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A marketer’s budget can be as unpredictable as the weather. Most small- to medium-sized companies have minimal marketing budgets that can only grow as fast as the company itself grows. After 20 years of creating budgets and implementing marketing strategies, here’s the approach I like to use with organizations that have small marketing budgets:
Attack your target market using a layered approach. This means, in effect, picking a cost-effective marketing vehicle to lead out with and driving that vehicle efficiently until your company’s revenue justifies the addition of another vehicle. This layered approach allows your marketing activities to grow along with your company’s revenue until all the proper marketing vehicles are deployed and working effectively.
Start with a cost-effective vehicle, such as public relations. PR requires minimal hard-costs and can be done through good strategic direction and old-fashioned manpower. A comprehensive, strategic PR program can help you successfully create leads, awareness and thought leadership. A solid and sustained PR effort will lead to press coverage within targeted print and broadcast media, generate analyst interest and commentary, secure speaking engagements, awards, and more. All with a moderate cost.
New media, which often falls under the PR umbrella, is another relatively inexpensive way to garner attention. Create a company blog or contribute to an industry-related blog. Look for a popular and highly trafficked blog within your industry and post interesting content that’s related to your business. Using blogs and podcasts is a great way to establish your brand, put a human face on your organization, build industry leadership, and reach opinion leaders and the media.
Web 2.0 technologies, such as RSS feeds, can offer visitors to your Web site or online news center a way to get continuous, relevant information. Every time new content goes up on the site, visitors who have subscribed to the feed are alerted and can link back to your site to read the new content.
In addition, keeping your website easily and readily searchable through Search Engine Optimization (SEO) strategies costs little and can reap huge benefits in terms of increasing awareness for your company.
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Involve Marketing in the Early Stages of Product Development
It is a familiar story. A company has a great product idea. The engineers are working around the clock to get it ready to show customers. Management is in meeting after meeting building strategic relationships and figuring out how and when this product is going to generate revenues. The one missing piece to this effort is the marketing team, albeit one person most of the time. But when is the appropriate time to get marketing involved? If the product is still in the ideation stages of its life cycle, is it too early to involve marketing? The marketing misconception is that marketing joins the effort when the product is ready to launch and customer collateral and materials are needed to sell the product. Marketing should be involved when the idea pops into someone’s head.
As the idea formulates and takes shape, marketing folks can help give it parameters. Using their skills in gathering voice of customer, marketers help the development team understand the articulated and unarticulated needs of the end-users. Typically this customer data will dictate what the design should be and how the product must be packaged so it can be incorporated seamlessly into the workflow of the target audience. Integrating voice of customer into product development creates an opportunity for a company to instantly resonant with their customers and speak to their needs.
Marketers also look at the market as a whole. What is happening around us? Who are the players—small and big? What opportunities exist out there that are not being serviced and why? This type of analysis allows everyone from R&D to management understand and familiarize themselves with the competitive landscape. It identifies the areas to differentiate the company’s product offerings and itself. Capturing this knowledge strengthens the company’s position as it enters into new territory or reinforces its planned strategies and tactics to capture more market share.
As products move along the development cycle, marketers should join the discussion to ensure the pipeline supports the brand and its promise. Due to development and customer need constraints, products can move outside of or stretch the brand promise. Protecting brands is one of the most important jobs marketers have. Companies need to provide an environment for their marketers to achieve this responsibility. Including them in early product development stages creates such an environment and helps marketing be better watchdogs for one of the company’s most essential assets.
Getting the marketing team involved early in product development also benefits your customers and other internal teams, i.e. the sales team, as the marketers collect and gather loads of information throughout the development process and turn it into relevant messaging that resonates instantly with the end-users. Integral involvement allows marketers to know, understand, and experience the market and its customers, which is important when they translate key needs and benefits in marketing materials such as sales presentations, collateral, and advertising.
Involving marketing in the early stages of product development creates the opportunity for companies to have an immediate impact within their target audience. Marketers assist the product development teams to understand the competitive landscape, identify customer needs and wants, protect the brand, and wrap it all together as an end product for end-users.
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Without question the field of public relations is evolving. New technologies and communication vehicles have begun to change the way PR professionals’ work, but the same traditional principles apply. Organizations must continue to leverage what the media and other key influencers reveal about them through articles, broadcast and radio coverage, analyst comments, speaking engagements, newsletters, and so forth.
However; with the advent of new communication vehicles such as blogs, podcasting, RSS, and the world of Search Engine Optimization (SEO), PR practitioners are changing the way they communicate to their various publics. New school PR, sometimes called PR 2.0, utilizes these new vehicles as additional ways to reach target audiences.
PR 1.0 (old school PR) centered on pushing content out to get media attention. Press releases, case studies, white papers, media pitches, VNRs, are examples of push-PR, a one-way broadcast for sharing your message. While these vehicles are still very effective, there are new modes of communication that PR professionals can add to their arsenal. I’ve chosen to discuss one of these: SEO-PR.
SEO-PR
Combining SEO and PR will improve search engine ranking for key terms, increase the amount of qualified traffic to a site, generate more sales leads, and increase publicity. SEO-PR is optimizing PR content (press releases, case studies, newsletters, etc.) in order to be found by search engines. This drastically increases the potential to attract customers, the media, and investors or partners who are looking for a particular product or service your company offers.
If applying SEO to Public Relations is becoming increasingly important, why are most PR professionals slow to embrace it? The main reason is that traditional PR departments and agencies do not have SEO expertise. However; some savvy PR professions are bridging the gab and implementing SEO-PR strategies. The five main elements of a SEO-PR strategy consist of the following:
Conduct key word research
Decide upon the words you’ll use to optimize your PR materials. If your company is relatively unknown, use search terms that are the most relevant to your offerings. The best search terms usually consist of two or three word phrases, too many websites will be relevant for one word. Also vary the search terms; this will make your website a relevant match for dozens of search terms.
Target Search Engines that generate the most referral traffic
There are five major search engines: Google, Yahoo, MSN Search, Ask Jeeves and AOL. According to the research firm Nielsen Netratings, there were 5.7 billion searches started by U.S. users in January of this year. The firm estimates that approximately 48.2% of all search requests were run through Google. Thus Google becomes the obvious target. Fortunately, Google publishes its guidelines. However; it’s vital that someone within your PR or marketing department understands them. You can find the guidelines at http://www.google.com/webmasters/guidelines.html.
Optimize PR Content
Make sure to include your key words in important spots on your website. This includes headlines in press releases, newsletters, and white papers. If not done properly, your website may end up being poorly ranked despite its relevant content.
Use Reciprocal links.
Every search engine uses link analysis as part of its ranking. This is because it’s very hard to fake good looks that are designed to spam search engines, so the link analysis tells the search engine what pages have good content. By building good links you can improve your website’s ranking in the link analysis system. Keep in mind that it’s not the quantity of links but quality; use links that link to good, relevant pages.
Track Optimization Results
Once your pages are listed in a search engine, you need to monitor them on a regular basis. Make sure links continue to work, that pages don’t disappear, and other problems. Continually change static content as much as possible to ensure that your pages are visited frequently by the search engine. Also, monitor and experiment with your key words until you’re satisfied with them.
Conclusion
Because of the overload of information available now, the media and other audiences have more choice and control over what they pay attention to. SEO-PR is great way to capture and pull them in order to deliver your messages.
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