The New Rules for Reaching the Media - ReachForce Book Club
Friday, September 19th, 2008The Web, of course, has made getting in touch with the media much easier. However has anyone had luck with emailing a journalist (you don’t know) a story and actually get published? If so, what is your secret? In most cases however, (in the words of David) “PR people are spamming journalists with unsolicited and unrelenting commercial messages in the form of news releases and untargeted broadcast pitches.”
Don’t worry, David is here to help with The New Rules of Media Relations:
- Nontargeted, broadcast pitches are spam.
- News releases sent to reporters in subject areas they do not cover are spam.
- Reporters who don’t know you yet are looking for organizations like yours and products like yours-make sure they will find you on sites such as Google and Technorati.
- If you blog, reporters who cover the space will find you.
- Pitch bloggers, because being covered in important blogs will get you noticed by mainstream media.
- When was the last news release you sent? Make sure your organization is “busy.”
- Journalists want a great online media room!
- Some (but not all) reporters love RSS feeds.
- Personal relationships with reporters are important.
- Dont’ tell journalists what your product does. Tell them how you solve customer problems.
- Does the reporter have a blog? Read it. Comment on it. Track back to it (send a message whenever you blog on a subject that the reporter blogged about first).
- Before you pitch, read (or listen to or watch) the publication (or radio program or TV show) you’ll be pitching to!
- Once you know what a reporter is interested in, send her an individualized pitch crafted especially for her needs.
Now your rate of getting noticed will hopefully be much more successful when you use these tips. And now let’s fast forward a bit, you have used the New Rules and started building relationships. How do you pitch to these journalists now? David has a few tips on this as well…woo hoo!
- Target one reporter at a time.
- Help the journalist to understand the big picture.
- Explain how customers use your product or work with your organization.
- Don’t send e-mail attachments unless asked.
- Follow up promptly with potential contacts.
- Don’t forget, it’s a two-way street-journalists need you to pitch them!
Mainstream media is still very important and hopefully you will follow the New Rules and tactics to start getting noticed. To close the same way David did, “you need to be smart how you tell your story on the Web-and about how you tell your story to journalists.”
Next week we will cover chapters 17 and 18 on Blogging to Reach Your Buyers and Podcasting and Video Made, Well, as Easy as Possible.
Get In On The LinkedIn Groups Party but Establish Rules of Etiquette First - B2B Sales and Marketing Tip #150
Thursday, September 18th, 2008In a good example of “better late than never,” LinkedIn finally added group discussion functionality to its professional networking network. Here on The B2B Lead I wrote about how much I was looking forward to LinkedIn going social and why I believe it will be so important for B2B marketers.
While commenters on the TechCrunch blog were quick to cry “inadequate,” we at BreakingPoint are happy with the early results and look forward to using the functionality to grow the group and make new connections. BreakingPoint’s Director of Marketing and Engage in PR blogger Kyle Flaherty got the party started right away in the BreakingPoint Application, Network Performance & Security Testing group. He produced this handy video tour of the new features.
So those are the new features. What are the benefits? Well, for week one, I can sum it up with the words: connections, market research, and web traffic. While our LinkedIn group is still very new, membership has grown to 60+ qualified professionals interested in testing tools. We’ve already connected with several influential buyers, shared helpful resources, conducted research, and benefited from a small burst of web traffic. LinkedIn jumped into our top 10 web site traffic referrers in the week following the introduction of user discussions. Notice I didn’t mention closed a few deals?
On the Lessons Learned front, I advise readers of The B2B Lead to set up the rules for behavior on the group right away. Kyle clearly established our group as a Sales- and Marketing-free zone after one newbie launched into a blatant sales pitch. Blasphemy, you say? This is The B2B Lead, after all. Why create a group at all if you aren’t going to use it to market to your customers?
If you are asking yourself these questions, then I recommend you read more of Kyle’s blog. While I sometime tease Kyle about being a social media purist (OK, I actually use the word “boy scout”), Kyle is a perfect example of how to build relationships with potential customers and the community at large by actually engaging in online conversations, providing value, and earning trust. In a recent post he wrote called “Seeking Inspiration” Kyle wrote:
“Inspiration comes down to a measure of trust, which comes from a solidly built relationship. The same goes for your marketing. A trusted brand has an easier time inspiring because they have created a relationship with you over a period of time. When a company enters social media they, of course, need a strategy, but the idea of building trust must be in conjunction with building relationships.”
And, when Marketers take this approach, the benefits will follow. If you are looking for real tangible ideas for leveraging social media and want to see exactly how serving your community can deliver big results, have a look at Kyle’s 3 part case study on BreakingPoint’s social media programs.
Here on The B2B Lead I’ll be posting about how we integrated social media into our overall programs along with our laser-targeted direct outreach. Look forward to your first hand experiences with LinkedIn and other community building efforts. Do tell.
Online Media Room – Your Front Door for Much More Than the Media - ReachForce Book Club
Wednesday, September 17th, 2008This chapter couldn’t have come at a better time. Leigh Anne and I were just talking about this. We need to update our ‘News’ page on our site. It feels so old school and is really due a 2.0 update.
David opens the chapter with a very important message – “…all kinds of people visit your online media room, not just journalists. Your buyers are snooping around your organization by visiting media pages on your Web site. Your current customers, partners, investors, suppliers and employees all visit those pages.” He goes on to say, people go to the online media room to know what’s current about the organization. I totally agree. If there’s no updated news does that mean the company isn’t doing well or is stagnant? Maybe.
As we are about to take on a site overhaul, here’s some of the best practices David suggests that we’ll be implementing:
- Needs Analysis – Before the reconstruction begins we’ll be identifying persona of the people visiting this new media room. Once identified we will then be sure to include content that meets the needs of each persona.
- Optimized news releases for searching and browsing – gone are the days of the aged list of press release headlines. When updating we must always consider SEO best practices. This spot has a wealth of good information, we’ll be sure to leverage this.
- Background Information that Helps Journalists Write Stories – This is often called a press kit and typically includes – company history, executive bios, investor profiles, board of directors, product and service information, analysts information/coverage and links to recent media coverage.
- Multimedia content – some like to listen, some like to read, some like to watch and listen. We want to make sure we have what their looking for.
- List Executive appearances, conferences and tradeshow participation – we want to be sure the journalists know where we’ve been, where we’re at and where we’re going.
- Don’t forget the bloggers – all news releases going forward will include bloggers distribution lists as well.
- Avoid Jargon, Acronyms and Industry Speak – we’ve covered this in an earlier chapter. Everyone sees through it and would appreciate us all just speaking in common terms we all understand.
Are we forgetting anything here? All of these ideas are great, right? For more ideas for a great media room, check out Hubspot’s Press Room.
How to Use News Releases to Reach Buyers Directly - ReachForce Book Club
Monday, September 15th, 2008In Chapter 5 we learned the New Rules of News Releases and how news releases should be written for your buyers. Building off of the New Rules, after you have written for your buyers, now you need to reach them. David gives tips on how to develop a news release strategy in order to reach buyers directly.
Here are some of his tips:
Write about pretty much anything that your organization is doing.
- Have a new take on an old problem?
- Serve a unique marketplace?
- Have interesting information to share?
- CEO speaking at a conference?
- Win an award?
- Add a product feature?
- Win a new customer?
- Publish a whitepaper?
Publish news releases through a distribution service.
We have been using PRWeb for our latest news releases and have gotten descent response. What service have you had success using?
Use RSS feeds.
- Many distribution services provide this to make your news release available to other sites, blogs, journalists and individuals.
Simultaneously publish news releases on your web site.
Link wherever possible.
Focus on the keywords and phrases your buyers use.
- Think about your buyer personas.
Include social media tags.
- Like Technorati, DIGG and del.icio.us
Tell the media, your clients and your prospects.
- Repurpose content for all audiences.
- Example: Tweak content for use in company newsletter.
I’ll close with what David said about the importance of reaching your buyers.
“Implementing a news release strategy to reach buyers directly is like publishing an online news service - you are providing your buyers with information that they need in order to find your organization online and then learn more about you.”
Skip the Mega-launch, Opt for a New Approach to Generating Buzz for Your New Product or Service - B2B Marketing and Sales Tip #148
Thursday, September 11th, 2008Thinking about how to make the biggest splash with your next mega-launch? Think again. Emerging companies are getting smarter about how they “launch” and opting for a slower community building process that takes place over the course of months. Turns out it is not only less expensive but it proves to be more valuable over the long term.
The process involves getting out months ahead of your product availability and building relationships with key influencers, contributing relevant valuable content to your market and attracting a loyal following with a blog or community. We did something like this at BreakingPoint, although it happened in a far more condensed time frame, and it has indeed been very valuable for reaching our hyper-niche market.
There’s been lots of controversy on the topic of launching at Tech Crunch 50 vs. DEMO lately. Robert Scoble triggered a firestorm of commentary when he posted a blog series about how “companies launching at DEMO suck”. (Why is it that blog posts that include the word “suck” always generate so much buzz?) This triggered Paul May of BuzzStream to blog about the economics of launching a startup at TechCrunch 50 or Demo. According to Paul:
“The cost and time required for the traditional, big-bang, big conference launch adds up quickly…and yeah, I know, TechCrunch 50 is free, but the entry fee is just where your costs begin. Let’s look at an example. My co-founder, Jeremy Bencken, was invited to present at DEMO to launch Tenant Market a couple of years ago. In addition to the entry fee, he calculated the following costs for even a bare-bones approach:
- Devote 80 hours to prep time. At $100 an hour, that’s $8K.
- Speaking coach - $5K
- Travel - three nights for three people - $6K
- PR rep - $10k to $20K (lots of variation depending on the quality of the PR professional and the required retainer)
- Booth, collateral, SWAG, etc. - $3K to $5K”
Wow, that’s a hefty price tag for a startup—bootstrapped or funded. Years ago when I launched a startup at Demo, it was well worth that investment. Why? Those were the early Internet Boom days when startups had to shell out $30,000 to $50,000 per month in retainers to PR agencies. We netted 17 pieces of very high profile coverage from our Demo participation in major trade publications and even The Washington Post. It was such a success that I actually considered going this year with BreakingPoint.
Today, however, most of those publications are no longer around—at least in print. Buyers get their information in different ways and focusing your efforts on laser targeted database marketing combined with a strong push for building a community using social media are the keys to success for startups. If you have a B2C play, those events may make sense for you. But for us, I had to pass.
So, back to the topic at hand: launching your company online. There’s absolutely no reason to wait until you have a product to launch to get started. Why not start engaging with your customers now? Reach out and conduct a little market research. Build tight relationships and a nice following for your blog. Funnel your money into building a detailed, role-based database of your target market. Hire an intern to discover the top thought leaders and start building tight relationships by interacting with them in social media circles. Start generating a slew of inbound links so that you will rank at the top of the search engines when you introduce your product or service. The possibilities are endless.
Are You Writing Gobbledygook for Your Buyers? - ReachForce Book Club
Wednesday, September 10th, 2008We’ve talked a lot about writing best practices here on The B2B Lead. B2B Marketers out there, pay special attention to this chapter. Gobbledygook words – that’s what David calls jargon-laden phrases. Words like groundbreaking, industry-stand, and cutting edge are good examples of gobbledygook words. David goes on to say that business-to-business technology marketers are the worst offenders.
Here are some interesting findings from a study David highlighted in this chapter.
388,000 press releases were analyzed over a 9 month period.
74,000 of them had gobbledygook words
9895 of them used the words next generation
over 5000 of them used words like flexible, robust, world class, scalable, easy to use
between 2,000 and 5,000 used words like cutting edge, mission critical, market leading, industry standard, turnkey and groundbreaking
WOW! And isn’t the goal of doing a news release to stand out in the crowd? Well we’re not if we’re using these words.
Here’s a few more tips – another study highlighted in this chapter, this time a survey of general business and trade editors. These are these people that we sent out announcements to. Are you using these words?
- “Leading” (used as an adjective) – 94% of editors feel it is overused
- “We’re excited about…” – 76% of editors feel it is overused
- “Solutions” – 68% of editors feel it is overused
- “…a wide range of…” – 64% of editors feel it is overused
- “Unparalleled” – 62% of editors feel it is overused
- “Unsurpassed” – 53% of editors feel it is overused
David does a great job of summarizing the importance of writing for our buyers, so if you don’t mind, I’d like to steal a couple of lines for the book to close this as well.
“Your online and offline marketing content is meant to drive action, which requires a focus on buyer problems. Your buyers want this in their own words, and then they want proof. Every time you write, you have an opportunity to communicate and to convince. At each stage of the sales process, well-written materials combined with effective marketing programs will lead your buyers to understand how your company can help them.”
If you’re worried about your use or overuse of gobbledygook words in your news releases, check out Hubspot’s Press Release Grader. This free tool helps you make sure you are getting the most out of every news release you write.
The New Rules of News Releases - ReachForce Book Club
Thursday, August 14th, 2008According to David Meerman Scott, Press Releases are virtually dead having been replaced by News Releases to reach buyers directly. Here are David’s “The New Rules of News Releases:
- Don’t just send news releases when “big news” is happening; find good reasons to send them all the time.
- Instead of just targeting a handful of journalists, create news releases that appeal directly to your buyers.
- Write releases that are replete with keyword-rich copy.
- Include offers that compel consumers to respond to your release in some way.
- Place links in releases to deliver potential customers to landing pages on your Web site.
- Optimize news release delivery for searching and browsing.
- Add social media tags for Technorati, DIGG, and del.icio.us so your release will be found.
- Drive people into the sales process with news releases.”
You can check out what we have already discussed about Keyword Optimization for News Releases. News Releases are really just another way to put fresh content out there to help buyers find you.
Do you feel like you have made this switch yet or are you still writing press releases in hopes of being picked up by the media? All marketers feel pressure from upper management to drive more leads and bring in more buyers. Well done news releases could be a great tool for this, however, upper management are also the ones that want to see their name in print. I think news releases are the future, but a few press releases are good to keep everyone happy.
Does anyone have good ideas or examples of reasons to send out news releases to fulfill David’s first rule?
Next week we will be covering Ch. 6 &7.
The Old Rules vs. the New Rules - ReachForce Book Club
Tuesday, August 5th, 2008In the first chapter of The New Rules of Marketing and PR, David Meerman Scott really lays the framework for the old school way of running marketing and PR. In case you have not yet received your book or didn’t get a chance to start reading, here are the old rules given by Scott:
The Old Rules of Marketing
- Marketing simply meant advertising (and branding).
- Advertising needed to appeal to the masses.
- Advertising relied on interrupting people to get them to pay attention to a message.
- Advertising was one-way: company-to-consumer.
- Advertising was exclusively about selling products.
- Advertising was based on campaigns that had a limited life.
- Creativity was deemed the most important component to advertising.
- It was more important for the ad agency to win advertising awards than for the client to win new customers.
- Advertising and PR were separate disciplines run by different people with separate goals, strategies and measurement criteria.
The Old Rules of PR
- The only way to get ink was through the media
- Companies communicated to journalists via press releases.
- Nobody saw the actual press releases except for a handful of reporters and editors.
- Companies had to have significant news before they were allowed to write a press release.
- Jargon was okay because the journalists all understood it.
- You weren’t supposed to send a release unless it included quotes from third parties, such as customers, analysts, and experts.
- The only way buyers would learn about the press release’s content was if the media wrote a story about it.
- The only way to measure the effectiveness of press releases was through “clip books,” which noted each time the media deigned to pick up a company’s release.
- PR and Marketing were separate disciplines run by different people with separate goals, strategies, and measurement techniques.
I’ll admit, I am really too young to remember the days of the old rules. Do any of you out there who have been doing this a while really think that your organization functioned like this? To me, smaller companies have always had to be renegade and with the advent of the web now really have the venue they have been waiting for.
Here are what Scott outlines as the new rules:
The New Rules of Marketing and PR
- Marketing is more than just advertising
- PR is for more than just a mainstream media audience.
- You are what you publish
- People want authenticity, not spin.
- People want participation, not propaganda
- Instead of causing one-way interruption, marketing is about delivering content at just the precise moment your audience needs it.
- Marketers must shift their thinking from main-stream marketing to the masses to a strategy of reaching vast numbers of underserved audiences via the Web.
- PR is not about your boss seeing your company on TV. It’s about your buyers seeing your company on the web.
- Marketing is not about your agency winning awards. It’s about your organization winning business.
- The internet has made public relations public again, after years of almost exclusive focus on media.
- Companies must drive people into the purchasing process with great online content.
- Blogs, podcasts, e-books, news releases, and other forms of online content let organizations communicate directly with buyers in a from they appreciate.
- On the Web, the lines between maketing and PR have blurred.
Although I would say I am far from old school, I can’t say I am still completely hip to all of the new rules. I hope that as a group we can learn from David Meerman Scott and from each other. Since the publishing of this book there have been even more advances and new technologies via the web which I hope we can help teach each other about. What do you hope to learn from reading this book and participating in the book club?
Keyword Optimization for Press Releases - B2B Marketing and Sales Tip #116
Wednesday, July 2nd, 2008Keyword optimization on your website has become standard operating procedure for most marketers. But are you optimizing your press releases with keywords? Here are a few reasons why you should:
- If you are posting your press releases to your website (and you should be), it is probably the freshest content. Google gives precedence to new content (that is why blogs rank so highly in search engine results).
- Press releases and news articles rank very highly on Google. The more keyword rich your press releases are, the better they will rank in Google.
- Press releases are not just for the press. Make it easy for prospects/bloggers/analysts/media to find you wherever they are searching.
Don’t know where to start to find the right keywords? Check out these tips from MarketingProfs: Four Steps to Writing Search-Engine-Optimized Press Releases (I highly recommend the entire article) by Kim Cornwall Malseed:
- Find out what keywords successful competitors are using
- Read articles written by target journalists
- Survey your PR and Marketing department personnel
- Survey your Web site development team
- Survey product development personnel and executive management,
- Many press release distribution services (PRNewswire, MarketWire, etc.) have SEO features. Use them a few times (the companies usually permit you to do a free trial) and track results to get an idea of which keywords are most popular.
Also, be sure to avoid gobbledygook, those over-used industry words like “flexible,” “scalable” and “market-leading” so aptly named gobbledygook by David Meerman Scott.
After you have written your press release and think you have optimized all necessary keywords, put it to the test. HubSpot recently announced Press Release Grader, a free online tool to rate your press release. “Press Release Grader rates a press release based on a checklist of criteria – from content and structure, to search optimization and link analysis. The free tool is designed to optimize a press release so it can be found more easily by media, bloggers, customers and prospects. Press Release Grader provides an analysis and recommendations that will help you improve the way your press release is structured.”
As it is for most marketing tactics, in the end it is all about testing and re-testing to find what works best for your audience. I am sure I am missing a lot here. Anyone have any more tips?
Social Media Leading Questions
Thursday, June 19th, 2008Social Media is one of the hottest topics in B2B Marketing right now. I interviewed a variety of marketers at MarketingProfs B2B Forum. Check out this video to see what marketers from Marketo, HubSpot, Manticore, Enspire Learning and IDC have to say. See how they answered the following questions:
- Do you participate in social media both personally and professionally?
- How do you think social media is changing B2B PR strategies?
How would you answer those questions?
