Insights for Leaders Navigating
Visibility, Credibility, and Growth.
From media strategy to reputation management, we explore the trends shaping public perception and share the approaches that drive measurable results for growing brands.
If you’re a Facebook user you’ve probably come across sponsored content in your news feed. Because people willingly give Facebook so much personal information, the social media giant is good at serving up highly relevant paid content for their consumption. This content comes up alongside user-generated posts, so as people quickly scan their newsfeeds they see these ads. However, it is not always easy to distinguish between user-generated content and paid advertising content.
This paid content is often aimed at helping companies increase brand awareness, generate new leads or drive sales. Nonprofit organizations, like advocacy group Moveon.org, are also leveraging sponsored content to educate people about upcoming events and issues.
Facebook claims it has a business tool for every business goal, and with 1.8 billion people using the social media platform each month, advertising via sponsored posts is well worth considering. Recently, I wanted to learn more about how companies can leverage sponsored content in conjunction with other marcom activities. It is proven that taking an integrated approach to marketing by combining different disciplines – such as content creation, PR and advertising – can be highly effective.
White papers, case studies and other original work can and should be used in myriad ways. Marketers can share content with journalists with the goal of securing earned media. They can publish original content on company blogs. They can put it on their website behind a paywall, or they can leverage it on social media with either unpaid or paid posts.
But, if you know nothing about advertising on Facebook, where should you begin? Daniel Lawless, a principal software engineer with Evocalize, a company enabling automation of contextual marketing in paid social media, has some good suggestions.
Where to Begin
“There are some critical first steps to take when planning a sponsored content campaign,” explains Lawless. “First, you need to be clear on your objectives and KPIs. If you’re looking to increase brand awareness and stay top-of-mind with customers, your campaign is going to be much different than if your goal is to generate new top-of-the-funnel sales leads.”
A marketer looking to generate new sales leads, for instance, might use a sponsored post to promote downloads of a white paper. When people click “download” on the ad, they are directed to a landing page with a form asking for their name, company name and email address. Only when they have completed the form can they obtain the white paper. This is how ad sponsors capture potential customers’ contact details.
You can see this post could be an effective way to drive downloads of its white paper. However, if your goal is simply brand awareness, you don’t need a “download” button. Instead you might use “learn more” and link back to your website. The point is that your overarching business goals are going to inform the design of your ad and your call to action.
When it comes to design, Lawless suggests marketers use high quality, compelling content and photos. “You want creative that’ll immediately draw that attention of users,” he says. “It needs to break through the clutter of other ads and posts.”
Another best practice is to frequently refresh your posts because Facebook rewards sponsors for having new content.
Below is an example of this type of campaign by Marin Software.
Segmenting and Targeting
Reaching the right audiences is also essential for success. Marketers need to know which people to target. They will want to think about their ideal customers’ demographics, interests and behaviors, and decide whether they should take a broad or specific targeting approach.
According to Facebook, broad targeting essentially means that marketers are primarily relying on its software to find the best people to display content to. Whereas specific targeting means marketers are providing Facebook a strict set of parameters with which to work. The strict parameters might include the target audiences’ location, age, gender, language preferences or other customer demographics such as relationship status, workplace, job titles or education. Facebook also enables targeting based on interests such as hobbies or favorite entertainment.
Marketers can create “core audiences” (people you select manually based on characteristics), “custom audiences” (people who have demonstrated an interest in your business) or “lookalike audiences” (new people who are similar to audiences you already care about). Finally, commonly used targeting options can be saved for repeat use. (For more on this topic, visit Facebook Business.)
Finally, it is a good idea to test your creative with target groups to see which versions will be most effective. Simple A/B testing can help you optimize your ads. The key is to come up with a measurable hypothesis based on KPIs.
Measuring ROI
If you’ve taken the time to define your goals, you probably have a good understanding of what will be valuable to you. You should also understand the economic value you’ll derive from your activity. If you’re selling a product, you’ll want to look at how many units were sold and how much profit you generated. If your goal is to generate top-of-the-funnel leads, you should look at how many quality targets were secured through your campaign. Assign a value to each of the prospective new leads and see how many of them eventually convert to sales.
“It is an exciting time for marketers,” explains Lawless. “In some industries, we’re seeing a doubling or tripling of return on ad spend through these techniques. Facebook can perform as well or better than traditional search advertising, depending on how you’re utilizing your data and targeting.”
In PR, social media activities can be a major part of your communication strategies. Whether you are creating a social media plan for a client, developing content to post, or providing guidance on which platforms to use, it is clear that social media has become an increasingly important part of any marketing campaign. B2C companies have been extremely active with their social media platform and seen impressive results, and what’s not to love? It is a cheap, easy and effective way to reach out to a target audience and keep a company relevant.
Over the last few years, B2B companies have also been jumping on the bandwagon and have gotten results just as impressive as their B2C counterparts. If your B2B company hasn’t made the jump to social media marketing, choosing between so many platforms and creating a voice for your brand can be a daunting task, but it is time to make the leap. If you already have a presence on social media, it may be time to revamp your efforts and capture a wider audience. Either way here are a few reasons why social media is both important and beneficial for B2B marketers:
Increased Brand Recognition
The easiest way to increase awareness of your company is to get your name out there. The more frequent your posts are, and the more appeal they have to your audience, the more visibility you will gain. However, it is important to focus on using the right channels that will provide you the best chance of connecting with your target audience. While platforms like Instagram and Pinterest are great for B2C companies, a B2B company should focus a majority of its energy on LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook. The Content Marketing Institute found that 66 percent of marketers rate LinkedIn as the most effective platform for B2B marketing, with Twitter coming in a close second. Focusing on these channels will give you the opportunity to connect with businesses that have similar interests, and will help establish your brand as a leader in your industry. Maintaining an active presence on these sites also increases brand recognition, making the brand more relatable and easier to connect with.
It Matters to Your Customers
Using social media has been proven, time and time again, to bring in more leads, more website traffic, better SEO, and therefore, more customers. In fact, 75 percent of B2B buyers are influenced by information they found on social media according to this Social Media Today report. That is an important statistic because it shows just how influential having a social media presence can be. If you are absent in your industry’s social media conversations, there will be no information around your company to sway those 75 percent of customers in your direction.
It’s not just about creating posts that promote your company either. It is just as important to share relevant news, respond to any questions or comments made by other users, and interact with other business leaders in industry-related conversations. A study found that 57 percent of buyers strategically browse through a company’s existing social media feeds and conversations when determining if it will be the right fit. Having a strong social media presence will help put you on these potential customers’ radar.
Your Competitors Are Doing It
A whopping 84 percent of B2B marketers use social media, so when I say that your competition is already out there posting away, I mean it. Right now, your competitors are poaching your social media traffic and conversions simply because you don’t have any, or don’t have enough. The Content Marketing Institute also found that 51 percent of B2B companies are expecting an increase in the amount of budget they allocate to content marketing like social media. So for those of you with a burgeoning social media presence now is the time to put a little extra energy into the campaign. Let your competitive side shine and aim to create social media content that is better, and more effective, than your competition. If your business falls in the 16 percent that don’t use social media, there is even greater incentive to get involved because you will have access to the entire market.
It’s Cheap and Effective
If no other reason thus far has convinced you, this one should: Social media is cheap. The platforms themselves are free, you simply have to sign up, and so a majority of the costs are related to the time it takes to develop relevant content. In the planning stages, the time commitment may be more demanding as you work through finding the right tone, content and angles. But as times goes on, it will become continuously easier and faster to create content. So in reality, there aren’t really any reasons not to start marketing on social media. It leads to higher conversion rates, better SEO, better brand recognition, gives you access to a wider audience, allows the opportunity for your company or CEO to become a thought leader in the industry – I could go on forever. Social media has an incredible amount of potential benefits and it’s cost effective.
The only thing left to say is that when it comes to creating a social media presence for your B2B company, or doubling your efforts on a campaign you’ve already started, you truly have nothing to lose. If you’d like to learn more about social media and how to leverage it, check out some of our other blog posts:
A Beginner’s Guide to Creating a Social Media Content Calendar
Social Media’s Role in News Reporting, Business Interactions and Our Personal Lives
Since email went mainstream in the ‘90s, PR professionals everywhere have all labored toward the same goal: to write the perfect email. The good news is it appears we’re not the only ones on this communications odyssey. My LinkedIn newsfeed is often flooded with articles declaring with authoritative certainty that the secret to email nirvana is just a click away. To save you the trouble of reading those articles, I’m throwing my hat in the ring as an expert on email advice from experts to summarize some of the most helpful tips I’ve found so far.
Subject Line
As we’ve mentioned in previous blogs, the subject of your email should be informative and direct. Now thanks to Boomerang, a productivity app, we even know how many words your subject line should contain. According to survey results, three-to-four words elicited the most responses (48 percent). Before you add another word, decide if it’s absolutely critical for clarity or if the recipient will still be able to grasp the main objective without it.
Body
If there’s one thing I can state with absolute conviction after my research, it’s this: No one is a fan of long emails. Much like subject lines, brevity is encouraged throughout an email. Harvard Business Review advocates for channeling your inner drill sergeant when writing emails and delivering the bottom line up front (BLUF). By immediately stating the key facts (who, what, when, where and why), readers will quickly glean the purpose and intent of the email.
As for the ideal length, Fast Company prescribes five sentences to strike the right balance between courtesy and concision. If five sentences seems like a miserly length to you, The Atlantic went so far as to whittle that down to a scant three sentences. However, if a situation requires a more detailed email, remember to use numbered lists and leave spaces between paragraphs since your recipients will likely be reading your message on their mobiles.
Sign-off
And last but not least is the email sign-off. Once you’ve nailed the subject line and content of your email, your final hurdle to clear is the closing. Fortunately, the Boomerang team also reviewed closings in more than 350,000 email threads to determine which phrases correlated with the highest response rate. Here are the top eight closings and their response rates:
- Thanks in advance (65.7 percent)
- Thanks (63.0 percent)
- Thank you (57.9 percent)
- Cheers (54.4 percent)
- Kind regards (53.9 percent)
- Regards (53.5 percent)
- Best regards (52.9 percent)
- Best (51.2 percent)
It turns out that a little thanks goes a long way, at least when it comes to email sign-offs. When emails with thankful closings were compared to those without, the study concluded, “Closing with an expression of gratitude thus correlated with a whopping 36 percent relative increase in average response rate compared to signing off another way.”
With that, I will thank you in advance for reading my blog post and leave you to your inbox.
We’ve all heard the saying, “To assume is to make an ass out of U and me.” The reality is that our assumptions can be powerful. That power can be positive or negative, and can drive you toward your objectives and goals or hold you back.
It is easy to fall in the trap of thinking about what someone else could have done, should have done, how poorly they handled something, how disrespectful they acted, and more, by focusing on negative criticism of their action or lack thereof. I can hear my mom’s words telling me, “Don’t give them so much power.” She was right. Focusing my energy on being critical and assuming a negative intent had the power to put me in a bad mood, distract me from my objectives, and frame my attention on things that were not productive.
A more productive approach (professionally and personally) is to assume positive intent. Kit Copper articulates in the post “Assuming Positive Intent: The Ultimate Productivity Driver” that “once we evolve to understanding the folly of this mindset, we feel freer and we become more productive professionally due to the minimization of unhelpful, distracting thoughts.
Indra Nooyi, chairman and CEO of Pepsico, articulated the power of assuming positive intent in a 2008 Fortune article “The Best Advice I Ever Got.”
She wrote, “When you assume negative intent, you’re angry. If you take away that anger and assume positive intent, you will be amazed. … You don’t get defensive. You don’t scream. You are trying to understand and listen because at your basic core you are saying, ‘Maybe they are saying something to me that I’m not hearing.’”
Ultimately, where we focus our attention will drive our behavior and energy, as well as dictate results. If someone chooses to focus on the negative, we pay more attention to the problems and spend less focus on the solutions. Our attention frames our responses.
A Harvard Business Review article by Caroline Webb, “Change Your Intention to Focus Your Attention,” offers four steps how on to be more deliberate in your attention and to decide on positive intention.
Below is an excerpt from Webb’s article:
- Check in with yourself. Ask yourself what’s top of mind for you right now? What are your expectations about the situation and the people you’re working with? What needs or concerns do you have? What’s your mood?
- Recognize your filters. Given what is top of mind for you, make two quick lists. What information or behavior will you be paying most attention to, because it fits with what is top of mind for you? What information and behavior could you potentially miss, because it goes against your current state of mind.
- Decide on Positive Intention. Identify what matters most to you. If you’re coming up with anything a little snarky or self-righteous, try to reframe generously. For example, perhaps it’s really more important to improve your connection with a colleague rather than making sure the colleague understands they did something wrong.
- Direct Your Attention. Given your positive intention and your lists, what do you now pay more attention to – in others, in yourself, or in the task at hand?
It can be challenging in the moment to not react in a snarky manner in response to another person’s behavior or upon receiving feedback or a suggestion. However, how you decide to react, what you assume in their intent and where you place focus can make a significant difference in your relationships, how you are perceived, in what you learn and ultimately in your success.
TV interviews are a terrifying prospect for many people. For a multitude of reasons, putting a camera in front of someone’s face has a unique ability to inspire stress and lapses in judgment that can curtail an interview from its intended focus. But have no to fear! There are a lot of things spokespeople can do to prepare for TV interviews and ensure they are at their best when speaking to broadcast journalists.
The topic of preparing for a TV interview came up recently when CPR worked with a spokesperson from A Place for Mom – the nation’s largest senior living referral service – to prep for a local TV appearance. (Technically it was a Skype interview, but similar in the sense that visuals should be taken into account when planning for the appearance). The spokesperson did an amazing job during the interview, which can be seen here if interested, and below are a few things we discussed in the training sessions leading up to the appearance:
Practice, practice, practice. Although it is a very cliché thing to say, it’s imperative that a spokesperson rehearses prior to an interview. Running through Q&As and practicing answers before the interview will ensure the spokesperson is comfortable with the subject matter and help identify answers that may need work. Try scheduling mock interviews with a co-worker or friend to prepare, or at the very least, recite talking points in front of a mirror before conducting the interview.
Select the appropriate clothing. TV is a visual format and wearing an inappropriate outfit can potentially distract the audience from the speakers’ actual message. In general, people should wear solid colors, avoiding checkered or striped shirts. Accessories should be kept to a minimum and appear subtle. And finally, dress to impress. In more cases than not, wearing formal clothes that empower the spokesperson and project leadership is recommended for TV appearances.
Demonstrate engagement. Viewers are most interested in watching and listening to people who are passionate about what they do, even if the topic can be considered “bland.” Show enthusiasm when speaking about a topic, making eye contact with the interviewer and using hand and body language to emphasize key points and bring messages to life. A spokesperson’s enthusiasm can persuade viewers that the subject matter is worth learning about.
Offer soundbites. TV interviews are often cut into short segments, so speaking in sound bites is a good way to ensure key messaging isn’t cut on the editing floor. Before the interview, think about the top three to four things that need to be conveyed and practice giving short and succinct sound bites around the point.
Think about body language. Professor Mehrabian came up with the 7 percent rule, explaining that “communication is only 7 percent verbal and 93 percent non-verbal.” This holds particularly true during broadcast interviews, where a spokesperson should think about what their body language is saying to the audience. Crossed arms? That’s a sign of defensiveness. Slouched over in a chair? That shows unprofessionalism. Before participating in a TV interview, record yourself practicing and look for body language that may be distracting to viewers to help avoid doing such things during the actual interview.
Relax. Beyond anything else, people need to relax before participating in an interview. Take deep, calming breaths before the appearance to unwind. Bring a friend for support if it’s helpful, or do whatever is necessary to calm nerves before the interview. Nervousness can interrupt speech patterns and be very visible to a TV audience, but being calm and collected can help ensure people are actually digesting what is being said.
Interested in learning about more PR tips and best practices? If so, be sure to check these other helpful posts on the CPR blog: Seven Ways to Ace that Public Relations Agency Interview, Conducting the Successful Satellite Media Tour and The Perfect Press List.
###
An interesting article recently shared on Times Insider, The New York Times’ behind-the-scenes insight page, revealed that the paper has been running a test on which headlines are attracting more readers. Mark Bulik, a senior editor, unveiled the test is part of an effort to increase the paper’s readership.
The experiment is a relatively simple one, yet reveals the importance of a strong headline. It involves using a tool that allows them to simultaneously present two headlines for one story on the home page. Fifty percent of visitors see one headline and the other 50 percent see another. From there the paper measures click-through rates and, if there are significant differences between the two options, they select the winner to appear on the home page for all readers.
Below are several examples of test headlines The Times has run. Can you guess which ones received the most clicks?
Test One:
- $2 Billion Worth of Free Media for Trump
- Measuring Trump’s Media Dominance
Test Two:
- Soul-Searching in Baltimore, a Year After Freddie Gray’s Death
- Baltimore After Freddie Gray: The ‘Mind-Set Has Changed’
Test Three:
- Is Everything Wrestling?
- It’s Not Just Wresting That’s Fake. It’s The World.
The Results
In test one, headline No. 1 garnered 297 percent more readers. In test two, the second headline showed a 1,677 percent increase in readership. Lastly, with the third test, headline two increased readership in tenfold.
The Takeaways
It’s important to realize that while the article is the story, the headline is how a reader determines whether or not they will invest their time in reading the article. Based on the findings from this experiment, Bulik says the headlines with the most success are clear, powerful, and written in a conversational tone. As seen in the third test, incorporating something slightly controversial and that’s top-of-mind with readers, like the word “fake,” has proven effective.
While Bulik doesn’t state this in his article, based on our experience in the industry, people like numbers, which is why I would venture to guess headline one in test one saw more success. It helps people quantify the gravity of the topic. Anyone would look at $2 billion and think, that is a lot of money. That value will likely pique their curiosity and create a desire to understand how the journalist arrived at that number. However, when referring to measuring media dominance, it unclear what that will look like. Is it measuring the number of news article about Trump? Does it measure the time people spend reading article about him? Are the measurements at all significant? It leaves the reader with a lot of unanswered questions about the significance of the topic, rather than the topic itself.
This is an interesting approach, enabled by the age of digital media, to refining a critical element of the writing process. Bulik’s parting piece of advice, when developing a headline, two heads are better than one.
For more tips for creating a stellar headline, check out these articles: