SKC Insights

From rising YouTube stars to Instagram models, to TikTok trendsetters, social media influencers drive successful marketing and PR campaigns. With the power to captivate audiences, amplify brand messages, and send engagement rates skyrocketing, these influencers shape brand perceptions in ways one can only dream when using traditional methods. Get ready to harness the potential of this dynamic marketing approach and take your company to new heights.

Here are 6 ways working with influencers can boost your business:

We’re in the heart of best-of season right now, the time of year when everyone releases their lists of favorites from the past 12 months. 2022 has been a fun and results-filled year for SKC and our clients, where we’ve added a creative flair to many PR campaigns to help clients to stand out from the crowd. 

These are some of the highlights from 2022: 

So, you’re thinking about starting or sprucing up a corporate blog? Good for you! A company blog is a great marketing tool for connecting with prospects, customers, partners, and to build thought leadership. And with figures like these – 77% of Internet users read blogs and spend 3X more time on them than email in the US – blogs aren’t something marketers can ignore! But blogging has to be done right to be successful and effective.

Here are our 5 Do's for creating and maintaining a successful corporate blog:

“Death of Mr. Peanut,” a 2020 Planters campaign, is a great example of social media success. It began with a tweet: It is with heavy hearts that we confirm that Mr. Peanut has died at 104. In the ultimate selfless act, he sacrificed himself to save his friends when they needed him most. Please pay your respects with #RIPeanut. Within hours, even other brands like Dr. Pepper were spreading the hashtag, and the campaign quickly became a viral sensation. Planters later revealed that Mr. Peanut was reborn as a Baby Nut, and now tweets from the Peanut Jr account.

Planters’ viral sensation and marketing prowess has continued to this day, where it has leveraged social media to engage and build followers and customers. Here are 6 ways social media can bolster your brand:

Are you aspiring to be a thought leader? Being a thought leader may seem intimidating, but it doesn’t have to be. Thought leadership can take many forms, but the most powerful tool in your arsenal is the contributed article. Such an article provides insights and positions you as an expert, without a hint of self-promotion. If you do it well, the benefits are aplenty, including having people seek you out as your industry’s "guru” and knowledge purveyor.

So, let’s get you published! To see your name, story and picture featured in your coveted industry magazine or even business and technology outlets like Entrepreneur and ReadWrite, here are 5 tips to getting your thought leadership articles accepted.

1. Offer Your Unique Point of View

Your point of view is not about your product. It’s your unique, even provocative perspective, informed by your experiences past and present, that are relevant enough to be part of your industry’s conversations and meaningful to your audience. Shawn Guan, CEO of Umbo Computer Vision, watched the artificial intelligence (AI) market evolve over the years and formed a unique insight on how AI will revolutionize video security. His “The Next Evolution” opinion caught the attention of Security Today which published the piece for their audience of security professionals.

Public Relations and digital marketing have a common goal. Both want to increase visibility and awareness, but while one is about your relationships with customers and prospects, the other is more about your relationships with reporters and media outlets.

A healthy marriage of the two disciplines benefits each side — making each one stronger than it would be on its own. PR gets access to digital audiences beyond their traditional sphere, and digital marketing gets the experience of tried-and-true methods of communication. And you get a cross-channel strategy that can’t be matched that provides the following 5 key advantages to your business.

1. Amplifies Your PR Efforts

By incorporating digital marketing tactics into your PR activities, press releases, thought leadership articles, case studies, and press coverage can be spread and amplified through new channels. Reporters will be able to find information on your business through twitter or a google search. Backlinks and/or SEO key phrases in your press release can boost viewership of a piece of news to a whole new audience. Sharing contributed articles or coverage clippings on social media extends PR to your followers and beyond. PR materials are also a great source for content-hungry channels and for content marketing where you can chop up a release for a blog post or whitepaper.

Would you like to become a thought leader and reap the benefits that come with it? Thought leaders—like Microsoft founder Bill Gates and Amazon founder Jeff Bezos—are people who have visions and strong degrees of expertise in subjects, topics, or issues. But more than that, they have publicly and relentlessly demonstrated their bona fides by taking a stance, having a perspective, and voicing their views and opinions. They’re leaders others want to meet, learn from and emulate.

Thought leadership takes time and effort, but the benefits are worth it. From building credibility with investors and customers, to shortening your sales cycle, to creating a legacy for the future, your efforts will not only help elevate your industry but catapult you to a new level of success and renown. Here are 7 steps to get started:

1. Be a Journalistic Resource

Getting quoted in news articles and publications is a great way to establish yourself as an expert or leader in a field. To be quoted, position yourself as a valuable source and make yourself known to reporters. Put yourself out there and be visible – engage in conversations with journalists, share your great ideas and insights. Help reporters choose you.

"Sorry, that's not news." Have you ever stumbled when a journalist tells you what you have to offer isn't newsworthy enough? You gulp. Here you are, with an exciting piece of news or scintillating insight, ready to strut your stuff, but they decide "it's not newsworthy" and don't give you a clue on what makes them tick. 

Well, we can't generalize for all media, but in our many years of working with hundreds, if not thousands of them, we have developed a good sense of the types of news and information that companies can create and package to pique the media's interest, earn their trust, and get written up in their news stories.

Here are 8 tips for creating newsworthy content:

1. Dazzle with Facts & Figures

Journalists love hard data. And that's a fact! Shining the spotlight on facts and figures, preferably with announcements about reports that shed light on industry trends, can entice a reporter to write about your organization as part of a larger trend story or even lead them to creating news just on your content. Survey data works great. When ACUHO-I's Annual State of ResNet Report was published earlier this year, media outlets picked up the story based on the strength of the numbers and infographic provided. One outlet, Campus Technology, even used the report in not one, but two articles, drawing from various newsy aspects of the report to cover multiple angles.

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: