SKC Insights

It is remarkable how publicity -- high-profile media coverage, speaking opportunities, and awards --- leads to bigger share of mind, and a bigger piece of the market. Public relations builds buzz and triggers people to talk about you in ways that you can never buy through advertising. But once you get the publicity, how do you really make money from it?

Here are 5 ways to turn publicity into profits:

1. Shout it on Your Turf

Your company and insightful quotes from your CTO have just been included in a cover story in your most coveted industry media outlet -- one all your prospective customers read. Wait. They have given you an award too! Besides popping the champagne and doing the victory dance with your colleagues, what else should you do? Well, let's make sure you shout it! Broadcast it to everyone at the office, frame the media coverage, decorate your lobby with plaques and awards, bind the stories into books, and display them prominently -- lobbies, conference rooms, and office walls. Open your treasure chest and let your credentials shine loud and clear.

Great media coverage starts with a great email pitch. It introduces and excites the journalist to various facets of your company -- be it your products, your founders, your unique proposition for a changing industry, your customer successes and/or your insights or predictions about the future. A pitch needs to be short and sweet, informative but not overwhelming, but what does it actually look like? For our post today, we've whipped up an imaginary pitch to aid our discussion, and broken it down into the 8 must-haves of a great media pitch:

1. Make Them Feel Special

When it comes to pitching, personalization comes in two parts. First, while it may save time to list all your contacts in bcc and send one email, journalists find mass email blasts to be impersonal and often delete such emails without even looking at them. Avoid the bcc line and you'll avoid the spam folder. Second, make sure you use the name of the contact you are trying to reach. A vague "To whom it may concern" or (heaven forbid) the wrong name tells a contact that you haven't put in the time or effort to get to know who you're emailing. Let them know that you care by taking the time to personalize your email.

Building 365, or even 182, days of content can test the most creative and best writers among us. Sometimes, it might feel like no matter what you do, you can't fill the blank spaces on the calendar fast enough. Fret not. Here are some tips to create timely content for your blog, newsletters, contributed articles, infographics, white papers, etc.

1. Celebrate the Holidays!

With built-in themes and dates, holidays are fantastic sources of content inspiration. Centering your content around the anticipated needs of your prospective customers, like including some of your fun gadgets as gift ideas for Mother's Day, is a great way to build content in advance. Some image creators, like Canva, even have holiday templates months ahead of time that you can use for stress-free planning. No big holidays coming up? Look for other opportunities. If you're a security company, you can have a field day with National Cyber Security Awareness Month. 

Content is the main ingredient when you’re cooking up a luscious digital marketing strategy. Just like how a chef works with different ingredients, a content creator works with varying types of content to entice their audience.

Here are 8 types of content to boost your digital marketing:

Email, a major pillar of any savvy company's marketing strategy, is the only channel where we have full control of our messages, design, and distribution. Plus, the ROI and conversion rates are consistently higher than other marketing tools.

So what makes a marketing email effective? Is there a secret formula that can help produce consistently great emails? There is!

AIDA is one of the longest serving models in marketing, commonly attributed to American advertising advocate Elias St. Elmo Lewis. Time tested, AIDA is a foolproof method of creating effective marketing emails with four essential elements. In fact, once you understand AIDA, you’ll start seeing it in every piece of marketing content that makes you say, “I need to buy that!”

1. Attention - Catch the Eye with A Killer Subject Line

Attention spans are shortening and you may only have seconds to attract a customer as they scroll through their inbox. So that attention-grabbing subject line is your essential foot in the door. Those few words will have to get your customer to read the first sentence of your email, which will lead to the next and the next. Peak their curiosity and self-interest with the promise of a benefit to them.

You have considered every angle of your PR launch. You've double-checked that you have every message a company needs. And you've planned for every stage of maturing your online presence. Yet you are still not getting the web traffic you thought you'd get.

With today's over saturation of competing media, it can be hard to stand out among the noise. So if people won't come themselves, you will have to get them to come. And the best way to grow traffic is email. The ROI figures alone prove it: every $1 spent on email marketing nets an average return of $38!

Here are 4 reasons email marketing can bring you the traffic you want:

With new forms of media appearing every day, it’s easy to forget tried and true methods of getting your story out. The company newsletter survived the transition from mailbox to inbox and continues to attract new customers while making current customers feel valued. Compared to social media, which can be done in as little as 10 minutes a day, a good newsletter requires time and effort.

A PR partner can put together the juiciest bits of information and services like HubSpot, MailChip and ConstantContact can make a newsletter easier to distribute. But even with all the support, you might ask why a newsletter is necessary?

Here are three reasons why a company newsletter is a valuable tool for your business:

In ye old days of print, a newsroom was the physical space where journalists gathered to pound out news on their typewriters. Now, the term refers to where companies post their news and all the information they want journalists to find.

Also known as digital pressrooms or media kits, your newsroom is the PR hub of your website. It not only attracts traditional journalists, but podcasters, bloggers, and influencers who are curious about your business. To ensure that they find what they are looking for, be sure to include newsroom essentials like:

Growing up is never easy. There are always unexpected twists and turns, but as children there was that shining light of adulthood at the end of the tunnel. Building an online presence for your company can feel the same. We dream of skipping those awkward adolescent years of slow news coverage and empty email lists and moving straight to being the go-to website for your market. But we need to learn to walk before we can run.

We've talked about why and who should keep a close eye on your business' social media feeds, and now it's time to go over how to respond to all of the tweets, shares, and comments about your business. All of that feedback is a great source of unfiltered news, but the sheer amount can be overwhelming.