SKC Insights

Generating leads - both high in quantity and quality - is a marketer’s most important objective. A successful lead generation engine is what keeps the funnel full of sales prospects while you sleep. Surprisingly, only 1 in ten marketers feel their lead generation campaigns are effective. What gives?

There can be a lot of moving parts in any lead generation campaign and often times it’s difficult to know which parts need fine-tuning. To break it down, the best lead generation campaigns contain most, if not all, of these four crucial elements: an offer, a call-to-action (CTA), a landing page, and a form.

Here are SKC's 10 favorite tips and tricks for lead generation:

Once upon a time, companies large and small relied on an overwhelming number of tools to market and promote their companies. Marketers were inundated by clumsy spreadsheets, a plethora of e-newsletter programs, separate social media accounts, blog extensions, and analytics tools galore. Then along came marketing automation platforms – HubSpot, Marketo, Infusionsoft etc. – with a unifying automation approach that changed the way we do marketing forever.

Today, many companies are reaping the benefits of martech and marketing automation and their belief in it is evident in their spend, now expected to reach $25.1 billion annually by 2023. This spend translates to coveted lead generation and conversion for many marketers, with 77% stating that they convert more leads with automation. What have these companies gained by leveraging marketing automation? How have their businesses and marketing and PR processes improved?

Here are 5 ways HubSpot and other marketing technologies boost your business.

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.

The advent of social media has turned the public relations world topsy-turvy. New media content creators, or Influencers, are now carving a niche for themselves with online video, photos, podcasts and more. On Instagram alone, the top 50 influencers command a total of $3.1 billion followers. That’s nearly three times the population of China!

People browse their social apps daily, actually, some much more frequently, to check out their favorite fashion insta's #OOTD (outfit of the day) or how a MUA (makeup artist) does their eyeshadow. They live vicariously through influencers’ Instagram travel photos and gaming livestreams on YouTube. And they buy the products and services featured, that in 2018, a stunning 49% of consumers relied on influencer recommendations for their purchases.

More and more companies are realizing it’s not enough to do traditional PR with media and analysts, and are now cultivating influencers because they are great at…

1. Providing Stunning ROI

According to a study from St. Joseph Communications, the ROI of influencer marketing can be eleven times higher than traditional marketing, such as TV and print ads. That makes it $6.50 earned per $1 spent on building connections with influencers.

2. Generating Sales

Social media sites like Instagram have made it easier than ever to generate sales thorough their platforms. Features like purchase links let users buy products that influencers display on their feeds.

3. Creating Content

“Content is King” is a constant mantra in digital marketing and influencers are the kings (and queens) of content. Their expertise in content creation can lead to new depth in your own content marketing, as they know the quality and frequency that their followers love.

The beginning of the new year brims with possibilities. You have goals and grand plans for your company. You have a brand to build, products and services to launch, more customers to win over and an opportunity to scale. You have so much to do and so little time!

Yet you’re challenged. You’re dreaming up ways to stretch your 24 hour-days into 48-hour days, spitballing ideas on how to meet these goals without adding headcount. Well, you’re not alone. From brand building to media relations to digital marketing, there are plenty of reasons why so many companies have found their solution by partnering with PR/marketing firms. Here are 6 reasons why hiring a PR and marketing firm is smart business.

1. Frees Up Your Time to Focus on What You Do Best

You're building your company, designing, developing and selling products and services. That’s what you do best. The PR agency has clients and products to market. We write, message and position you, pitch media, create news stories, secure speaking opportunities and awards, execute digital marketing – that’s what we do best. When you find your trusted agency, take a sigh of relief as you can now free up your time to focus on what you do best, paving the way for you to build products that are PR-worthy.

Sometimes “bad timing” can be “good timing.”

Conventional wisdom dictates that companies should avoid media pitching and outreach during the holiday season. The belief is that everyone, including consumers, reporters, and editors, is too busy and distracted to hear our story pitches, look at press releases or read news articles. The truth is this is an ideal time. The news cycle is slower, creating content holes for reporters. For companies, the holidays are the perfect time to gift news outlets with story ideas.

Here are 5 tips for getting yourself some coveted coverage during the holiday season:

When Steve Jobs received his first big investment for Apple – $250,000 from angel investor Mark Markkula — it was meant for the development of the new Apple II product, the first major Apple product to hit the masses. However, before he started investing in new hardware, Jobs hired the best PR professional in Silicon Valley, Regis McKenna. Jobs knew before he could focus on building the products that would launch his company that he needed to have a PR plan in place.

Jobs embraced PR, and so do Richard Branson and Bill Gates. How about you? In fact, Gates once said, “If I was down to my last dollar, I’d spend it on public relations.” And these business titans aren’t alone in their fervent faith in PR. Many executives from companies feel the same.

Here are 14 reasons why:

1. Master Your Message

If you don't tell your story, others will tell it for you. Avoid negative or misleading press by presenting the best version of yourself with public relations.

2. Differentiate Yourself

With so many products and services out there now, it is far too easy for customers to get overwhelmed. Good PR programs can make you stand out from the pack. As Seth Godin says, “People do not buy goods and services. They buy relations, stories and magic.”

3. Create Buzz (and Adoration)

Do you have a product coming out? Start building that fan and customer base by influencing the influencers. Stoke that excitement with social media, bloggers, journalists, grant interviews, offer reviews and you’ll see awareness evolve to adoration.

The customer of today is no longer the customer of yesterday. With competitors offering more and customers’ expectations growing, companies are struggling to deliver their messages and gain market share. Think about it. Traditional outbound marketing—advertising, cold emails, cold calls, snail mail and trade shows—are not yielding results like they used to. So, what’s a company to do to stand out from their rivals and attract more prospects and customers?

Here’s where Inbound Marketing comes into play. Inbound marketing – a customer-centric approach to providing helpful content and experiences to meeting prospects’ needs and challenges – is a strategic and wholistic marketing practice that brings together a plethora of techniques ranging from blogs to podcasts to videos to SEO to social media, and more, to spur companies onto unprecedented growth.

Here are 10 ways Inbound Marketing, sometimes referred to as “digital marketing” or “content marketing,” can benefit your company:

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: