. Using the second largest search engine and the 4th largest website, you can promote your video and have a call to action by using Pay Per Click on Video. It’s cheap, has a high conversion rate, and if you want to find out more about PPC advertising there is a ton of information available that can help you. Note to self “YouTube pay per click ads? Better check this out.”

Remarketing where you re target a prospect after they’ve left a site also allows you to upsell those who have already bought or almost bought. Knotice, a marketing company that I’m following in Akron Ohio, has a video that shows what I think Ted was describing for advertising to people who abandon in the middle of a transaction, (or purchased a similar product) but you want to keep advertising to them like this to get them to come back and buy.

3. Local is Where It’s At:

Using Near Me Now, people can find companies in a walking radius on their mobile phone. You can search for a coffee shop walking down the street and because of the GPS, the phone knows where you are. Because of Google Local, the phone knows where the nearest coffee shops are. Or art galleries. Or eye doctors. Or restaurants. Or whatever kind of business you’re looking for. Or school. Note to self: “Even though I’ve known about this for a while, I wonder. Are all our clients listed in Google Local? I better check and get them listed if they aren’t.” Restaurants could this as a type of restaurant digital marketing to reach potential customers.

4. Personalizing Is Becoming Even More Important

He used the example of trying on sun glasses before you buy at the Ray Ban site by uploading your face and virtually putting on the glasses. I’ve heard of hair salons letting people try on new hair color and styles. He also used the Domino’s example of how you can custom order a pizza, and the website tells you when the order is accepted, cooked, boxed and delivered. I’m thinking it’s kinda like UPS tracking?

Thanks Ted, for taking the time to stop by Cleveland on your way to Paris to work in the Google office and help other Google offices in Dubai, Moscow and the Ukraine scale their services to meet the growing demand. Your talk gave me some new ideas and reinforced some others that I’d been considering.