Sales and Marketing

How do you get your money�s worth for PR?

SBOCTeam — Tue, 03 Feb 2009 14:38:00 GMT

by PR_Boston

Business owners large and small are looking for ways to cut expenses. So the question arises: Do I need PR? Here are a few reasons why you should say yes and feel good about the expense.

PR is a cost effective alternative to advertising. Even though web ads can cost 25% of those in old-line media, advertising is expensive. And, there are so many ads you have to wonder which ones really stick. People are exposed to thousands of messages everyday: in the supermarket line, at the gas station, on websites-not to mention the ads on the radio, in the newspaper and on TV. We are faced with ad fatigue.

PR provides third party validation. When someone else-an independent person-- writes about you and places that article in a public place, it has intrinsic value. That's why companies want to be featured in the media whether it's in the town paper or on the Today Show. A good PR plan includes strategies for promoting your story to the right media.

Many people think PR is expensive. It doesn't have to be. If you're a small business consider working with a small PR firm. A small business owner is used to being the point person and could be frustrated dealing with a junior level executive at a large firm. Plus, small firms are cheaper.

In PR, unlike in advertising, spending less doesn't mean you get less. Cutting an ad budget means you lose your reach and frequency and that can undermine a good ad. But, cutting your PR budget and signing on with a smaller, more nimble firm can still result in an effective media placement. Similarly, opting for a black and white ad instead of color means you could fail to attract enough eyeballs to get the ad noticed. But working with a PR firm on a project basis as opposed to a costly monthly retainer can still get you featured on TV. In the end it comes down to how well your PR pro develops your message and leverages it with the media.

In today's economy, ROI is more critical than ever. While PR is never a guarantee, it can be a cost effective way to get you message to the right people, and if you can still throw some money behind advertising-that's even better.

Video Marketing � How to Promote Your Business Using Videos

SBOCTeam — Fri, 02 Jan 2009 18:20:00 GMT

by ZekeLL

Video marketing is a fairly new term. It means producing videos and posting them to several video sharing websites to boost your website traffic and get your name out there.

5 Reasons Why Video Marketing Is Great

Google is showing more and more videos in the search results.
Producing a video is very inexpensive and posting it is free.
Most video sharing services such as YouTube have several tools to help people spread the word. Think about it. People actually market your videos for you.
Millions of people promote their websites using articles, but just a small percentage of them use videos. The competition is a lot less fierce.
Video communities are a lot more active than article communities. It is not uncommon to post a video on YouTube and get 1,000 comments in a month!

5 Steps to Producing a Video

Decide what kind of video you want to record (talking head, based on a PowerPoint presentation, from your computer screen, interview, etc.)
Get a good microphone and a camera. It doesn't have to be a professional camera. Sometimes a simple digital camera is enough.
Write the script or prepare the content. Do a practice run first.
Record it.
Do some minor editing using free software such as Windows Movie Maker. You will probably need to trim out the end and the beginning, and add a watermark with the URL of your website.

Where You Can Submit Your Video
YouTube - http://www.YouTube.com
Google Video - http://video.google.com/
Yahoo Video - http://video.yahoo.com/
FlickLife - http://www.veoh.com/
Blip - http://blip.tv/
Crackle - http://crackle.com/
Flurl - http://www.flurl.com/
BoFunk - http://www.bofunk.com/
Vimeo - http://vimeo.com/
Flixya - http://www.flixya.com/

A Case Study
In case you are still not 100% convinced that video marketing is an amazing tool to drive massive traffic to your website, listen to this. Last month we recorded four videos for a client and distributed them to the services mentioned above.

We used some tricks, picked the right keywords, and created some backlinks to them. Then we social bookmarked them, submitted their RSSs to some RSS search engines, and we finally pinged all the pages that we created. All this took us 4 hours. In 6 days, our client's videos had 150,000 views! Do you realize what that means? 150,000 people discovered our client's company in less than 6 days. He got 1,746 visits and $11,235 in revenues from that campaign. His investment was $215. Are you a video marketing believer now?

Zeke Camusio is a serial entrepreneur. The Outsourcing Company, his 6th endeavor, is a creative web design and Internet marketing agency with offices in Aspen, CO and New York.

Zeke writes Let's Do It!, one of the most prestigious and popular entrepreneurship and Internet marketing blog. Check it out: http://www.TheOutsourcingCompany.com/blog.

The Beauty Of Branding

SBOCTeam — Sun, 09 Mar 2008 08:45:00 GMT

If you're not defining how your customers feel about your small business, who is?

Mention "branding" and successful marketing campaigns from the world of Big Business things like Nike's ubiquitous Swoosh symbol or Coca Cola's catchy "Have a Coke and a smile" slogan almost immediately spring to mind. And though few small businesses will ever find the need for a jingle that gets customers to "sing in perfect harmony," more and more of them are finding out just how critical branding can be to their survival and to their bottom line. But without extensive expertise, many small business owners embrace the concept of brand building only to find themselves confused about how to actually go about it.

In his book, Emotional Intelligence: How Successful Brands Gains the Irrational Edge, Daryl Travis argues that many businesses mistakenly focus their energy on the tools of branding, rather than on the more essential branding task of understanding their customer's feelings and purchasing experiences. Companies that tap into these feelings have an edge over competitors who simply appeal to a customer's pocketbook, he believes, because "we develop an emotional response to the brands in our lives that is deeper than our rational minds can fathom."

At the small business level, this emotional connection is usually tied directly to the small business owner. "Small business branding is not a good logo, a rhyming name, or special font," agrees Yaro Stark, an Australian entrepreneur who also runs the blog smallbusinessbranding.com. "It's the wayrelationships are built and maintained, the way a person does business and treats other people."

David Waxman, co-founder of Spot Runner, a southern California based TV advertising firm that caters primarily to small businesses, says that once you've identified these feelings and experiences, it's imperative to start actively conveying them to your customers through marketing and advertising. As an example, Waxman points to one of Spot Runner's clients, the threeman law firm of Lapidus & Lapidus. "This small firm competes against a lot of larger, well established law firms in Beverly Hills," he says. Consequently, the company wanted to instill concepts like trust, authority, and permanence as part of their brand. By choosing to develop a more traditional, serious television ad, Waxman explains that Lapidus & Lapidus furthered their branding goals because, "TV lends an enormous air of credibility to a small company, and it allowed them to look bigger than they are."

Indeed, recognizing how different advertising media work is critical to making a branding campaign effective. "TV, magazines, and radio what we call ‘push' media are typically about discovery; they're where companies introduce customers to something new," notes Waxman. "In ‘pull' media, like the Internet and the Yellow Pages, customers often already know what products or services they want and are turning to these media to compare prices." A well balanced brand campaign, then, might feature a dramatic photo of a product in a magazine ad complemented by a detailed list of that same product's technical specifications on the company website.

In the end, branding comes down to making and fulfilling a promise to your customers. And though it might seem like a daunting task to do this on your own, Waxman says small business owners actually have one major advantage over the Cokes and Nikes of the world. "Big businesses use big ad agencies to do their marketing, but those people don't have their feet on the ground, they don't see who the customers are, where they come from, and why," he notes. "But small, local business owners interact with their customers every day." And armed with all that invaluable market insight, small business owners should take heart when it comes to branding and "just do it."