1. Don’t Pay Gold Prices for Pewter PR
Don’t even think about paying top dollar to hire a large agency to do your public relations and marketing work. The smaller your budget is, the less time senior associates will spend on your activities. You’ll end up with low-level associates doing your day-to-day work.
By working with a boutique agency, where senior-level executives are heavily involved in the day-to-day activities that support your public relations program, you’ll get a lot more bang for your marketing buck.
2. Don’t Underestimate the Power of Industry Relationships – and Traditional PR
Hire a PR agency with the right media relationships. Because getting your story covered by the right publication can help it go viral. When Calysto worked with an Associated Press reporter to secure an AP story for one of its clients, that one story generated more than 300 additional stories within 24 hours. As a result, the news reached more than 510 million subscribers and/or unique monthly online visitors in just one day – and drove a rush of new visitors to the client’s website.
3. Repurpose Your Content in a Dozen (or More!) Different Ways
Thanks to the rise of social media, your company can now deliver the same message to many different audiences. So the next time you have some great content to share, consider:
- writing a white paper
- turning your white paper into a press release,
- modifying that white paper to create a slideshare presentation,
- embedding that slideshare into a blog post,
- turning that blog into a post on LinkedIn and Facebook,
- sharing a link to that post in Twitter (complete with hashtag),
- And much more.
4. Use These Simple Tricks to Get More People Reading Your Content
According to an analysis by PR Newswire and Crowd Factory:
- Each time you share a press release, it generates an average of nearly 2 click-backs to the original release
- Sharing across social networks can increase your total audience by 70 percent
- Sharing on Twitter is most effective, driving about 30 percent more press release views than sharing on Facebook
Additionally:
- Websites that display Twitter sharing buttons get seven times more social media mentions than sites that do not, according to an analysis by BrightEdge.
- PR Newswire found that press releases that include multimedia generate almost 10 times more visibility than press releases that don’t.
- Adding a photo nearly doubles a press release’s visibility, while adding video results in more than 4 times as many views.
5. Tie Your Marketing Activities to Your Business Goals
It’s shocking how many companies throw money at public relations, social media and content marketing with no idea of the return they’re getting on their investment. That’s why it’s important to first understand the business goals you want to achieve with your communications.
Instead of just throwing money at social media, one Calysto client asked for a plan to help it use social media to drive more traffic to its website. Instead of completely reworking its social media strategy, the client chose to focus instead on improving its content on Twitter and LinkedIn. The result: Twitter and LinkedIn now drive eight times more traffic to the client’s website. The cost: Around $5,000 total.
6. Ditch the Monthly Retainer
Want to ditch the monthly PR retainer? Consider hiring an agency that lets you have a flexible “consumption-based” budget. This allows you to increase and decrease your public relations and social media activities as needed each month. After all, why pay for what you don’t need or use?
7. Double Down Your Budget on a Few Key Trade Shows
Designate more dollars to spend on PR and social media activities surrounding the most important shows you attend to increase the payoff. Consider timing a new product launch to coincide with a major trade show. You can hire an agency a few monthsprior to the show to help you create and distribute your announcement via a press release, pitches and social media outlets. The agency can also help you set upone-on-one briefings with media and analysts at the show. One Calysto client did this – and got 10 times more traffic from Tier 1 service providers compared to the previous year.
Adhering to these seven rules will not only help your company maximize its existing investment in PR, Content Marketing and Social Media, but can also be an extremely cost-effective way to reach new audiences, increase user engagement, attract visitors to your website and drive sales, increasing your company’s bottom line.