Tag Archive for: PR strategy

Harnessing PR Consistency: 4 Strategic Tips for Improved PR Results

Establishing a robust online presence is essential for technology startups and market innovators. To amplify your online visibility and prime the market disruption, you should embrace PR consistency as a marketing superpower. Using a multifaceted arsenal of PR tools, including press releases, earned media, interviews, and shared content, you can quickly engage your audience, build a credible public image, and solidify your position as an industry thought leader.

The Power of PR Consistency in Tech Marketing

Regular engagement is the cornerstone of an effective marketing strategy. Embracing PR consistency as the foundation of your marketing plan drives awareness and interest. Use PR tools to establish your brand as an authority, distribute high-quality content, and connect with customers through trusted publications. PR consistency delivers quantifiable ROI, which can be measured through key performance indicators (KPIs) such as audience reach, mentions, and website traffic. 

PR consistency also supports a strong brand image. The technology sector thrives on innovation—use your PR strategy to reflect your brand’s dynamism through steadfast communication. A haphazard, start-stop approach to PR is a common pitfall for many technology startups but should be avoided. Infrequent or unorganized communications confuse audiences, disrupt momentum, and hurt a company’s credibility. 

Sustaining Brand Relevance through Strategic Communication

Your brand’s narrative should be a clear, ongoing dialogue, not a series of disjointed statements. A uniform PR cadence fosters brand familiarity and fortifies your reputation, positioning you as an industry authority. Digital PR tactics provide an ideal channel to educate audiences and distribute free tools and resources. 

Buyers today want to be informed rather than sold to. The rules of PR engagement force you to focus on content that is useful, rather than salesy. Placed editorial is often a good place to start. Beyond that, you can creatively use online news releases to publicize survey results, industry reports, webinars, or other informational content. When spun correctly, quotes, stats, or visually rich content can pique the interest of journalists and win you earned media.

Fostering Media Relationships: The Lifeline of Effective PR

Your messages must shine amidst an abundance of PR pitches. Regular contributions of on-target, timely content to target publications nurture enduring relationships with journalists, paving the way for continued media attention and coverage. Editors evaluate the newsworthiness of a PR pitch by assessing its potential impact on the target audience and society. 

Your pitches will likely get noticed if they have the potential to generate interest, discussion, or even action among readers. Develop a reputation for providing PR pitches that address pressing issues, unveil groundbreaking innovations, or present significant developments in your industry to improve your success rates. 

Four Pillars of PR Consistency for Measurable Impact

  1. Strategize and Develop a PR Calendar: Create a comprehensive PR blueprint and editorial timetable. Tailor your plan to cover key messages, target demographics, and preferred media outlets. Pre-scheduling content will ensure a regular communication stream, but remember to stay flexible. Monitor trends and formulate responses that cater to the media’s appetite for timely and relevant updates.
  • Craft Compelling Narratives: Your content must be original, valuable, and newsworthy to captivate media interest. Don’t rely on Generative AI to craft your pitches. Your competitors can use ChatGPT just as easily as you can. Instead, tap into the knowledge of your company founders, technologists, salespeople, and customers to identify fresh, engaging story pitches that sync with industry trends and create the desired media buzz.
  • Cultivate Media Alliances: Research and connect with leading industry influencers. Engage with journalists and editors on social media, attend networking events, and offer top influencers exclusive content or interviews. If you like a journalist’s article or have value to add, let her know through email or social media. Building and maintaining authentic relationships with the media can increase your chances of securing coverage.
  • Measure and Refine Your Media Footprint: Monitor media narratives surrounding your brand and sector to gauge the pulse of journalistic interest. Analyze the performance of your PR programs by tracking media mentions, web traffic, and social media engagement. Use these valuable insights to enhance and fine-tune your outreach strategies. 

Conclusion: The Enduring Value of PR Consistency

Persistent, value-driven communication is the cornerstone of an effective media strategy. A well-orchestrated PR initiative enhances consumer trust and deepens media relationships. PR consistency puts your brand at the forefront of media engagement, driving substantial, long-lasting results. For tech marketers and PR professionals, PR consistency isn’t just a strategy—it’s a commitment to sustained brand evolution and market leadership.

Attain Marketing, a boutique B2B technology PR and marketing agency, can help you in this journey. With our expertise and deep understanding of the B2B technology media landscape, we can help you navigate the complexities of media relations and develop customized strategies that align with your brand and objectives.

From winning earned media to establishing thought leadership, Attain Marketing can guide you every step of the way.

With the right strategies in place, you can effectively communicate the value proposition of your technologies, build trust, and establish your brand as a reliable and clear choice in your industry.

So, join us to effectively tap into the power of public relations, content marketing, and audience engagement to supercharge your company growth!

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Why A Corporate Blog Is a PR Strategy Game-Changer

Businesses use Public Relations (PR) to build visibility, enhance their brand reputation and credibility, and establish meaningful connections with customers. Among the various PR tactics available, a corporate blog stands out as a powerful and versatile platform that can significantly improve a company’s overall PR strategy. This post explains why a corporate blog is an indispensable component of a successful PR strategy and provides tips on how to maximize the benefits of your corporate blog.

1. Establish Thought Leadership

With a corporate blog, you can position yourself as an authority in your industry. Offering well-written, informative and thought-provoking content that demonstrates your expertise can help to build your credibility and establish trust with your audience. By providing value through your content, you can attract a loyal following that trusts your brand and comes back for more. 

2. Showcase Your Brand’s Personality

Corporate blogs give you the platform to convey your brand’s voice and personality. By publishing blog posts that reflect your brand’s identity, you can connect with your audience and showcase your unique characteristics. For instance, if your brand is known for being quirky and fun, you can create engaging content to reflect that. People are more likely to do business with brands that they trust and connect with on a personal level, and a corporate blog can help to establish this emotional connection.

3. Humanize Your Brand

A corporate blog is an excellent way to put a human face on your brand. It gives you the opportunity to engage with your audience directly and have two-way conversations. It enables you to respond to comments and feedback, which can be incredibly beneficial in strengthening your relationship with your audience. When people feel that they are talking to a person instead of a faceless corporation, they are more likely to engage with your content and trust your brand.

4. Boost Your SEO

A blog is an integral part of your content marketing strategy, and it can significantly boost your SEO efforts. By regularly publishing blog posts with relevant keywords, you can increase your visibility in search engine results pages (SERPs). Also, blogging allows you to build internal linking structures throughout your website, which can boost your rankings, and increase exposure for your brand.

5. Stay Top of Mind

Regularly updating your blog with valuable and engaging content can keep your brand top of mind with your audience. When your content is shared by your readers, it helps to increase your exposure and visibility online. By frequently providing fresh, valuable content, you can encourage your audience to think of your brand when they need your product or service. 

Conclusion

Incorporating a corporate blog into your PR strategy can be a game-changer. By offering informative, valuable, and engaging content, you can establish your brand’s authority, showcase your personality, and humanize your brand. Your blog can boost your SEO efforts and keep your brand top of mind with your audience. Overall, ensure that your corporate blog is part of your integrated PR strategy, and that you’re promoting it through social media and other channels for maximum results.

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Give a gift to Sales: Thinking outside the Holiday PR Box

A lot of companies tend to see only two options for PR around the holidays: holiday story lines and New Year trends.  While these may be the perfect recipe for a good holiday PR campaign, it’s time companies think outside the box.  As noted in my blog post last year “Tips for Successful Holiday Campaigns”, I do believe the time period between Thanksgiving and the New Year presents an opportunity to leverage the perceived news lull with a year-end or year-beginning storyline.  Often editors and bloggers are looking for interesting ideas to fill their “pages” during this holiday down time.

However, as is with every good strategy, over time everyone gravitates to it.  So now, the noise around obvious holiday trends is so great, it’s difficult for a company to rise above the crowd.  Time for some holiday innovation, how about it?

With the general slow-down in corporate productivity around the holidays, more people are reading news sites, blogs and following social media channels than during busier times of the year.  So smart holiday PR campaigning can be a powerful way to get your company noticed.  And everyone knows Sales is desperately trying to make their year-end numbers, so give the readers something that will potentially translate to a sale.

Customer case studies, product innovations and discounted products and services are three great alternatives to the holiday trend approach.

#1 – Customer case studies: I can promise you that in your existing customer base there is a hero waiting to rise to the forefront of your PR efforts.  Here’s the catch.  They don’t have to come from a behemoth company.  They just need to have a passion about what they are doing and believe your product is an enabler of their cause.  Also, with smaller companies you don’t need to maneuver the dreaded corporate PR watchdogs – many times these spokespeople have an open microphone to speak freely about what they are doing with your product and /or service.  Seek them out and then pitch their story.  Nothing is more helpful to a customer sale than a great customer testimonial.

#2 – Product Innovation: A lot of companies hold product innovation news until the New Year has rung in.  Why not be bold and let potential customers know what your product can do for them now.  In the midst of holiday “do’s and don’ts, a strong product announcement is like a breath of fresh air to writers who have been pitched trend stories ad-nauseum.   And it certainly won’t hurt your sales team’s efforts.

#3 – Discounted products and services: Let’s face it; we can’t get around this one.  Everyone is looking for a bargain during the holidays, so give your customers what they want.  With the advent of location-based offers at ridiculous prices, you can’t escape the fact that everyone is expecting at companies will make some incredible offer at some point.  Why not during the season of giving?  Instead of offering tips, offer a promotion.

Again, I do believe the holidays are great times to announce results of surveys or make predictions about New Year trends – or to consider something a little more catchy or gimmicky as these types of news stunts often seem to fit in better with the sense of sensationalism surrounding the holiday season.

But please, they’ll be enough boxes under trees –  don’t let your PR campaigns get stuck in one.

Wishing all of Attain Marketing’s clients, colleagues and friends a safe and truly joyous holiday season!

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PR Strategy: The Importance of Blogger Relations

As I reported back in August, “Traditional PR is Not Dead”, by any means, but the influence of bloggers is certainly gaining ground and should not be ignored as you develop your 2010 public relations strategy.

According to a blog post entitled, “Statistics Show Social Media is Bigger Than you Think” by Erik Qualman there are over 200,000,000 blogs and a reported 34% of bloggers post opinions about products and brands.

With over 1.5 million new blog posts every day and 77% of active Internet users reading blogs, coverage in the blogosphere can greatly increase your potential brand exposure and drive interest from target audiences.

Another upside is the fact that today’s journalists increasingly rely upon blogs and microblogs to find story ideas and conduct research. According to a new survey from Middleberg Communications and the Society for New Communications Research (SNCR), 66 percent of journalists use blogs and 48 percent use Twitter and other microblogging sites to assist them with reporting.

These findings shouldn’t surprise any of us considering the growing lists of journalists using Twitter and other social networks.

To engage this new audience of influencers, you will first need to find the bloggers that cover your space. Free tools like blog search engine Technorati or Google can help you build and research your list. As a starting point, I would recommend that you identify no more than 20 targets.

Next subscribe to the RSS feeds and get in the habit of reading the posts and comments daily. This will help you monitor target blogs for topics that merit commentary or present possible opportunities to engage — but don’t jump in just yet. Blogger relations require different tactics than traditional PR because most bloggers don’t get paid to cover a specific beat.

Technorati’s 2009 State for the Blogosphere report claims over 70% of bloggers are hobbyists and self-expression and sharing expertise are the primary motivations for these bloggers.

According to our social media maven, Susan Getgood, the success of your blogger relations program depends upon how well you translate PR and marketing messages into stories that will resonate with your target bloggers on some personal level. Unlike the news media, bloggers don’t necessarily require the story to be new. Relevant is often more important, although this space will have a tendency toward wanting the latest news.

First and foremost, make sure that you understand your target blogger’s motivation for blogging and personal interests before you attempt to post a comment or pitch a story. With all the noise in the blogosphere, you must provide real value in order to be worth a post or better yet a longer-term relationship.

Finally, make a commitment to be in this for the long haul because blogger relations are very personal and an ongoing program is more effective than a campaign approach.

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