As wild weather bombards parts of the nation, it’s time for Reputation Ink’s round-up of the week’s wildest stories in PR, marketing and social media. Which companies and tactics weathered the storm? You be the judge:
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In 1970, Citibank set in motion a series of events that eventually gave birth to a movement dedicated to simple, clear writing. Now called the plain language movement, Citibank’s efforts resulted in legislatures across the country passing laws requiring documents like insurance policies and consumer contracts to be written simply.
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With all the talk about content marketing lately, it’s surprising how many companies tend to skip right over the “content” part and focus all of their efforts on the “marketing” end.
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Creating high-value content is no easy task. Once you’ve taken the time to carefully select a topic your prospects will appreciate, research your topic and write it specifically for the appropriate persona, should you call it quits?
If you’re like most content marketers, brainstorming fresh topics can become laborious after a while. The good news is your posts don’t have to face a “one and done” fate. There are several tips out there for repurposing content, but many of them seem a little overwhelming for those of us who aren’t geeks (no offense, geeks).
Here are a few simple ways non-techies can revamp, recycle and repurpose content to keep the momentum going:
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Don’t put all your marketing eggs in one basket
Remember when traditional marketing was dead?
It was only a couple of years ago that everyone from the Harvard Business Review to Forbes magazine was trumpeting the demise of traditional marketing and public relations strategies. In a world of social media and online marketing, they contended, old-school tactics for connecting with customers just wouldn’t cut it.
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I’m an attorney, and I’ve been blogging for more than 10 years. I’ve started several blogs over the years, including ones on law school, the Atlanta Braves, the business of baseball, career advice for aspiring sports professionals and the business of college sports. Now I work with attorneys and law firms on blogging and social media strategy as part of my job as a content marketer, and I find many legal blogs have the same common mistakes.
I have a law degree, and I practiced law for four years, yet I still don’t understand many of the law blogs I read. For most of you, your audience is clients and potential clients. No matter how sophisticated you think your clients are, if they’re not attorneys they aren’t going to understand legalese. In fact, even if they are attorneys, if they don’t practice in your area they likely still won’t understand you.
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Before you even go down this road, the first question you should ask yourself is, “Do I really need to outsource content marketing?” From Moz to HubSpot, there are plenty of useful tools and platforms to accommodate in-house marketing teams in publishing and promoting content. But remember, quality is king when it comes to content.
According to a report by the Content Marketing Institute, the biggest challenges b2b marketers face are lack of time and producing enough content. Combine that with the fact that most in-house teams are more focused on strategy and project management than writing, and outsourcing may seem like the ideal solution, given you find the right fit. Here’s what to look for in a content marketing agency:
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Fluff belongs on your dessert – not in your press release!
Working with a professional public relations agency can offer significant benefits for both large and small companies alike. So much so, in fact, that USC’s Annenberg Strategic Communication and Public Relations Center reports that 95 percent of all large public companies and nearly half of all small private companies rely on outside PR/marketing counsel.
In selecting a public relations firm with which to work, however, companies would do well to remember three words: Hold the fluff.
In media parlance, “fluff” is the term for the flowery language and effusive frippery in which some publicists drown their copy. Rather than simply stating the facts and letting their client’s product or project speak for itself, some PR reps seem to believe that applying a thick coating of hyperbole to their prose will catch the eye of that jaded reporter and score their client a primo placement.
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As previously outlined, content marketing isn’t a fad. Times have changed for marketers and will continue to do so almost daily. Following the successes of startups like Pinterest and Twitter, today’s savvy (or just plain broke) marketers are turning to growth hacking instead of traditional marketing techniques.
Growth hacking is defined as using conventional and unconventional tactics to grow a user base startup-style. Some examples you may be familiar with include Twitter’s “Who to Follow” prompter and Dropbox’s rewarding more storage space to users who invited friends to use the platform.
But these tactics aren’t just for startups. They’re actually the new MO of marketing. And at the core, they’re all about knowing who your customers are, where they reside on the web and what motivates them.
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As website content writers and strategists, we’ve been involved in many projects that go like this: An information architecture (the organization or structure of the site) has already been developed, wireframes created, page layouts designed, colors chosen, photos taken and “lorem ipsum” (industry standard “dummy” text) placed throughout. And that’s when we get a call. Our assignment is to write the copy (the text on the page), which will be “flowed in” just before the site goes live.
While this is an incredibly common way to build websites, it’s not the most effective. As Jeffrey Zeldman, author of Designing with Web Standards, once said, “Design in the absence of content is not design, it’s decoration.” However Zeldman also said, “‘Content’ doesn’t mean ‘having all the copy.’ It means knowing what the site is about, what kinds of information it will present; it also means knowing something about the intended users and what they might want to be able to do on such a website.”
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