Most effective 5 PR strategies in 2021

Public relations is a demanding business, mostly because of the conditions of digital media. Consumers access multiple online channels on an almost constant basis, so keeping your brand both visible and positively received by the masses can be troublesome for the busy entrepreneur. Many entrepreneurs, especially those helming startups or small businesses, simply neglect their public relations development strategy, believing it to be a secondary priority. But no matter how busy you are, you can make time for these simple, yet effective, PR strategies:

1. Cultivate Testimonials. Testimonials are your best friend as an entrepreneur. Depending on the medium you use for your inbound testimonials, you could enjoy the benefits of increased brand visibility, increased user trust, increased SEO authority from external links, and an increased propensity to go viral with a product or campaign. Encourage your users to post written and video testimonials on their social media profiles and external sites. You can offer them a small reward in exchange for their honest opinions, or sponsor a competition that recognizes a random participant. Initiating a steady flow of user testimonials is a way to let your customers do your PR work for you. Consumers trust other consumers more than brands anyway, so you’ll be able to build your reputation naturally without doing all the work yourself.

2. Make the Most of Your Press Releases. Have a plan in place to submit regular press releases whenever your company does something newsworthy. Press releases can be a great source of external links for SEO, since they’re usually published on high-authority news sites, plus you’ll get a boost in brand visibility from the shared readership of each publication. But press releases don’t have to be one-use-only. If you’re already creating and distributing your press releases on a regular basis, you can tap them for additional PR value without spending much additional time. For example, you can post a variation of the press release on your own site as a blog entry, possibly adding an extra feature like an interview with your CEO. You could also repurpose it into a whitepaper, or include it as part of an informational packet. It’s a form of recycling, which will let you take advantage of the press release’s full value.

3. Set Aside Ten Minutes a Day. If you’re having trouble keeping up with the nonstop social media posts and constantly evolving news landscape, you’re not alone. It’s almost impossible to keep up with everything. But instead of giving up and no longer trying to get involved, try setting aside ten minutes a day — an amount of time that almost anyone can afford to allot. Ten minutes a day will give you an opportunity to scan your news feed, figure out the gist of what’s been happening, and reach out to at least a handful of followers. You may not get time to answer every query or post lots of messages, but it will establish your brand as one that cares enough to make a daily effort.

4. Focus Your Strategy. It can be tempting to pursue every possible channel and target every possible demographic, but for the busy entrepreneur, that’s an inefficient strategy. Instead of trying to do twenty things with an average success rate, narrow your strategy to do one or two things with the best success rate. For example, if you’re trying to build a following on five different social media profiles, instead focus on building an audience for one (with the other four on the back burner). You’ll have a smaller potential audience, but the audience you end up with will be more passionate, more loyal, and more enthusiastic about your brand.

5. Leverage the Power of Influencers. This is another way of letting others do your PR work for you. Instead of spending hours a day trying to force your way into new markets, make friends with a handful of influencers and ask them to do the work for you. For example, if there’s an industry leader with a huge following, you could ask him/her to tweet a link to your latest press release — or if you’re on good terms already, you could ask him/her to create a testimonial for you. If they honor your request, you’ll gain almost-instant access to their audience, adding their range of visibility to your own without significant extra effort.

Small Business SMM

If you own a small business, it seems like everyone is trying to get you to use social media. Platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter are pushing hard for small businesses to embrace social media marketing.

Digital marketing gurus are spending big money to try and get you to spend big money on their social media marketing services.

You’ve probably already dabbled with social media marketing. You might have a Facebook business page. But, in your gut, you also suspect that social media is a bit of a scam.

You’re wrong.

Social media marketing isn’t a bit of a scam. Social media marketing is a complete scam for most small and medium-sized businesses.

What Does Social Media Marketing Mean?

Social media marketing is built around the concept of creating free content to build an audience. This is a time-tested strategy. But, social media marketing breaks this otherwise effective approach.

First, when you build an audience on social media, you aren’t creating an asset for your business. You are creating an asset for the company who owns the platform. If the social media platform goes under next month, your audience goes down with it. Social media platforms can, and do, change policies on a whim. What’s free today is pay-to-play tomorrow. Facebook pulled the rug out from under businesses several years ago making it impossible to reach your fans without paying to boost your posts.

Second, social media isn’t a great vehicle for selling. Look at any think piece about how businesses should use social media, and you will find that you should do more than just share your own content. You should be seen as a trusted authority or source or entertainment. But, it’s hard to make money just by being social and leaving a good impression.

But, as a small business, you cannot effectively monetize any of those metrics.

Social media marketing won’t lead to more sales for your small business. It will suck up all of your available time and money, leaving your frustrated and ready to quit anything having to do with online marketing.

Social media marketing is about creating posts to try and drive likes, shares, comments, and follows. But, as a small business, you cannot effectively monetize any of those metrics.

Pay-per-click advertising on social media is an entirely different beast from social media marketing. Paid advertising can be effective, but paid or free content marketing on social media platforms is a horrible investment for small businesses.

How Big Consumer Brands use Social Media

Big brands like Arby’s, McDonald’s, Target, and Ford spend a lot of money on social media marketing. These are smart companies. Why would they invest in something that doesn’t work?

They don’t.

What big brands want and get out of social media is different from what you want and what you get as a small business.

One of the marketing strategies big businesses employ is investing in brand recognition. They want people to associate their brand with specific emotions, life stages, and decisions. Big consumer brands don’t care about generating sales from social media. They care about leaving an impression.

These brands can afford this strategy because of their size, the number of different markets they are in, and because they are mostly focused on consumers.

You’re Not a Big Brand

Your small or medium business is not a big brand. You don’t have the budget or timeline to slowly build a desire for your products and brand over several years. You can’t afford to invest in brand recognition because you will get squashed by the competition.

Your company isn’t a big brand. You shouldn’t waste money trying to use their marketing strategies.

You need to focus on marketing strategies and tactics that actually make a difference to your bottom line instead of focusing on metrics that flatter your ego.

Boost Profits by Making Sales Not by Leaving an Impression

How much is a like worth to your business? How about a share or a follow? Here are the results of some back of the envelope math:

Likes = $0

Followers= $0

Leaving a good impression doesn’t generate one penny of revenue. If you want to boost profits, you have to sell more stuff. That’s how small businesses stay in business. They sell enough goods or services to pay all their bills and generate a level of profit.

You don’t have VCs backing you. You aren’t going to cash out in an IPO. You are going to have to get your cash the old-fashioned way, selling stuff people need or want.

While this seems like common sense, most social media marketers forget this fact. Think about what would happen if you suddenly had 10,000 real Facebook fans tomorrow. How would that affect your business?

It wouldn’t

You would still have to try and sell to those followers. How are you going to reach them? You can write a bunch of posts, but you will have to pay to boost those posts to get more than 5% of your fans to see them.

If you make all of those posts sales posts, you’ll start losing fans.

You’re in a no-win situation with social media.

No matter how much time and money you spend on social media, you still have to do the work of making a sale.

Instead of wasting your time and money on social media marketing, you should invest in three different tactics instead:

1. Paid advertising on social media platforms

2. Long tail SEO

3. Direct response email marketing

The exact way you deploy these tactics will vary depending on the specifics of your business. Business to business companies have different sales funnels than consumer-focused companies.

But, these tactics will help you connect with people eager to buy from you, and not just people looking to fill their feed with interesting articles.

Paid Advertising on Social Media Channels is Different

The real social media gold for small and medium businesses is in paid advertising. Writing and boosts is a slow, expensive, and inefficient way to attract paying customers.

Paid advertising cuts right to the heart of the matter. You get to ask your ideal customer directly to do something. It might just be to click on a link, but, it gets them off of social media and onto your website where you control the terms of engagement.

The biggest advantage of social media advertising is you can micro-target. You want to appeal to a very narrow set of people. When you use micro-targeting, it’s easy to talk directly to their needs. The customer can feel that you speak their language. They are excited to see how you can deliver the one thing they most want or need.

Paid advertising should be used to send customers to a specific landing page, and not just your website. You want to send them to a place where they can buy a specific product or service, or you want to send them to a landing page where you can capture their email address in return for something of value.

Advertising leads to direct sales, or it allows you to build a list of contacts that you can continue to market to, through methods you control like physical mail or email.

Paid social media advertising is one of the best ways to rapidly drive sales. Most businesses can see significant results in spending as little as $5 a day in social media advertising. But, you will have to invest time and money into testing ads and audiences. Paid advertising isn’t a silver bullet, but unlike social media marketing, it does deliver real results and generates a measurable return on investment.

Using Long tail SEO

Paid advertising is excellent for driving traffic and generating fast sales in the short term. But, if you want to build your business for the long term, you need other tools.

Long-tail SEO can provide you with small, steady profits that gradually increase the longer you are in business.

The goal with long-tail SEO is that you are driving organic traffic from search engines to your product or service pages. People who are looking to buy what you’re selling will find you. Long-tail SEO isn’t sexy like social media marketing. It takes hard work and a lot of patience. But, it delivers.

Long-tail SEO is about creating thousands of sales pages on your website that each generates a little bit of money each month.

Advantages of Direct Response Email Marketing

Email marketing is the most cost-effective form of digital marketing. It costs almost nothing to send an email campaign. When done right, you can generate thousands or tens of thousands of dollars just by sending out an optimized sales sequence to your list.

But, for this tactic to work, you have to build a high-quality list of prospects and customers, and you need to master direct response marketing.

Direct response marketing means that you ask your prospect to take a specific, measurable action. It might be buying something. It might be signing up for a free webinar.

The goal is to persuade your prospect to take one action that brings them closer to making a purchase.

Direct response marketing is a multi-billion-dollar subspecialty of marketing. It works.

When you combine paid advertising, long-tail SEO, and direct response email marketing you turn your small or medium business into a selling powerhouse.

None of these steps are easy. But, they are all simple. You will see results with each one, even before you have mastered the tactic. Each of these tactics makes it easy for you to measure your results. You can easily calculate your return on investment.

This is critical because you need good data to run effective experiments.

You only have so much time as the owner of a business. Don’t waste a second of it on social media marketing.

Instead, focus on marketing that gets results you can measure. Focus on tactics that put money in your pocket through sales instead of tactics that give you a dopamine hit from likes and shares.

You can’t pay bills with dopamine.

Year in Search|Google

Another powerful example of a brand using data to drive creativity is Google’s ‘Year in Search’ campaign. Much like Spotify’s data-fueled creative effort, the stars of the search giant’s annual campaign were its users.

Google creatively put insights into action, exploring the emotional story at the heart of every search term that dominated 2016.

Honing in on everything that made that year particularly memorable, including its most shocking news stories from Brexit and Trump’s election to Syria and the Orlando shooting, Google managed to turn the widespread perception of 2016 as a year of disproportionate lows on its head to spread a message of hope, ending with the words: “Love is out there. Search on.”

Aptly highlighting how Google is not just a search engine for the world at large, but a source of learning where people turn for answers, the campaign was a clever play on emotions that once again proved its dominant influence over the online world.

“From Powerball numbers to Olympic champions, whether making dessert or becoming a mannequin, this year affected us all in different ways.” says Ben Gomes, VP Search.

“Through all the highs and lows, people came to Search to learn more and understand.”

Ref:

• https://www.google.com/intl/en-GB/trends/2016records/
• https://trends.google.com/trends/yis/2016/GLOBAL/
• http://google.com/2016 | #YearInSearch

C R E D I T S: Brexit - Ruptly Trump & Hillary Supporters - Associated Press (AP) US Election map: ABC BLM Protesters - AP Dallas PD Vigil - Ruptly Dallas PD memorial - ITN News Source Orlando PD - Steven Fernandez Aleppo Wall - Russia Insider Omran Daqneesh - AP Refugees welcome - Shay Murphy Justin Trudeau at pride - Canadian Press Hillary Clinton @ DNC - CNN Doaa Elghobashy @ Olympics - AP Simone Biles performance - USA Gymnastics Prince with guitar - Richard E. Aaaron Special thanks to www.alicenter.org/ Ali with mic - AP Bowie with Lighting Bolt - Duffy Archive & Bowie Archive Aziz Ansari w/ Lighting - Photo by Crackerfarm/Under The Table Additional Lighting Makeup shot - Dade Freeman Bear and Deer - JukinMedia Secret Life of Pets available on Google Play Zianna Speaks to City Council - CNN Refugees at Sea - Vice News Border embrace - ITN/Reuters Dallas Protest - Dallas Morning News

Content Strategy in 10 Simple Steps

More and more, brands are recognizing that a strategic approach to content is becoming important. Content is moving from being among the final considerations of a Web-development project to being front and center in a digital-marketing strategy.

Engage via Conversation

It's easy for brands to get drawn into the hype around the latest format, platform, or tactic. A couple of years ago, brands were all asking for a "viral," whereas now they all seem to be asking for iPhone apps.

But content is merely a means to an end: Content drives conversations, conversations are how you engage with people, and engaging with people is the only way brands will be able to survive in the social-media-disrupted world we now live in.

Formulating a content strategy can be a difficult process, partly because of the many considerations and partly because of the number of stakeholders. So, to help, here's a simple 10-step systematic process for formulating a content strategy.

1. Principles

Set some principles. Doing so allow the brand to have a healthy and robust discussion around authenticity, transparency, and humility, as well as an opportunity to define the engagement policy.

Also, acknowledge that because brands no longer control when the conversations end, you need to commit to making continual investments. Unlike a campaign, this endeavor is ongoing.

2. Business Objectives

Here we get into the "Why are we doing this?" question. Clarify your objectives; link them to appropriate metrics, setting targets if possible; and define a budget.

3. Brand Purpose

Substance focuses the mind on what subjects and topics are important to you. What's your position on things, your point of view? Where's the evidence that you're serious about content? What's your story? What's your purpose? Why should people care?

David Ogilvy, founder of advertising agency Ogilvy and Mather Worldwide, talked about identifying a brand's ideal. For example, Dove believes that the world would be a better place if women were allowed to feel good about themselves, Fanta believes the world would be a better place if we grew up less and played more, Scrabble believes the world would be a better place if we loved words more, and Coca-Cola believes the world would be a better place if we saw the glass as half full, not half empty.

Identifying your brand ideal is a great way to uncover your purpose and so gives you something to anchor your content to. Remember that you need to support your brand ideal with evidence. Just paying lip service is playing with fire.

4. Content Value (Social Currency)

What value does your content deliver directly to people? What value does it deliver indirectly (i.e., the payback you get for telling someone else about it)? The direct value is the content's social currency, and there are five types of value:

• Entertainment value. Advertising campaigns typically deal in this currency. It's worth asking whether the idea lends itself to being parodied like Cadbury's Gorilla campaign, as that can be a potent conversation multiplier.
• Personal value. Fame delivers powerful personal value. The rise of The X Factor-type television shows and other reality-TV shows over recent years indicates the value that people place on such content.
• Knowledge value. B2B thought leadership via white papers is an example.
• Monetary value. Consumer public relations (PR) typically deals in this type of currency with promotions and competitions. A 40%-off voucher that UK wine-store-chain Threshers offered in 2006 is a great example.
• Utility value. Many iPhone apps, such as Sky+, fall into this category. Also, see toilet paper brand Charmin'sEnjoy the Go campaign, for which it installed 20 restrooms in Times Square.

How can we blend some of those together to make them more potent? Attempting to blend various values together is the modern-day equivalent of the challenges faced in creating an integrated campaign (i.e., you need a multidisciplined, experienced, and talented team to work collaboratively together).

Here are some other thoughts: Can we tap into popular culture as T-mobile did with TV show So You Think You Can Dance, or can we ride a meme like EA Games did with the Tiger Woods "walking on water" game glitch?

5. Sources

Who is going to be creating or producing all this great content for you? You have more choices than you may realize.

• Employees can be an effective choice. US online shoe retailer Zappos.com encourages all staff to use Twitter and even has a competitive element: a leaderboard that ranks Zappos staff according to their Twitter following.
• Agencies are an obvious route.
• You could use industry peers by simply sign-posting people to relevant, interesting stuff.
• User-generated content (UGC), crowdsourcing, and co-creation can also be a viable option for some brands.

6. Spaces

Which social and digital channels will the content be going out through? Or, put another way, what's the distribution strategy?

• Brand media: outposts, websites, email, or events
• Earned media: influencer networks, communities, or the media (what used to be called the press)
• Paid media

How are you going to balance or integrate content across those spaces? Experiential and social spaces work really well together. For example, if we look at the T-Mobile flash mob in Liverpool Street station, it started with an event (or PR stunt, if you like), word of mouth spread online, and then the traditional media picked up the buzz and covered it via their channels.

Another challenging question: Is the brand able to build a social destination? Not many brands can pull that off. If you try and you don't currently have enough pulling power, you could find yourself spending a lot of money on generating traffic, which is pointless. It may be better to get out into the communities that already exist.

7. Formats

Formats that are appropriate to use include blog posts, presentations, videos, pictures, podcasts, tweets, Facebook, iPhone apps, or live streams.

Repurpose your content into different formats. For example, a white paper could be repurposed into a YouTube-video interview with the author, then into a series of blog posts, and then into an iTunes podcast.

Is your content in a format that is easy for people to share and remix? Cadbury's Eyebrows ad actively encouraged parody by providing tools to enable people to remix and share it.

8. Schedule

Remember that conversations can't be turned off like campaigns, so plan for a rolling three-month content schedule. Consider what will be preplanned and what will be left as ad hoc and reactive. How will you ensure a constant stream of content? How are you going to create peaks of interest?

9. Social Agents

Who will be manning your brand outposts? Who will be managing the conversations? Who will be building the relationships? Who will be redirecting questions or suggestions to the appropriate internal function? Who will be looking for early signs of an online crisis?

Ultimately, who will be responsible for your social brand?

Will your social agents be a central team, a distributed team, all employees, an agency?

10. Active Listening

To find out what the reaction to your content has been, you need to ensure you have set up your active-listening tools. 

What conversations have you started? What conversations do you want to join? How are you tracking against your objectives, targets, and budgets?

Bluespace::: Conquering the space through search

BRAND OWNER :Bluespace
CATEGORY :Office Goods
REGION :Spain
DATE :Apr 2008 - Dec 2008


The self storage market has been growing at a rapid speed in Spain – well above the European average. Since it’s inception in 2002, Bluespace has been the largest storage company in Spain, but new competitors were popping up every day, mostly from the local sector.

More than 50% of Bluespace’s business is generated through the internet, specifically Search Engine Marketing, and the challenge was to drive more business.
Bluespace has two types of consumers: rental or home owners and corporations. Those individuals who take advantage of Bluespace services do so because they are either moving or renovating, or because they need extra storage space near their home, while companies often use it to store files when office space is just not available.
Bluespace launched a three month test campaign, fostering agreements with several business sites to measure CPC and CPM rates, keywords and conversion rates. It then analyzed SEM by reviewing current investments to define a more effective structure. Bluespace then simplified the ad words structure to gain more control over performance. The entire campaign was tracked and optimized on a daily basis, with keywords being added and older words being deleted. Keywords like “moving services” and “real estate” were found to the consumer. The Bluespace landing page being modified based on keywords. The campaign achieved more than 24m impressions and there was a 200% increase in leads per month during the last four months of the campaign. The cost per “hot lead” (CPR) dropped from €150 to €50 on average. The client was so happy with our findings/optimizations that there will be a 40% increase in online investment in 2009 and a 100% increase in search