Did an SEO presentation to a local telco company about two weeks ago; guys present in the meeting room are from marketing, IT, and research. They seemed very interested in the online press release part I talked about. Let me share 11 tips on online press release and hope you find it useful.
Wait a second, why should we do online press release?
Promote your company
Drive your brand awareness
Introduce your new products
Drive targeted traffic to your websites
Get people link to you (people especially journalists are dying for news).
Write Quality Headlines.
It matters and it matters a lot. People are thirsty about news and surrounded with news. Your headlines must be seductive enough with keywords in it. Read this 2 posts for more headlines tips.
Use a picture. Haven’t you heard, “A Picture is Worth a Thousand Words”?
Use Statistics.
Use up-to-date, relevant, newsworthy statistics to get attention.
Cut the crap.
If people find this post helpful, they may be interested to find out more about this blog or who Rocky Fu is. If you just have to include some background information, move them to the end section such as “background information” or “further information”.
Publish Useful Press Release.
Who cares? If your staff are not even interested to spend some time to read about it, who else will?
Syndicate your press release.
Here are some websites you can syndicate your press release:
Provide updates via RSS or email.
In my Google Reader, there is a few press release RSS feeds which provides me up to date information.
Bonus: HubSpot’s Press Release Grader evaluates your press release and provides a marketing effectiveness score. This score is based upon basic factors from public relations experts including the language and content of the release, plus advanced factors from Internet marketing experts such as links and search engine optimization characteristics.
The media group’s ‘This year, next year’ forecast predicts that the combined online spendwill reach $3.6 billion this year, and $5.2billion in 2009. (source: brand republic)
I know you can’t help thinking of the growth of online ad spend in US in this two years, here is a forecast from eMarketer (2008: $25.9 billions; 2009: $30.0 billions):
No wonder so many digital agencies are running to China.
Does your brand or product suck? Google it yourself. Say your company has a brand called “starabcd” (hope this doesn’t really exist), search “starabcd sucks” in Google and see yourself what people don’t like about it.
I hate to say this but the fact is that, what many executives expect is non-existence of bad word of mouth. Is it possible? No, for most products if not all. Even for the very well known brand such as iPod or Google, there are still bunch of people who don’t like them. That’s why only a few companies put up a blog and others find themselves enough “reason” not to do it.
The purpose of listening is to interact and engage your customers to better your products or services.You can never make a perfect product, but you can always make it better.
I posted a few questions last month in LinkedIn as a simple survey for online marketing managers. The survey wasn’t conducted in a scientific way at all; but, I know you are interested to see the results. Here they are.
Options for Questions:
a. search marketing (paid search)
b. affiliate marketing
c. social media marketing
d. display advertising
e. search engine optimization (SEO)
f. mobile marketing
g. online PR
1. In 2007, which was your preferred digital marketing channel?
2. Which one do you have least understanding?
3. Which one are you most interested in?
Social media, online PR, and mobile marketing seem the most interesting channels to online marketing managers. Me? I’m personally mostly interested in search and social media.
4. Which one haven’t you tried yet? why?
Is mobile marketing truly expensive? I believe blasting out to a huge crowd is; but, as this emerging channel matures, the system may be more flexible like AdWords.
5. Which one do you think is the most cost effective?
But, don’t take it the wrong way; no one said SEO is free because it is not.
6. which one has most share of your 2008 digital marketing budget?
Of course it depends on the industry and purpose of the campaign; but, generally I would put half my budget into search, 40% into social media, and the other 10% testing out other channels. And, I’ll keep doing affiliate marketing.
It’s a brief survey so let’s not draw any conclusions here. But, I definitely hope you learned something from this survey. Have you?
Google learns to crawl Flash [Google Blog]
Google has been developing a new algorithm for indexing textual content in Flash files of all kinds, from Flash menus, buttons and banners, to self-contained Flash websites. Should you build your website in flash?
Adding white papers and case studies to your website [e-consultancy]
If you run a business that provides information to prospective customers through a website, you may want to consider offering downloadable white papers or case studies.
Web Design Case Study: Brand Building [Business Week]
To further promote “what happens” in Vegas, R&R Partners teamed with design firm Critical Mass to create an interactive trip-planning site
Consumers Want to Talk to Brands, Finds ExpoTV Survey [BusinessWire]
Fifty-five percent of consumers want an ongoing dialogue with brands, according to a recent survey conducted by ExpoTV, exploring how direct consumer engagement creates brand advocacy.
In Asia, people start to talk about social media optimization and social media marketing. The fact is, if you ask what social media is, many may fail to give you a clear definition.
So, what is social media? If you ask Google, this is what you can get:
A category of sites that is based on user participation and user-generated content. They include social networking sites like LinkedIn or Facebook … searchenginewatch.com
The term social media describes media that is posed by the user and can take many different forms. Some types of social media are forums, message … www.batchblue.com
Software tools that allow groups to generate content and engage in peer-to-peer conversations and exchange of content (examples are YouTube … www.bottlepr.co.uk/glossary.html
Social media is an umbrella term that defines the various activities that integrate technology, social interaction, and the construction of words … en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social media
Online technologies and practices that people use to share opinions, insights, experiences, and perspectives with each other.
www.tvb.org/multiplatform/Multiplatform_Glossary.asp
This presentation created by Marta Kagan gives helpful explanation too:
For marketers, online social media is much more than a channel to drive traffic to your website but a media providing opportunities to interact and engage users.
Every business serious in branding and marketing need a person focusing on social media. Don’t know what kind of person is good fit? Some tips from Andy’s blog would definitely give you a direction.
It’s an old topic; but I often came across some clients who know the importance of search engine optimization always worrying about being penalized. First of all, for most sites, it’s not easy to rank well on competitive terms or to be penalized by search engines.
Being penalized means your site is out of the search engine index, viz. no one could ever reach you through organic search. A quick way to check if your site is not penalized is to use “site:” command. e.g. “site:www.rockyfp.com“; if it returns no results, too bad!
Now you can go ahead and submit a request for reconsideration. Log in to your Webmaster Tools account. Under Tools, click on “Request reconsideration” and follow the steps. Make sure to explain what you think was wrong with your site and what steps you have taken to fix it.
“site:” is a very useful command; I’ll share more about this if you are interested.
Color Psychology in Marketing [Branding Strategy]
Give some thoughts to the message you want to send and to the psychology of the recipient. Then choose your colors accordingly.
