Digital is the way we communicate and we have you covered. From e-newsletters to e-promos, our team can develop a complete digital communications program to get your message to the right audience, at the right time, efficiently and effectively.
5 Ways to Use P.R. to Grow Sales
By Victoria Rossi, Managing Director, i-media-international
Companies in all stages of the business lifecycle, and all levels of success, can use P.R. to grow sales but too often, P.R. is treated as a separate discipline unrelated to sales or simply left out of the marketing mix. This leaves opportunity and a powerful sales tool on the table ready and waiting for your competitor to grab and run. Don’t be that guy or gal. Here are 5 simple ways you can use PR to nurture your business development and marketing efforts to grow your sales.
- Awareness: PR is about creating awareness. Awareness of your product, service, expertise, organization, and success. Awareness is the most basic principle in sales. Use PR to create broader awareness of your company and what it offers through an article about your company, a mention about your new service, a featured case study about one of your solutions, an article written by someone on your team showcasing their expertise, a quote provided by one of your executives, a speaking opportunity, a press release about a successful outcome with one of your clients, etc. Approach trusted media and industry events that have established audiences that are in alignment with your target market. This will allow you to use their reach to grow yours, and create awareness of your product, service, and expertise with a broader group of potential prospects.
How effective can this be? Imagine this scenario. Imagine you are at a cocktail party. You see the CEO of a company you’ve been trying to connect with for months. As you approach, you practice your opening line and put your hand out to introduce yourself. While he is polite and smiles, he doesn’t seem too interested in what you are saying. Suddenly he perks up, and says, “Excuse me, but I see someone I’d like to speak with. I read about him in XYZ Trade Magazine, and it seems they have the expertise and perfect solution to my company’s problem.” He makes his way around you, and you turn to see him introducing himself to your competitor.
Bonus Assignment: Extend awareness of the coverage or speaking engagement to your prospect and customer database by including a link to it in your company newsletter, posting it on your social media channels and website, and most importantly, sending the link to prospects and clients with a personal note. If you’re speaking at an event, invite prospects and customers to attend, send out a press release about your participation, have someone take pictures and post the pictures on your company’s social media channels.
- Consistency: Consistency in sales and marketing is extremely important. It helps build credibility, familiarity and trust, all which enhance and forward your sales efforts. P.R. can help provide consistency, deliver information about your company, product, or expertise, and help you reach your prospect/target audience via multiple touchpoints and angles. Create a schedule to send an article a month featuring your organization to your prospect and client database. This will make it easier for happy customers to forward the article to colleagues and refer business to you, while at the same time keeping your company constantly present and top-of-mind with your target audience/prospect in a positive manner.
- Value: Providing value is a demonstration of your commitment to be of service. It helps build credibility and trust in your organization. A P.R. agency or in-house team can work on your behalf to provide opportunities for you to write and publish informational articles in your area of expertise, develop and market informative white papers, develop and publish industry research, and much more. These actions will serve the purpose of providing value to your target audience and moving the conversation forward in your target industry. In addition, it will demonstrate your commitment, showcase your expertise, and position your organization as a resource and thought leader.
- Credibility: Before trust comes credibility. Building credibility with new prospects and your target audience is a key part of the business development process. Garnering ongoing press presence, having an article written by you or about your company published in a trade publication, and having your executives speak at industry events will help you build credibility by demonstrating your expertise, experience, and thought leadership. It will also put you in touch with potential prospects and generate leads. A well-crafted P.R. program should deliver all of these credibility-building opportunities on an ongoing basis. You will find potential customers approaching you, instead of the other way around.
- Trust: Once you have established a constant presence, have provided value, established credibility, and demonstrated your expertise, your target audience will start to trust you and your organization, and begin to see you as a resource. This will go a long way in forwarding your sales and business development program, in some subtle ways, like getting a meeting on your first call, and in some not so subtle ways, like your sales pipeline.
5 Best Practices to Achieve Higher Participation & Interest in Multifamily Energy Efficiency Programs
Implementing a multifamily energy efficiency program can be challenging. In comparison, the program’s development can seem like the easy part. A 2016 study conducted by the American Council for an Energy Efficient Economy (ACEEE) identified five best practices for achieving higher participation and interest in multifamily energy efficiency programs that utilities and program administrators (including energy efficiency service providers) can implement for better results.
3 Digital Marketing Tools You Should Be Using Right Now To Increase Sales
By Victoria Rossi
A marketer or salesperson’s job is never done. It can be a challenge to make cold calls, generate leads, qualify and develop them into prospects, and then close the deal. Wouldn’t it be great if there was an easier way to warm up your lead pipeline and increase the number of prospects that were looking for a reason to close the deal with you? We have good news for you! There are three digital marketing tools that will help you do just that. They are e-newsletters, e-promos, and SEO/SEM.
1. E-Newsletters
E-newsletters are an excellent marketing vehicle because they:
- Get you in front of your prospect
- Give you the opportunity to showcase your expertise
- Allow you to provide your prospect or client something of value
- Can increase your audience
- Keep you top-of-mind
Once you add e-newsletters to your toolbox, make sure you follow some straightforward best practices. Always give your audience the ability to easily:
- Opt-out
- Share your content via email and social media
- Contact you
- Subscribe
- Get more information about products/services that are specifically relevant to them
- Link to your site
Also, be sure to:
- Deliver content of value that your audience can use to improve their business or better their lives. Consider what could be particularly useful to your audience, and offer it without expecting anything in return. Give your audience a reason to open your newsletter, and to be glad that they did. Many will share that valuable content allowing you to reach and positively impact more people.
- Archive your newsletters on your site. This simple act will help improve your site’s SEO.
- Create a blog on your site in which you can use the same content from you e-newsletter. This way you get more mileage out of each piece of content you create, have easily findable content that will provide value to site visitors, and you can showcase your expertise to site visitors that do not receive your e-newsletter. Bonus: Distribute the content through LinkedIn, and your other social media channels.
- Create a regular schedule for your newsletter. Part of the goal is to show your organization is dependable, credible, and organized, and if your newsletter schedule is erratic, it will not reflect well on your organization.
- Track your results, including opens, unsubscribes, complaints, etc. You want to be able to modify your next campaign and begin to develop your own set of best practices.
2. E-Promos
Unlike e-newsletters that are meant to allow you to showcase your expertise, tell your ongoing story, and provide something of value to your audience, the e-promo is more focused in purpose in that it’s primary objective is to propose an offer. The goal of the e-promo is for your audience to take specific action such as making a purchase, scheduling an appointment, or inquiring about a specific product/service you are offering.
Make sure your e-promos are:
- Well-designed
- Focused in their proposal
- Concise in their wording
- Properly linked
- Trackable. See 1.e from above.
3. SEO / SEM
While slightly different but just as powerful, if not more so, is search engine optimization (SEO) and search engine marketing (SEM). SEO and SEM drive self-qualifying prospects to your site. People conducting specific searches online are at the very least, gathering information, but more often than not, they are ready to consider buying options and be sold. Choose your keywords wisely and direct your traffic accordingly. What do we mean by that? If your keyword phrase is “blue suede shoes” then be sure to direct the corresponding link to a page offering blue suede shoes and not bedazzled red heels. This goes for the SEO on your website and any SEM you do on any of the popular search engines.
Most mid-sized companies already have these tools in place, but their use sometimes get put on the back burner behind bigger budget items such as advertising and events, or urgent items such as getting information to prospects. But remember, the great thing about all three of these tools is that they help the potential prospect self-qualify. They choose to open the e-newsletter and e-promo, and they decide to click on your link and go to your website when they find you in a search. This pre-qualification takes them from cold to hot prospects, and the cost of conducting the above in comparison to those bigger budget items, makes these tools essential in enhancing your marketing program and increasing your sales and business development results.
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Victoria Rossi is CEO of i-media-international a public relations and digital marketing agency based in New York City. At i-media-international, our primary objective is to help your organization meet its sales and communications goals. We do that by bringing together the disciplines and best practices of public relations and digital marketing to create awareness, positioning, new leads, and ultimately, new sales opportunities for your organization. Contact us here.
3 Steps To Thought Leadership
Thought Leadership. What is it? Should you be doing it?
In the P.R. and communications industry, we’re constantly urging our clients to embrace the concept of thought leadership. However, with everything most executives have on their plates, especially closing business and focusing on direct revenue generating activities, individual thought leadership is often not a top priority. But establishing yourself and your organization as an industry thought leader doesn’t have to be the time consuming task many fear it to be, and more importantly, it should be recognized as a sales support activity.
Let’s start with what is a thought leader. A thought leader is someone who is at the forefront of thinking in their industry or discipline, distinguishing trends, opportunities, and burgeoning themes, and most importantly, is able to effectively communicate these to relevant audiences. The “relevant audiences” part of the definition is one that is often left out of other definitions. However, it is quite important because you want your perspective and insights to add value to audiences to whom the information is important, as well as audiences that are important to you and your business. Being identified as a thought leader can be quite beneficial in the sales and business development process because it can tip the scales in your favor, encourage potential clients to seek you out, and establish trust and credibility with potential prospects and partners.
The path to thought leadership status, won’t be laid overnight, but it is one that can be fruitful along the way. Below are three quick things you can do right now to begin sowing the seeds to growing business opportunities and sales through thought leadership. You can remember them through the acronym SOW.
- Speak at target events: Most industry conferences open speaking opportunities for proposal submissions. Identify three to four industry conferences that are relevant to your target audiences and submit a proposal to speak. These presentations are meant to be informational in their content, not promotional, and as such are excellent opportunities to show your expertise to a qualified audience.
- Obtain positive publicity: Reach out to target media outlets with a pitch to provide commentary on the area of your expertise. Ideally this should be done within the context of a bigger story. Let’s say that your industry is experiencing certain challenges, or there are trends you see taking shape that will affect it in the coming year. You can offer to provide commentary or be a resource on your area of expertise within the context of these broader industry topics.
- Write bylines: Reach out to trade publications and pitch an article written by you, also known as a byline. The idea here is to write a story that provides value and insight to your target audience while showcasing your expertise.
These three actions can be implemented immediately. Be sure to work with your public relations team or agency to hone your strategy and optimize this opportunity.
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by Victoria Rossi. Victoria is CEO of i-media-international, a public relations and marketing agency.
The Challenges of Creating Content
Marketers find creating content or keeping up with their blogs to be one of the most challenging marketing tasks, with 43% indicating that it simply takes too much time. But creating content doesn’t have to be that complicated.
Much of the material that you need to create valuable content is already at hand. Here are our top three suggestions for facilitating the process for you and your team.
1) Create an editorial calendar: Create a calendar with topics and posting dates to help you map out the schedule and plan. You don’t have to get fancy, just use Google Calendar or a simple Excel spreadsheet. Select topics of interest to your target audience and consider industry shows, seasonal product cycles, product launches, etc.
2) Assign team members on a rotating schedule: You don’t have to be responsible for writing every post. Assign different team members with areas of expertise matching your editorial calendar. Have a new product launch coming up? Then invite the product manager as a contributor. Has your technical team been receiving a specific kind of inquiry? Invite your tech manager to write a brief that answers those questions and offers additional information to your clients.
3) Reach out to partners, clients, and vendors: Your blog shouldn’t be all about you. Feature, interview, and invite partners, clients and vendors for a blog that offers depth and multiple points of view.
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