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.
Would you believe it if you heard that nearly 11 percent of most marketing budgets are dedicated to social media? How about if you heard that among Fortune 500 companies, nearly 98 percent rely on social media for a combination of public relations, marketing, and customer service and industry insights?
While these statistics alone are not surprising, it is curious that despite the deep integration and heavy investment in social media activities, marketers are still facing challenges to deliver a strong ROI.
The 2017 biannual CMO survey, sponsored by American Marketing Association, Deloitte, and Duke University’s Fuqua School of Business, shines a light on the challenge businesses have converting social media investments into effective marketing. In fact, the survey found that 44 percent of CMOs said that social media’s impact was nonexistent or minimal.
With the impact of social media at an all-time low, and the investment of social media increasing (spending is expected to grow 19 percent over the next five years), how can companies better align strategies to create a social media plan that is both impactful and successful?
Cision recently published a white paper that taps into this challenge, providing six best practices for companies to consider when creating an enterprise-level social media plan. Checking the box on all six of these strategies will help maximize social media spending.
- Include all company departments. Taking a company-inclusive approach to social media will help create a plan that is authentic and maps back to the company’s overall business and communication objectives. A marketing department may not have insight into every subdivision, so getting feedback and including insight from different branches will help better define messages, accurately establish targets, select platforms and track results.
- Establish relevant, specific and measurable goals. Setting objectives you hope to secure from your social media efforts will lay the groundwork for future social activity. Without establishing an end goal, social media efforts can result in being too general and run up budget spending instead of delivering meaningful messages to your target audiences and creating impact for your company.
- Create target audience personas. A great way to establish and deliver meaningful content to your target audiences is by creating a customer “persona.” This can be done by identifying the character traits and spending habits of your company’s average and/or target customer. Combining characteristics such as age, gender, profession and income to create an “ideal” customer will help you understand the messages they want to hear, ultimately creating a more strategic social media plan.
- Identify the right platforms. Once you have firmly defined your target audience and established your persona, consider what social media platforms they would visit. What social media apps do they have installed on their smart phones? What platforms do they check at lunch? Depending on your industry and your persona’s demographic and profession, the answer to those questions and therefore the social platforms of interest will likely vary. Consider holding focus groups and issuing surveys to confidently detect your persona’s preferred platforms.
- Invest in the right technology. Investing in integrated social tools can help marketers monitor analytics around engagement levels and message distribution. A disconnect between social media spending and ROI can often occur when companies have not established an efficient and effective way to track their metrics. Marketing departments should vet multiple tools before making a purchase decision.
- Get internal feedback. Opening up the communication lines and welcoming feedback from the inner team will help in the brainstorming process and introduce ideas and strategies that the C-Suite may not have considered. Not only will this create opportunity for fresh insight, it may also filter and eliminate suggestions that are not ultimately structured for success and that will not resonate with your persona.
Cision’s full white paper can be found here: A Hub, Spokes & Technology: Social Media Strategy for Enterprise Businesses.
For many young adults entering the professional workforce, the ability to successfully manage email can be daunting. If not correctly managed, important emails can wind up at the bottom of one’s inbox, which may lead to a late reply or missed opportunity.
Managers, business partners, and customers also expect people to master email because so much business is conducted over the platform. According to Reuters, Adobe Systems, Inc. conducted a poll of 400 white-collar professionals and found that, on average, they spent 6.2 hours per day checking and sending emails, 3.2 of which were dedicated to work emails alone. Assuming that folks work 40 hours per week, this means they are spending an average of 16 hours weekly managing email. Because so much time is spent each week on email, developing good habits is exceedingly beneficial.
Given this, I decided to ask my colleagues at Communiqué PR for their tips on managing email. Here are their suggestions
Create and Use Folders
Folders are a great way to be organized in email. Some people prefer to create folders organized by subject, client or required action. For example, Zach Hanlon, a marketing and sales expert, was experiencing email overload. After speaking with his best friend (who works at a major consulting firm), he adopted a simple, yet effective strategy and set up just five folders: Inbox, Today, This Week, This Month/Quarter, and FYI. Then, he filed his emails into the various folders based on when he needed to act on them. (He details his approach in Fast Company.)
Personally, I’ve chosen to organize my folders by inbox and our list of clients. The bottom line is you need to come up with a system that best fits your needs and helps you to stay organized.
Respond in a Timely Fashion
Timing and organization are everything, and being responsive to email demonstrates you are punctual and that you view the sender’s email as a priority. Most clients and colleagues expect a response to their email within 24 hours, at the latest. Even if you can’t immediately start or respond to a request, it is a good practice to reply and let the sender know that you have received the message to avoid leaving people in the dark. By practicing good email etiquette, you are more likely to establish effective working relationships that are conducive to your overall success.
A popular tool to help you manage email when you’re out of the office is an automated response. An automated response may be used for certain occasions such as vacation days, sick days, or other blocks of time when you anticipate being unavailable. Communication is an important aspect of business, and by setting up an automated response you are still actively in contact with clients and colleagues even when not available. However, you’ll want to restrict its use because the recipient may perceive that his or her email is a lower priority or that communication with you may be difficult.
Another interesting idea is to put your out-of-office details, such as vacation days or meetings, in your signature so it is clear when you may be unavailable. This enables you to remind people in advance of your absence, which most people appreciate because it allows them to plan.
Be Concise
In the business world, time is of the essence, and maximizing your time and work output is paramount for success. When composing emails, communicating clearly while keeping the email brief is important, which is why the “One Thing” rule by David Masters, a professional blogger and writer, is so useful.
According to Masters, when composing emails it is best to limit yourself to writing about one subject at a time. When trying to discuss multiple subjects, the email may become too long and confusing. By sticking to one subject, you can begin to take a step in the right direction toward brevity and clarity.
Another great tip is to follow the idea of five sentences or less in an email. Usually, anything under the five-sentence mark comes off as abrupt, while more than five sentences is deemed too long. In email, you should be able to achieve your overall goal within the five sentence limit. Within these five sentences, the main questions that should be answered, according to Guy Kawasaki, a chief evangelist for Canva and brand ambassador for Mercedes Benz, are: Who are you? What do you want? Why are you asking me? Why should I do what you’re asking? And, lastly, what is the next step? By sticking to these five questions, you will be able to write clear and concise emails, which is a valuable skill to have in the business world.
For more on how to craft a perfect email, check out this article: “The Experts’ Guide to the Ever-Elusive Perfect Email”.
Concluding Thoughts
There are many ways to handle a high volume of emails, and some methods may work better than others. For those who have not tried these tips, I recommend incorporating them into your daily email routine.
Influencer marketing has become an incredibly popular method brands use to reach their consumers—especially social media. A study conducted by Tomoson in 2015 proved exactly why this has become one of marketers’ favorite news tools, stating brands make $6.50 in revenue for every $1 they spend on average on influencer marketing. In fact, so many marketers are seeing the positive effects of this method that 59 percent stated they would be increasing the budget for this activity.
With such impressive numbers, and the added benefit of tracking the effectiveness (to a degree) with click-throughs and engagement, it is no wonder this method has become an integral part of brands’ marketing plans. So if you are working with an influencer, here are a few ideas around how to leverage them to connect with your audience and drive results for your brand.
Personal Branding
Any influencer a brand collaborates with will already have some sort of following – that’s what makes them an influencer. And with a following comes personal branding. They’ve already built a persona for themselves, whether they are a reality TV star, a makeup artist on YouTube, a professional athlete or a comedian. Their audience has an understanding of who they are and you want to ensure that their personal branding messages align with your brand’s messages.
That being said, as you begin working with an influencer, have a conversation with them to understand what messages they are passionate about not specifically related to your brand. Once you have a clear understanding of the messages they want to communicate, you can determine how to best align your brand and its messages with their messages. By working backward, you can authentically intertwine the influencer’s messages with the brand’s messages, making them more impactful and enabling them to better resonate with the target audiences.
Social Media
If you have Facebook, Instagram, Twitter or Snapchat, you’ve seen some form of influencer marketing. You may not always be aware of it, though many more influencers are adding “#ad” to their posts, but influencers are everywhere.
Of course, one of the most apparent ways to leverage social media when working with an influencer is to create social media posts that tie back to your brand. This could show the individual using your product or it could be an image of an activity with a description about how your product or service enhanced that experience. Images are a critical aspect of not only influencer marketing, but marketing in general. If you share a piece of information with someone, they will likely only remember 10 percent of it three days later. Add an image to that information and information is retained increases to 65 percent.
In addition to having the influencer post about the brand, its products or updates, you should also interact with the influencer from the company handles. Retweet or regram a post they have shared or comment on the post itself. This will reinforce the connection between the brand and the influencer. Lastly, create a specific hashtag for the influencer to use when posting about the brand. This will enable people who come across the post to easily find one centralized area with all of the posts shared by the influencer. It’s a way to create a story arc in the crowded, content-saturated environments created by social media.
In-Person Events
One of the reasons social media has become so popular is because it enables people to directly connect with others, especially those who once seemed out of reach, such as movie stars, models, sport icons, etc. Social media has provided fans and consumers with what feels like a direct line of sight into individuals’ lives, creating a behind-the-scenes look.
Consumers are often very curious to know what influencers do day-to-day, how their careers or fields operate, their personal interests and anecdotes, and what products they are using and enjoy. An in-person event is a way to enhance the connection between the audience and the individual and increase the number of messages the influencer can share with their audiences. Instead of having the audience’s attention for a matter of seconds as they scroll through their feeds, the influencer can captivate their attention for the length of the event and build a more meaningful, personal connection.
Influencers are becoming an integral portion of marketing campaigns and the number of brands leveraging them is growing. To ensure your campaign is successful in cutting through the noise, create authentic messages, encourage engagement, and create opportunities for your audiences to build personal connections.
September has arrived in full swing with back-to-school preparations, football-related programming, and dreams of pumpkin spice lattes. One September event that I look forward to (more than any kind of latte!) is the release of the next generation iPhone. This month, Apple is unveiling a major redesign of the iPhone, but most importantly, this year marks the 10th anniversary of the device that has forever changed the way consumers – and PR professionals – are connected to a mobile device.
As a diehard iPhone user who has watched Steve Jobs’ iconic 2007 keynote address countless times, I recently took a moment to reflect on this ten-year milestone. Since its conception, the iPhone has been a catalyst for the widespread adoption of smartphones; it has also played a pivotal role in mobile app development and social media consumption. The opportunities to discuss the impact of the iPhone are endless, but I want to highlight three ways that the iPhone has changed the way we practice PR.
1. The evolution of the 24 hour news cycle.
Steve Jobs, in his 2007 keynote address, called the iPhone, “a revolutionary and magical product that is literally five years ahead of any other mobile phone.” As this device gained popularity, the smartphone industry exploded to challenge Apple’s quick tripling of its market share. It is no surprise that smartphones rapidly caught on with consumers, but even Jobs could not have foreseen the extent of its adoption. Indeed, according to Pew Research, 77 percent of Americans (roughly 242.3 million people) own a smartphone.
In the past, access to breaking news and information was limited to the evening news and newspaper printing press schedules. Now, there are 242 million people in the United States alone that have access to the worldwide web in their pocket. This means that there are 242 million people seeking the most immediate and compelling news from more publications, blogs, apps and online sources than ever before.
Journalists and PR professionals have had to drastically adapt their practices to cater to this demand for information as well as the vast number of news sources. Because news never stops in our digital age, reporters are in intense competition among other news outlets to be the first to report breaking news.
The constant, high demand for news means that PR professionals have to work harder to get their companies and clients to stand out from all of the constant, competing noise on the internet.
2. There are now incredible opportunities to form relationships with journalists.
The popularity of social media, undoubtedly aided by the development of smartphone applications, has created unparalleled opportunities for PR professionals to connect and form relationships with journalists.
Many reporters are plagued with hundreds of irrelevant emails and pitches every day. While there are still those PR professionals who won’t do their research, the advent of social media has made it easier to find the perfect beat reporter match for the story they are trying to place. Twitter can be an excellent resource to find out more about a reporter’s interests, which industries and companies that reporter typically writes about, and if you have any mutual connections. These three elements combined help foster that incredibly important and coveted personal connection. A 2014 PRSA study sums it up it perfectly, “Overall, social media helps you see what kind of person a reporter is.”
3. The rise of consumer co-created messages.
With a powerful, pocket-sized machine in millions of people’s pockets, the volume of user-generated content on the internet has skyrocketed. As digital marketing firm Brolik describes it, “…smartphones have allowed us to create that content (with cameras and keyboards) and post it to social media (with Internet connectivity) at almost any time. The result is an unprecedented ability to create and interact with content all day, every day for the over 50% of Americans who, according to the Pew Research Center, have a smartphone and use it for social networking.” Now, in our digital age, anyone can say anything about anyone. This is both a PR pro’s dream, and worst nightmare. The viral nature of social media makes it too easy for a worst-case scenario to become a part of the daily news cycle.
Take the NYPD, for example, when it attempted to leverage co-created content by encouraging Twitter users to send photos of themselves with officers using the hashtag #myNYPD. Unfortunately, a steady stream of photos demonstrating police brutality and racial profiling surged through Twitter in response. If the NYPD had taken the time to asses the risk of this kind of co-created content, the adverse reaction of the public might have been anticipated, and the campaign would either have been adapted or cut entirely.
With no control over the content of the message, it is the PR pro’s duty to insert his or her client’s point-of-view into the conversation. In the case of the NYPD, it was important for them to have already established a personality on Twitter, rather than blasting information and hoping for the best. Dan Tisch, chairman of the Global Alliance for Public Relations and Management, shared some thoughts regarding smartphones and co-created content in a New York Times interview, “In a world where the ordinary consumer is walking around with global publishing power in his or her pocket, the role of public relations has shifted from creating content to attempting to influence the content that’s created by others.”
While you won’t see me camping outside of the Apple store for days prior to the release, you better believe I will be upgrading. The iPhone 8 is likely to have a radical redesign from its earlier counterparts, leaving new opportunities for society to evolve along with it. Who knows where this new generation of iPhones will take PR professionals – most likely somewhere unimaginable.
As PR professionals, we are constantly seeking innovative ways to amplify, leverage and increase visibility for clients. Considering the investment of time and energy that goes into securing coverage for clients, PR professionals should be asking themselves how to increase the reach of the content before it’s published.
In addition to the traditional strategies, integrating paid tactics is a way to take earned media amplification to the next level. To successfully use paid channels, you first need to understand what the content aims to accomplish and the types of paid options available. Setting specific goals and tracking the right KPIs will make it easier to adapt your content and your paid amplification strategy for success. Example KPIs include website traffic, increasing video views and boosting social channel engagement.
There are countless ways to incorporate paid channels into your amplification strategy, but this post highlights a few ways to elevate single pieces of content. Here are a few ideas to get started:
Paid Social Media Posts
Social amplification enables brands to amplify the reach of organic content and target the right audience. With social channel algorithms evolving daily to provide users with a better experience, brands need to supplement organic posts with paid promotion to ensure the posts are reaching their target audiences. Nearly every social platform offers some type paid amplification options.
You can bring individual content pieces to the news feeds of new, targeted audiences through boosted posts. It’s quick, easy, priced by the click and a great way to expand viewership on content that’s important to your brand. After posting the content on your Facebook business page, select the “Boost Post” button in the lower right corner. Define your audience, select a budget and amplify away.
Similar to boosted posts, Twitter’s promoted tweets give brands the option to elevate specific posts to new audiences. Twitter bases its targeting options on keywords, interests and followers. Tweets will be displayed directly on the user’s feed and can include specific calls to action, such as “register now” or “learn more.”
LinkedIn offers a variety of ways to leverage its 500-million-strong user base. A good place to start is its self-serve PPC advertising platform, which allows brands to target audiences based on a variety of criteria, such as job title, responsibilities, geography or age. Through its sponsored content feature, brands can pay to have content featured on a member’s LinkedIn home screen or news feed.
Content Recommendation
Content recommendation platforms allow brands to place their content on respected websites and media properties underneath other types of relevant content. Through companies like Outbrain, brands submit content to be linked to websites such as CNN, Time and ESPN. It’s an effective way to amplify without interrupting, as the headlines from brand publishers blend into the rest of the content recommendations, creating a seamless user experience.
Sponsored Content
Sponsored content or sponsored articles are an evolved version of what many PR professionals call advertorials and have been around for decades. In addition to sponsored content options on social channels, major publications are developing their own studios to create and host sponsored content. They usually employ a team that is separate from their editorial team to produce content for their sponsored content offerings. Using a publisher’s content studio doesn’t come cheap so a healthy budget is necessary when exploring sponsored content. Examples of content studios include, BrandVoice at Forbes, Partner Studio at Huffington Post and T Brand at The New York Times.
The perception of paid media is changing in PR agencies. In the last several years, paid media has transitioned from being a faux pas to becoming a core part of the PR strategy. Consumers are increasingly inundated, becoming more fragmented and harder to reach. To drive results for clients today, paid media can play an integral role in your overall strategy.
Forbes has labeled 2017 “The Year of the Influencer,” and they might be on to something. The idea of an influencer in itself is not particularly new or revolutionary – brands have been using celebrities to promote their products for decades – but the landscape of influencer marketing has drastically changed over the last few years. Thanks to the rise of social media the coveted title of influencer is no longer reserved for the mega-famous or people with millions of followers – and so enters the micro-influencer. These days, just about anyone can become a micro-influencer if they have the time and energy, and that has opened up a lot of doors for marketers.
A micro-influencer is exactly the same as an influencer, just with a smaller following. Think 10,000 to 100,000 instead of hundreds of thousands or millions. Don’t get me wrong, the big names and celebrity influencers are great if you want a lot of eyes, but there are two major downsides: cost and engagement. Getting the big names is expensive, and multiple studies have shown that social media users with huge follower bases actually see a drop in engagement after they pass the 100,000-follower mark. Why? People just stop trusting them. Turns out, consumers are sick and tired of brands trying to pull the wool over their eyes and are starting to question the authenticity of the sponsored-influencer Instagram posts that are popping up on everyone’s feed. Micro-influencers fix both of these problems.
You may still be thinking, “But won’t big stars with lots of followers expose my brand to a much larger demographic and, therefore, increase my sales more than a micro-influencer would?” Yes and…maybe. It will definitely expose your company to a lot of people that you may not have reached yet, but it will only significantly increase sales if what you’re selling appeals to everyone and you can afford it. Big influencers will have followers that are every age, gender, nationality and race, that all have different tastes and interests. So unless your product or service is demand by a huge demographic, you could be spending massive amounts of money to market to people that are never going to become customers. With many celebrity endorsements costing five or six figures, it might not be worth it.
Micro-influencers, on the other hand, usually have a much smaller variation in the kinds of people that follow them, which can be extremely helpful if you are targeting a specific audience and cost virtually nothing compared to the bigger names.
Let’s say that you have a new workout clothing line that you are trying to market. In one scenario, you pay a celebrity to endorse your brand in a sponsored Instagram post. In the second scenario, you do some research to find 20 micro-influencers that are passionate about fitness and healthy living and pay each of them to sponsor your brand. Some 97 percent of Instagram micro-influencers and 87 percent of bloggers charge $500 or less per post, so that is only $10,000 to get 20 sponsored posts out there. In comparison, influencers with three to seven million followers charge an average of $187,500 per Instagram post. You could get sponsored posts from 375 micro-influencers for that same amount of money. Now, you probably won’t reach three million followers through the 20 micro-influencers, but if each of them has 50,000 followers, you will still reach 1 million people at a 20th of the cost.
Not only that, but these 1 million niche followers have much a higher probability of actually engaging with your brand than the celebrities followers. This is because it is a niche audience engaging with a trusted source. Micro-influencers become micro-influencers because they are passionate about something and their followers are typically passionate about the same thing. So the 1 million people who follow your 20fitness focused micro-influencers fitness are more likely to invest in workout clothes because they have an interest in working out.
This is also where trust plays a major factor. Micro-influencers are more believable when they sponsor a product because their followers know that companies aren’t just throwing huge amounts of money at them to endorse a product they probably don’t even use, which is the general perception around sponsored celebrity posts. Even more believable? Having a micro-influencer rave about a product because they genuinely love it. To cut down on costs even further, you could send your top micro-influencers some free workout gear and ask for their opinions and feedback. If they think it is a great product, there is a chance they will post about it without the extra sponsorship fee.
This year might be the year of the influencer, but it doesn’t look like they are going anywhere anytime soon. There are lots of benefits to any influencer marketing, but micro-influencers are one of the most cost-efficient and effective ways to get your brand out there. In this case, you can have quality and quantity.