Trade magazines and website editors love a good case study. (You know, those stories about your satisfied customer using your saved-the-day product.) So do magazine readers – your customers and prospects. This public relations tactic gets your product success stories into the editorial columns of print and electronic media, and it lets readers learn how you helped solve real-world problems. So what separates strong case studies from less effective ones? […]
A survey of large high-tech companies found some mighty unhappy campers in the executive offices — on average, they ranked their satisfaction with their own companies’ public relations programs a lowly 5.8 on a scale from 1 to 10 (least to most satisfied)*. When these same respondents were asked, “What would you say is the main reason that PR hasn’t been fully effective for you?” […]
The benefits of combining advertising and PR in your marcomm program
Keeping your messages in front of your target audience at all times is one of the keys to marketing communications success. Whether your prospect is reading a trade journal, surfing the internet, opening the mail, checking email or attending a trade show, the more times he encounters your messages, the more likely he is to remember your company and products and, ultimately, to buy from you. [...]
“If the person handing it in wants it published worse than the newspaper, it’s advertising. If the paper wants it worse than the person handing it in, it’s news."
Okay, so that’s one of the more cynical ways journalists have defined their craft, but it does capture the essence of public relations. PR is content that trade magazine and website editors want to publish because it serves their readers. Marketing PR is content that is carefully crafted to [...]
Okay, so Humphrey Bogart’s famous line in Casablanca is one of the film industry’s most widely misquoted. But the idea of repetition is good advice for business-to-business marketers. It’s called the frequency phenomenon, and it explains why we sometimes find ourselves saying the lines to a TV commercial or singing along with a radio jingle. Frequency, in marketing communications lingo, measures the number of times your marketing message reaches your target audience in a given time period. […]
