How to Communicate Back to School Protocols Posted on August 12, 2020October 1, 2020 by Natalie Slyman The start of the school year is looking a lot different depending on where you live. In some districts, schools are opening with set safety requirements, like masks and social distancing. In others, schools are keeping learning remote, at least through the end of the year. And at some schools, the plan is to open, and restrictions are up in the air, if any. There’s a lot of confusion out there about what the appropriate next steps are. But with the school year set to begin, school administrators need to think up the best ways to address back-to-school protocols. Here are some tips for conveying to parents, students, and teachers what the new year might look like. 1. Create a Visual Infographics and other visual content can help quickly, clearly, and easily convey any protocols that will be in place, as well as outline various scenarios. While the graphic above doesn’t commit to a specific course of action yet, it does concisely break down the different available options. By keeping it visual and succinct, this school is able to efficiently communicate what possibilities are currently on the table — all without overcomplicating it. Here’s another great visual example. This graphic states a school’s requirement to have any ailing staff members, faculty, or students stay home. It sets the groundwork for school protocols with a message that those of all ages can understand and makes it clear that coming into school when not feeling well isn’t safe. The key to using visuals to communicate protocols is to keep them as simple as possible. From there, you need to distribute them as needed to ensure everyone sees them. This can be accomplished through snail mail and email, and posters in and around your campus. 2. Create an Email Campaign Email is one of the most effective resources that schools have for communicating with parents. Send emails leading up to the first day of school, and as needed after school starts, to keep parents in the loop. Prior to the first day, describe how your staff is preparing and sanitizing the school, what the CDC is saying regarding guidelines for schools, and what the official plan will be for returning. From there, use email to continually update parents as needed. 3. Film a Returning-to-School Video We’re in unprecedented times, which means it may be very difficult for parents and children to visualize what certain protocols will look like, such as social distancing in the classroom and lunchroom. Videos can help outline procedures for returning to school in a way that is both helpful and more understandable for parents and kids. They can also be used as a way to very clearly communicate to students what they should and should not be doing when they return to school. Try to cover as much ground as you can in your video to address common questions parents and students are going to have. This may include rules on things like bringing in items from home and whether recess is still going to happen, as well as what it would look like. 4. Publish a Landing Page Build a landing page on your school’s website that can serve as a one-stop resource for everything that parents, children, staff, and teachers need to know about your school’s policies and protocols. Since these are likely to change over time, this landing page should be regularly updated to ensure that everyone is aware of what’s happening. On the page, list all of the health updates, safety protocols, and various policies that your school is enforcing. Ultimately, this should serve as a hub for all need-to-know information so that everyone at every time can be up to date. 5. All of the Above! Your best course of action when communicating your school’s protocols: do more, not less. You can never be too careful right now, and overdoing it is always going to be a safer bet than under-doing it. Pursue as many avenues and methods as you can for conveying information about what your school is and isn’t doing, including all of the steps above, if possible. Note that if you have any families in your school who you know do not have access to or regularly check things like email and your school’s website, you will need to have a plan in place for staying in touch. Keep a list of these families and ensure that you mail to them directly any updates on policies and protocols. As cliché as it is to say, we’re all in this together. Look to other schools in your district and beyond to see what they’re doing, what’s working, and what’s not working. Be adaptable with your protocols, and recognize that information is changing nearly every day, and it’s okay to change course if it means protecting your students, teachers, and staff. We’ll get through this, but in the meantime, do your best with what you’ve got. And if you are looking for a software solution that can help enable your K12 communication, schedule a live demo of our K12 Edition today.
The Ultimate Guide to Outlining Your Small Business Marketing Budget Posted on August 11, 2020August 6, 2020 by Allie Wolff Setting a marketing budget sounds intimidating, but it doesn’t need to be. In fact, you’ll be surprised by how empowering it is. Small business owners know marketing is important, but they also spend a lot of time trying to justify their marketing costs. However, having a marketing budget that’s part of a marketing plan gives small business owners a roadmap for understanding how they’re spending their money and why. Here’s your guide for how to get started. Get To Know Your Sales Funnel Your sales funnel represents the stages someone moves through to go from a stranger to one of your customers. Generally, a sales funnel consists of five main stages: Awareness Phase Interest Phase Evaluation Phase Decision Phase Purchase Phase If you know how much it costs, on average, for someone to move through these phases, you have a rough understanding of how much money it takes to convince someone your product is worth buying. Where are your site views coming from? Identify whether the majority of your site’s hits come from blog posts, videos, infographics, social media posts, Facebook ads, Google ads, etc. If your views are coming from blogs shared on Facebook, you can increase the content you post there and reduce the money spent on less lucrative methods. How many of these views turn into leads? If you have tracking links on call-to-action buttons at the bottom of your blog posts, videos, or landing pages, you can gauge which site views are turning into leads. So if your budget is tight, but several methods attract hits, you can focus your spending on those things (i.e., blog posts, white papers) that lead to conversions and not just hits. How many leads turn into sales? Once someone is a lead (meaning they’ve handed over their email, name, other contact info), you can determine the cost of converting them vs. how much they end up spending. Understanding these numbers gives you a baseline for how much it currently costs to win customers. Determine Your Goals & How Much Manpower You Need To Meet Them Now that you know how many hits and leads generate sales, set your goals, and be specific about what you’re measuring. If you decide to increase your leads by 50 percent, set a deadline so you can stay on track and know exactly what the expectations are. Being specific will allow you to do and determine a few things: Know how much to increase your budget for lead generating strategies (like whitepaper creation) based on how much it cost you to generate these materials in the past. Assess whether the investment is worth it by having an exact target to meet. After you’ve stated your goal and understand how much you’ll need to multiply your current spending, you’ll need to assess your operational needs. Will your internal team be able to handle the increased workload, or will you need to outsource? If you choose to outsource, will you hire freelancers or an agency? Tie Your Marketing Goals to Your Business Goals Marketing should not be an afterthought, but it also shouldn’t be a fully staffed team that’s divorced from what’s happening in the business. All of your marketing goals should be directly tied to your business goals, and your marketing team should be regularly communicating with your sales team. This is why monitoring and measuring your marketing efforts is important. If you have a data-driven understanding of what your creative projects produce, you can set targets based on business goals. For instance, if you decide that you want to increase sales by 15 percent by the end of the fourth quarter or choose to move into an entirely different market, you understand how much that will cost. Don’t forget that the core function of marketing is to generate business. If you’re creating wildly creative promotions, but don’t attract your target audience, you’ve wasted money on irrelevant brilliance. A marketing budget helps you stay the course. The goals you set will prevent you from yanking money away from marketing during a bad month, and your data-driven plan will remind you that there is a purpose for every dollar spent.
What Matters More, Inbound or Outbound Sales? Posted on August 6, 2020January 15, 2021 by Tricia O'Donnell When it comes to sales, there are two distinctive approaches: inbound and outbound. But which is the strategy you should be focusing more on? Spoiler alert: The answer is neither. If you’ve followed our blogs for a while (thank you!), you’re probably not surprised that we strongly believe in the power of balance when it comes to your sales and marketing efforts. In sales, as in life, there is rarely an easy way to achieve success. More often, it requires a coordinated strategy that picks and chooses the best practices from various types of initiatives, blending a little bit of this and a little bit of that until you hit the sweet spot. So instead of focusing on inbound sales or outbound sales, you should be focusing on both. And here’s how that works. What Is Outbound Sales? Outbound sales refer to sales conversations that are initiated by the sales rep, not the potential buyer. Instigating buyer engagement can happen in a few ways, including through broad and/or targeted marketing and cold outreach. Instead of just casting a net and sitting back to see if you catch anything, outbound sales involves baiting the hook and pulling on every bite. There are plenty of leads in the sea, after all, and many who, either knowingly or unknowingly, are looking for what you have to sell. What Is Inbound Sales? Inbound sales, which is often interchangeable with inbound marketing, are sales conversations that are initiated by the potential buyer. By expressing interest upfront, leads acquired through inbound sales situate themselves further down the sales funnel than their outbound-earned peers. They’ve acknowledged their problem and are actively seeking out solutions — and they’ve come across your solution as the one that might be it. What’s a Better Sales Tactic: Outbound or Inbound? Circling back to the beginning of this article, it should be clear by now that this is undoubtedly a trick question. A well-rounded, effective sales and marketing strategy includes both, with equal prioritization, so that no leads are slipping through the cracks. Your company needs to have both an outbound and an inbound strategy in place, and these should complement each other for maximum results. And remember: it’s not just about having these strategies in place; it’s about eking out their full potential. Here are a couple of essentials to doing that. Your Outbound Strategy A great outbound strategy puts you in front of potential leads in as many settings as possible. Schedule out attendance at events and marketing conferences to tap into a wider audience and create more brand awareness. In addition, design your outbound strategy so that it allows you to meet face-to-face with more qualified prospects (even if it’s over video chat). This humanizes your brand for a more personalized sales experience, amping up your efforts by conveying likeability and trustworthiness to your leads. Your Inbound Strategy A stellar inbound strategy requires an effective approach to email marketing. Generate an email list with online forms and gated content on your site, and use a marketing automation tool to create and send drip campaigns and gradually move inbound leads through the funnel. Combining Your Strategies Goodbye siloes and hello integration. Your outbound and inbound sales strategies need to work together, and they should also be bolstered by general practices that are driven toward more effective processes. Maintain a detailed CRM and link it to your email marketing automation platform so that you have a quick point of reference when trying to remember an individual lead’s situation and, if applicable, your former communications with them. You should also be linking in an analytics platform to allow for more targeted outreach and more productive conversations. More information is always a good thing to have. What you learn from your outbound sales can help you optimize your inbound efforts to bring more leads to your door. Meanwhile, insights from talking to inbound leads help you build more robust customer profiles and form a better idea of who your ideal audience is. If you rely too heavily on one over the other, you risk losing out on these insights — and by default, losing out on more leads. Whether you’ve done it consciously or not, your brand has most likely ironed out some key practices already for both outbound and inbound sales. Take a step back for a second and evaluate what’s working and what’s not for both tactics, then look for threads between the two. What can you learn from outbound sales that can improve your inbound sales and vice versa? What are the biggest differences separating your outbound leads from your inbound ones, aside from just how your first contact happened? Once you start answering these questions, you’re already well on your way to successfully integrating your strategies for a more impactful sales process.
The Importance of Employer Branding Posted on August 5, 2020July 30, 2020 by Erin Posey To be a successful business, you have to offer value in two ways. One, with the product or service that you’re selling, and two, with the culture you’re providing employees. Miss the mark on the latter, and you’re going to have a much tougher time with the former. In their book Talent Force: A New Manifesto for the Human Side of Business, authors and executives Hank Stringer and Rusty Rueff note that while a product or service may be a company’s face, the talent behind it is their soul. Think of employer branding as the collective goodwill (or lack thereof) that drives your business’ reputation. And from there, think of what it’s saying to your customers. For this post, we’re looking at the importance of employer branding — what it is, why it matters, and why you should be incorporating it into your marketing strategy. Here’s what you need to know. What Is Employer Branding? Employer branding — also referred to as “talent branding” or “people branding” — is the value proposition that you offer your employees. It’s your reputation, benefits, and approach to the employee-employer relationship all rolled into one. Ir requires an active process of feedback and improvements to create a brand worthy of bringing in top talent. As it stands, 69 percent of Americans say they won’t take a job with a company with a bad reputation, and 84 percent say they would leave their current job for a company with an excellent reputation. If you can’t afford to sacrifice on the quality of your team (and let’s be real, who can?), then your employer brand needs to be a top priority. Marketing Your Employer Brand Before you write off employer branding as an internal concern, keep in mind that it’s not just job candidates who pay attention. Today’s customers are as concerned about who your brand is as they are about what it sells, and they’re backing up those concerns with their spending. A study of Glassdoor, a job review site, found that a one-star increase in a company’s employee satisfaction score resulted in an average 7.9 percent bump in market value. Another eight-year study found a strong correlation between employee satisfaction and stock performance. Companies boasting high employee satisfaction rates earned 1.35 percent extra returns above the market. So what’s driving the connection between employer satisfaction and profit? Well, for starters, happier employees are more invested in their work, with more incentive to perform at their best. A strong, positive employer brand also speaks to customers, showing that a company has good values. As for putting your employer brand forward in marketing and recruitment, start with these key steps. 1. Understand What Your Employer Brand Is. Where does your company’s reputation stand? To market your employer brand to both customers and potential employees, you need to know exactly what you’re bringing to the table — and where you might be falling short. Get your team together and ask them how they would define your employer brand. It’s helpful to know what they think because they’re the ones who actually work for your company and have the best insight. 2. Define Your Employer Brand and Document It. You should condense your employee value proposition into a clear statement of who you are and what you have to offer. This statement should be documented and disseminated to ensure everyone is on the same page. Spend time putting together your core values and mission statement. Include input from your team and use them to help define what your company is about and what you want to convey to the outside world. 3. Create Content that Pushes Your Employer Brand. A great employer brand is something worth sharing about, so create content on it. Write blogs about your company culture, share it on social media, and use it in your email marketing. Wherever your brand image lives, so should the information on your employer brand. 4. Use Employer Branding in Recruitment. A great employer brand will attract great job candidates. In both the marketing of open positions and filling them,you should be touting the benefits of your employee culture and highlighting everything that makes your company the place to be. Today’s consumers do a lot of research on their own before making a buying decision, and the same can be said for job seekers. If you don’t have any content out there that shares your company culture, you’re going to see fewer candidates interested in applying. Meet them halfway by sharing your content along with your job postings so they can get a clear idea of the type of company they’re applying to. 5. Tie Employer Branding to Onboarding. Teaching recent hires about your employer brand should be a big part of training. From programs to benefits to your expectations around work-life balance, be as clear as possible in getting new hires up to speed with what it means to be part of your team. Put together a spreadsheet that includes all your content on these topics so they can spend some time reading up on it while training for their new role. Make sure to check-in with them so they can ask you any questions or get further clarity where needed. Marketing your employer brand can lead to better employees and sales and elevate your business’s reputation in intangible ways. Invest in policies and best practices that back up a positive brand image, and when you’re there, shout it from the rooftops. You have a lot to gain from cementing a strong employer brand — and a lot to lose from neglecting it.
Are You Using the Right Content for Lead Generation? Posted on August 4, 2020July 30, 2020 by Natalie Slyman No matter who you are or what you’re selling, your business always has a need for lead generation. Aside from bringing awareness to your brand, your lead generation efforts help you nurture your prospects and provide your sales team with qualified contacts — and ultimately, it’s one of the most important tactics for consistently achieving your revenue goals. But time is money, and if you’re spending time creating content, it better be bringing in the desired results. So often we go about a strategy thinking we know exactly what we’re doing, only to find out that the methods we’re utilizing aren’t actually correct for driving the results we need. That’s why it’s important that you use the right content to generate leads, and that prospects at all stages of the buyer’s journey have access to content that answers their questions and nudges them closer to a sale. Below, we’ll share three types of content that are specifically driven to help you improve your lead generation efforts, plus the essential tools for maximizing their performance. 3 Types of Lead Generation Content Not all content is geared toward the same purpose. And while any piece of content that you create has the potential to draw in more leads, some formats serve that purpose better than others. Here are three types of content that work wonders when it comes to lead generation, and which should definitely be incorporated into your lead strategy. 1. Gated Content Gated content refers to any content that requires the sharing of information before it can be accessed. For the purposes of lead generation, that’s usually a name, an email address, and sometimes a phone number, as well as an opt-in to receive email marketing. The purpose of gated content — which can be whitepapers, ebooks, infographics, guides, checklists, tutorials, webinars, or anything else that requires information to access — is to exchange valuable information for a contact. The topics you cover in your gated content should be specifically geared toward high-quality leads and should provide more value than the content you share for free through other channels. It’s a mutually beneficial tradeoff between brand and consumer, with very real benefits for engagement and sales. 2. Landing Pages A landing page is a standalone page driven toward a specific purpose. It’s distinct from your homepage and other main pages, and may not even be on the same domain — though it’s branded effectively to convey your identity and purpose. Landing pages are essentially the gate to your gated content. They’re also the entry points for other types of lead generating activities, like contests and special offers. It’s also vital to include a form where people can provide their information before moving on to the content or promotion they came for. Using landing page best practices ensures you’re optimizing their capabilities and generating as many leads as possible. Be sure that there’s something on the other side of the form that merits a prospect sharing their contact information with you, and that can’t be accessed in some other way. Don’t forget to include an opt-in box too for your email marketing, since you don’t want to turn leads off by contacting them without first getting their express permission. 3. Pop-Ups Lead generation is all about making it as easy as possible for potential customers to connect with you. This is where pop-ups come in handy. When used during key touchpoints on your site, pop-ups grab attention at just the right time and ask for contact information. It could be a prompt to sign-up for your e-newsletter or schedule a demo or a portal to a landing page. Whatever your intention with your pop-up, the main goal is always the same: get eyes on the prize at the right moment, and turn a casual visitor into a lead. Getting The Most Out Of Your Content The right content is nothing without the right tools to enable it. Are you putting these essentials to work for your lead generation efforts? CRM. A CRM helps you track and log information that you gather about your prospects and use it to create more targeted content and deliver more qualified leads to your sales team. Integrate it with the rest of your marketing tools to learn everything you need to know to consistently increase your lead flow. Marketing automation. Automate your marketing efforts to better segment your prospects and send leads down the funnel in the most efficient way possible. You’ll end up with more engaged leads, plus less time wasted trying the wrong tactics with certain audience segments. Content is integral to any lead generation strategy. Make sure you’re doing everything you can to get the most out of it, and then sit back and watch the leads roll in.
The Fine Art of the Apology Email Posted on July 30, 2020August 6, 2020 by Allie Wolff Mistakes are hard to swallow. When they happen, and when they’re your fault, you feel especially awful. Mistakes chip away at your self-confidence, and they don’t get easier to deal with as you get older. The truth is, you can be the smartest person in the room and still make simple mistakes. Today’s demands are intense, and expectations around productivity and the amount of things you should achieve are high. To meet these demands, the world operates faster. We rush through tasks so we can check them off and move on to the next. We pile on more projects so we can meet and exceed our goals. And we rarely take a minute to look at what we’ve done to give it a once over and ensure it’s airtight. The other day, I had one of those cringy mistake moments. I was tasked with putting together an email on behalf of our CEO, explaining the recent news regarding The EU-US Privacy Shield. This is what I sent out: Can you spot the mistake? I mixed up the merge field for the recipient’s first name so instead of pulling in the right data, I sent an email to thousands of people that said Hi [First Name]! It was a silly mishap, and as soon as I spotted it, my mind scrambled for a way to remedy it. It was an agonizing five minutes. I decided to own up to it and send a follow-up apology email. For reference, here’s the GIF I included. One of my favorites should you ever feel the need to crawl in a digital hole like I did. via GIPHY I checked and re-checked the apology email before and after sending. And then I waited for the upset emails to flood my inbox. Instead, the results were surprising. These are just a few of the many, many responses I received. Seeing that people not only didn’t mind the mistake but that they appreciated the follow-up apology turned my (incredibly embarrassing) mistake into a valuable learning moment for me and my team. Apology emails are effective, and they’re great at getting you out of a pickle. But there is an art to them. So, next time you make a mistake in your email marketing, remember these four rules for crafting an endearing and sincere apology email. 1. Own Up to Your Mistake Just fess up! Don’t beat around the bush or pretend that nothing happened. Own up to your mistake and let recipients know about the error. When you show others you’re able to take accountability, they’ll be impressed with your ability to swallow your pride and admit fault. Also, it helps keep you in check, and it identifies those crucial learning moments that shape us into stronger marketers. You’re never too skilled, smart, experienced, or old to learn from your mistakes, and owning them is the first and most important step toward doing so. 2. Use Humor and Keep It Light Everyone loves a good laugh. Adding an element of whimsy or humor to your apology email makes the awkwardness a little more bearable. As you can see from my apology email, I love a good gif. They’re a safe choice because they’re universally loved, and it’s hard to find one that doesn’t elicit even the smallest chuckle. So, keep it light and add a funny image to show your recipients there’s a human being on the other side of your marketing messaging. 3. Don’t Make the Same Mistake Twice Okay, this one is huge. If you’re going to go to the trouble of sending out an apology email, you have to make absolutely sure you don’t make the original mistake twice. Double, triple, quadruple check everything in your email before you hit send. Make sure there are no spelling errors, missed spaces, and that you remembered to load the merge field correctly (!). 4. Slow Down Navigating this pandemic and coming to terms with the fact that the only thing we’re certain about is the uncertainty of what’s next, we’ve gained some perspective on the beauty of the slow down. We try to understand that being productive while working from home means making room for more breaks, exhaling, and enjoying what’s in front of us. This should also translate into being more thoughtful with our work. So, take a little longer to write that apology email. I’m sure you’ll want to get it out ASAP, but going a bit slower will ensure you don’t overlook another mistake. After all, you don’t want to send two apology emails. Remember these four tips when you’re sending your apology email (believe me, if you haven’t sent one yet in your professional career, you will). Mistakes happen, and while they may be embarrassing, they’re a time for us to own up to our humanity and try to move on with dignity. And remember, try really hard not to mess up an email you’re sending on behalf of your CEO (facepalm).
Marketing vs. Public Relations Posted on July 29, 2020July 24, 2020 by Guest Author Marketing and Public Relations are often lumped into one. Although the two industries work best when used cohesively, it is important to know their differences. Learning the values and strengths of marketing and PR separately is the best way to start using them for your business effectively. Both are essential for the success of a company. Let’s start with the traditional definitions of marketing and PR: According to the Oxford Dictionary, marketing is defined as “the action or business of promoting and selling products or services, including market research and advertising.” Whereas, public relations is defined as “the professional maintenance of a favorable public image by a company or other organization or a famous person.” These definitions just brush the surface of what each industry does. I mean, can you define any profession in one sentence? Probably not. At the core, marketing supports selling a particular product or service, whereas PR is used to create a positive image for the overall brand. Let’s examine what kind of tasks each area specializes in. Marketing-Related Tasks A lot of other functions can fall within marketing, including public relations. However, there are plenty of specific projects and duties that are unique to marketing professionals. Building Campaigns. Building successful campaigns for a company’s product or service is one of the most important tasks for a marketer. This is essential to promote, educate, and sell products or services to specific targeted consumers and prospects. Research. Part of knowing what drives a business is knowing various elements like company history, target audiences, the effectiveness of past campaigns, and everything in between. Learning and applying this information will be the most helpful piece in being successful in other tasks. This also includes extensive market research to better understand the industry and what role your company wants to play within it. Social Media Management. Social media advertising and posts are a great way to connect with your company’s fans and audience. Each social platform has easy to use tools to produce ads that help you effectively target desired demographics. Regular weekly posts, including past media features, specific landing pages, blog posts, and more, are vital to staying relevant. A marketing team typically designates someone to create a social media calendar, which helps keep social posts consistent. Buying Advertising. Purchasing ad space with Google Ads or any other outlet, be it radio, or print, is a huge component of effective marketing. Doing it successfully will mean low costs and high reward for clients or your company. Creating Content. Writing is a huge component of marketing and used across many channels. Of course, there is short and sweet copy used in ads and on social media. Yet, creating content for newsletters, websites, blog posts, landing pages, and whitepapers requires a bit more heavy lifting and strategy. PR-Related Tasks Here are a few tasks that PR professionals find themselves taking charge of. Managing Company Image. Managing the company image is essentially the definition of public relations. Changing and monitoring a client’s messaging and dialogue during an internal or external crisis is crucial. Making sure the company and its employees are seen positively can make or break a brand. Pitching. New products, services, updates, messaging, branding, etc. must be shared with the public. Creating media targets and writing tailored pitches helps get the information out to reporters, sharing with the world, and creating buzz. Securing Media Meetings. From pitching, comes the opportunities. Securing interviews with top tier publications or scheduling clients to be featured as a speaker at an event are all part of the weekly grind for PR professionals. Building Relationships. PR is all about who you know. As a public relations professional, creating lasting relationships with reporters will help your client secure interviews or coverage. Creating a media list that features everyone you have or will want to reach out to keeps things organized and on-course. Creating Content. Similar to marketing, writing is a huge part of PR. Of course, writing relevant pitches but also press releases, Op-Eds, and briefing sheets for clients in all of their meetings with the press. When day-to-day expectations change quickly, it can be both exciting and overwhelming. Yet, winning mentions, articles, and interviews make it all worth it. This brings us to the next biggest difference between marketing and PR: how each measures success. Success as a Marketer Measuring success as a marketer is very numbers based. Often teams will look at how their email marketing is stacking up. Is the open-rate consistent or increasing? Are people clicking the CTAs? Are landing pages converting site visitors to leads? How many of those marketing-generated leads are becoming paying customers? It’s also important to look into the ROI from specific marketing campaigns. Identifying how much was spent on marketing and the profit made will determine if the effort was worth it. Numbers aside, the qualitative ROI doesn’t lie either. If a particular campaign was a success, it will likely create engagement on social media or increase site visitors. This can lead to more followers, comments, reviews, etc. Never overlook the value of brand awareness. Success as a Public Relations Professional As a successful public relations specialist, clients or your company will have plenty of interviews with top tier publications. More often than not, these meetings will turn into articles, broadcasts, radio, or podcast features. The effort and more reporters reached out to is a direct correlation to how many “wins” or article mentions you will get. This proactive outreach can also lead to having the client featured as a speaker at an event, which will most likely lead to more press. There are thousands of awards given every year within most industries, for individuals or companies. Another way to measure success could be getting clients’ nominations or wins for awards. Best When Together Marketing and PR have overlapping qualities. The way different companies create their positions often will have a lot to do with this. There will be some public relations jobs that consult on ideas with the marketing team and vice versa. The reality is, each role is important to the other. The campaigns on the marketing side should coincide and be amplified on the PR side. A positive public image will increase sales, and a negative public image will likely decrease them. Both marketing and PR are significant pieces to the puzzle that will make a company thrive. For further clarity on how marketing and PR can work together to increase awareness and sales, take a look at this case study of the 14er Gold Award B2B Product/Solution Campaign for OnDeck in Denver. Author Bio Justin founded Cast Influence in 2017 after serving in senior marketing roles in-house for 18 years. He manages strategic operations for the agency, oversees brand positioning, and informs the engagement strategy to enhance clients’ reputation and awareness. He also created and hosts InfluenceNow, a marketing and business strategy program.
Why Your Sales Team Should Invest in Building a Personal Brand Posted on July 28, 2020July 24, 2020 by Jonathan Herrick Your brand identity might be at the forefront of building brand awareness and drawing in new leads, but it’s your sales team that’s ultimately responsible for sealing the deal. Sales is the face of your company during a number of essential touchpoints, often providing the first human-to-human contact that a potential customer has with you. And when that team has a personal brand, it can help make your company appear more likable, more trustworthy, and more desirable to partner with. The sales brand is another example of marketing and sales working together toward a common goal. Your sales team’s personal brand is both an extension of and a complement to the message you’ve been sharing in your marketing campaigns. And in some ways, it even helps fill in the gaps that marketing leaves behind. The more competitive advantages you have, the better. Here’s why your sales team should have a personal brand and how to make it happen. What is a Personal Brand in Sales? It’s hard to estimate just how important your sales team is to your overall success as a company. The most critical time to gain a customer’s continued loyalty is during their first purchase or right when service begins, so a lot is riding on the experience they have with sales. A “personal brand” refers to the distinguishing traits that your individual sales team members have. In the sales department, these traits are related to everything from the experience they bring to the table to their knowledge of your industry. These traits tell a story about the kinds of people that make up your sales team and your company’s overall values and practices. Whether intentional or not, every interaction that a sales rep has with a customer shares a message about your brand. It pays to shape those experiences and build them on the individuality of your sales team members. But in doing so, it’s also crucial to put forth a united front regarding who your brand is and why it’s better than the competition. Personal Branding is Just Good Strategy The world of commerce might be getting increasingly digital, but customers have higher expectations than ever when it comes to a brand’s identity. And a personal brand in sales helps you follow through on these expectations in three big ways. Put names and faces to your brand. Humanizing the real people behind your company helps build likeability, making your brand easier to interact with and trust. Build influence. A personal brand allows you to establish who you are and what you know, fostering more influence in a particular space — which is a necessity when you’re working with leads. Stay top of mind. Brand awareness doesn’t stop at the bottom of the funnel. A personal brand means a more memorable experience and interaction, both before and after a sale. How to Build a Personal Brand There are two avenues through which members of your sales team establish their personal brands: through interactions and content. And in both cases, a few key rules apply. 1. Be helpful It’s not just the big wins that deliver value. Being helpful and reliable in sales communications and content benefits the customer service experience as a whole, in turn adding more overall value to your partnership. Accessibility is huge here. Your sales team members should aim to be available as needed for customers, responding to questions or comments in a reasonable timeframe and offering plenty of useful content that can be referenced as needed to clear up confusion and spur on a sale. 2. Don’t be overly promotional “Be less sales-y” might seem like counterintuitive advice for a sales team, but aiming for educational insight over blatant promotional is a great way to enhance a personal brand for the better. Authenticity will always beat out a good pitch, and customers are quick to see through blatant sales-driven efforts. So ditch the used-car lot sales talk and have your team stick to what really makes your brand and them unique, including experience, industry expertise, and innovative solutions. 3. Always be consistent Your sales team can’t fake a personal brand, nor can they achieve it overnight. It takes consistency across channels and over a long period of time. Content plays a huge role in consistency. Keep the personal brand of your sales team members strong by having them regularly create and share content. This can be part of your sales enablement strategy, with a focus on content that provides value to potential buyers in accessible and succinct ways. Having your sales team work on their individual personal brands, highlighting what makes them great will also highlight what makes your company great. You likely already have a good idea of what constitutes a strong personal brand for your sales team members, so get to work disseminating it and see the payoff in your customer interactions and relationships.
6 Social Media Trends for 2020 Posted on July 23, 2020July 21, 2020 by Natalie Slyman Social media never seems to sit still. Just when you think you’ve got a handle on what methods you need to be doing for your business, bang, there’s a new platform, a new feature, or a new algorithm that’s forcing you to change course. Of course, you can’t do everything, nor can you constantly be adjusting your social media strategy on the fly. A better way to do it: pay attention to social media trends, and look for patterns in them that you can use to guide your next steps. To help you get started, we’ve outlined some of the most compelling social media trends of the year and what we can learn from them. Let’s dive in. 1. Behold the Rise of User-Generated Content User-generated content (or UGC) is taking off, with customers turning into advocates for brands for the benefit of both businesses and consumers. And it’s clear to see where these advantages come from. Ninety-two percent of consumers trust UGC more than traditional advertising, which is in line with the growing importance of peer-to-peer recommendations and influencer marketing. For brands themselves, UGC is a low-cost, high-impact way to increase brand integrity, with a constant churn of valuable content that requires very few resources to maximize on and maintain. 2. Gen Z Is On The Scene Social media marketing used to be all about connecting with Millennials, but today, you’d be remiss if you neglected Gen Z. This generation spends the most time on social and is shaping how brands interact with their audiences, and where they do it. If your audience includes consumers who are 25 and under, then you’ve got to meet them where they’re at — which means it’s time to amp up your usage of Instagram, YouTube, Snapchat, and TikTok. 3. Success Is About More Than Just Clicks Click-through-rates from social media dropped from 2018 to 2019. If you only measure your social media success through your CTR then, you’re probably going to end up frustrated at the difficulty of getting users to follow through to your landing pages. But what if your CTR isn’t the true measure of success anymore? Today’s social media users want to engage with brands on social, but not necessarily through clicks. Instead, on-platform engagement and social-based customer service seem to be reigning supreme as metrics of performance and should take precedent when evaluating how you’re doing. 4. The Video Revolution Isn’t Over “Pivot to video” is pretty much a curse word in the world of media these days. Like it or not, though, video continues to be a smart social strategy — even if it’s not the end-all-be-all it was once poised to be. Ninety-three percent of brands report getting a new customer because of a video on social media, and eighty-eight percent report being satisfied with the ROI of their social media video marketing efforts. Just look for balance, instead of putting all of your resources into one type of content. Diversify content formats to keep up engagement and interest, and be sure to make video part of it. And, make sure you know what kinds of videos your audience wants to watch. 5. Social Listening Is Crucial Social listening refers to the practice of monitoring direct mentions of your brand across social media — and it’s currently the number one tactic used by marketers to guide their social strategy. Social listening does more than just cue your marketing team in on what consumers are saying about you. It gives you insight into brand perception and popularity, and an opportunity to engage in discussions that you might otherwise have been left out of. Many social media marketing platforms now offer social listening as a feature, so it pays to take advantage and keep an ear to the ground regarding your social reputation. 6. Sharing Is Caring Ninety-four percent of marketers use social media for content distribution, and you should be one of them if you’re not already. Social media offers your brand one more way to get attention on the content that you create — even if, per trend number three, it’s not necessarily guiding users back to your site. Every piece of content has some benefit for your brand, so capitalize on the audience that you’ve built on social and make sure that you’re sharing there. Instead of just linking, though, look for other ways to share, such as snippets, images, or videos that get across your main point without redirecting to another page. Social media isn’t going anywhere, so your strategy for using it needs to be just as comprehensive as the one you create for other marketing efforts. With a nearly limitless reach potential, there’s a lot of value to be eked out of social media channels, and a lot of reasons to pay attention to important trends.