Red On Marketing Blog

B2B PR: Get inside reporters' heads to grab their attention

Can you get reporters at top-tier business publications to take you seriously? Of course you can.

Take a hint from the classic Five W’s that a reporter or blogger needs to put in a story

Not every B2B marketer has worked previously as a news reporter. Few news reporters have ever worked in a marketing consulting company.

Is it any wonder that sometimes the two don’t get along very well?

That’s only the half of it. Say you are an account assistant in your mid-20s, pitching ideas to the top-tier business publications with reporters who have been covering your client’s industry since you were in junior high school. Can you get them to take you seriously?

Of course you can.

One key is to pitch with authority rather than bravado. Take a hint from the classic Five W’s that a reporter or blogger needs to put in a story, then gather some information yourself.

Who

Within the publications or blogs, who writes about your industry? Names are important, so get them right. I’ve known several co-workers who would save the most outrageous misspellings of their own names and tape them to their computer monitors. You can bet they remembered who sent the worst howlers.

What

Now you know who covers your industry. But what aspects does each person cover? Some may look only at the stocks of public companies in your industry. Others may look only at new products. In this age of layoffs, one person may have to do it all. Know before you pitch.

When

Even with the Internet available 24/7 to showcase their prose, writers and bloggers have deadlines. Find out what they are. They may have special reports of publications scheduled throughout the year. See if they’ve posted that editorial calendar online. If you are trying to get them to interview the CEO of your client company, first make sure the CEO will be there to pick up the phone or see any incoming email.

Where

Some organizations cover the world, others cover only the United States, still others stick to a region. If you want to get a Boston company noticed, don’t waste the time of a writer who only covers Northern California -- unless the Boston company is opening a San Francisco office, or just landed venture capital from a firm in Silicon Valley.

Why

Readers turn to business publications for a reason. Usually, they are looking for a way to make money. How is your pitch going to help the readers do that? Nail this one and you can get a writer’s attention fast. Remember, a story doesn’t have to be a profile of the client company. If the client CEO can speak as an industry expert about current trends, that’s gold.

Proceed with caution

Those are some Do’s. Here are a few Don’ts:

• Don’t rush things. Research takes time, but it’s a good investment. You may discover that you don’t have anything right now that’s likely to interest your target writers. It’s better to wait until you do, instead of annoying them with an idea that’s off the mark. Likewise, good relationships take time to build. The salty reporter has to learn to trust you. And you have to learn to trust Old Salty. It won’t happen on the first phone call or email.
• Don’t ask, “Will the story be positive?” For one thing, what’s positive to you might be negative to someone else. Suppose office space is getting cheaper to rent. That’s negative if you own a building, but positive if you are looking for space. A good reporter will write an honest story and let readers love or hate the facts as they wish. But even if a reporter knows what kind of reaction to expect, that might change during the reporting as new facts come to light. So don’t expect the writer to know how your client will be perceived.
• Don’t be a control freak. Guide, yes. Control, no. Let’s say the reporter asks you about something the company would rather keep quiet for right now. You might be tempted to say, “If you hold off, we’ll give you an exclusive.” The problem is, you can’t really control that. Think about it: The reporter already heard about it. So the story already is floating out there. How are you supposed to control whether somebody else gets wind of it? Reporters want to report news, not the CEO’s second-day reaction to a story that somebody else ran with while the first reporter was waiting for you to give the green light.

Now get out there and win one

Follow these simple tips ... and you still won’t bat a thousand. Nobody does. Even Old Salty strikes out sometimes when he’s pitching an idea to his editors.

Your thoughts?

B2B Lead Generation Blueprint: killer 12 week campaigns

Money talks

Over the last nine years, I have made a living at helping B2B companies generate leads. Through close collaboration with clients, we've helped produce $2B in qualified B2B leads and $225M in B2B sales opportunities for clients.

Take my client that in 2009 built $1M in B2B leads in 12 weeks on a $25,500 investment, for example. That’s a 3,922% return on investment. Another increased B2B sales by more than half, with less than 2% of its annual revenue invested in B2B marketing. Another grew B2B sales leads 500% in about 12 months, with less than $50,000 invested.

What is (and isn't) a sales lead?

Per B2B sales lead expert Mac Macintosh, "leads are qualified, sales-ready opportunities."

A guy visiting your website isn't a sales lead.

A guy you bump into at a tradeshow isn't a lead.

A guy who subscribes to your newsletter ain't a sales lead, either.

An inbound lead generation campaign is about jump starting real relationships with real business decision makers, while holding costs to a minimum.

B2B lead generation blueprint

To do it, we prepare and rollout a 12 week lead generation campaign focused on developing and promoting an educational guide (or ebook, executive brief, tip sheet, decision guide...). In each guide is a call to action that helps prospects to the next step.

1. BUILD CONTENT - First we interview you about topics important to your target audience. Drawing on your comments, we write one executive brief, guide, or ebook conveying important tips, insights, and steps to learn more. We write a search optimized landing page (LP), confirmations page, and email confirmation. We also adapt the content to prepare a search optimized press release. We prepare blurbs you can place on your website, email signature area, and other places.
2. ADAPT CONTENT - We optimize visit-to-lead conversions by having hard-working landing pages and attracting prospects to them using search engine optimization, social media marketing and an optimized press release. We adapt the content to other purposes as well, to get more mileage. For example, we help equip the CEO to offer information on the content via email, on his networking platforms like LinkedIn, and – importantly – in person to other executives.
3. PROMOTE CONTENT - On an agreed-on date, we publish the guide, issue the press release, send the promotional email, and post links on social networks. We meet weekly to track and discuss campaign ROI.

When we get started with content marketing, it typically benefits the client within weeks.

Your sales leads and experiences

Where do your sales leads come from? What does and doesn't work, in your experience?

2010 Email Marketing and PR - What's Different?

Using 2010 best practices to engage prospects and speed up sales

By Rebekah Donaldson

Hats off to Meg Arnold, Laura Good, and other members of the Sarta team for producing yesterday's seminar 2010 Trends in Marketing and PR. 

2010 email trends we discussed

• Prospects have control - adapt to succeed
• Email is competing with social media for attention
• Is email obsolete because of social media? (no)
• Far and away email is most popular for sharing
• Email marketing budgets are up
  

Top 4 tips to improve email results

• Use transactional emails
• Build permission
• Mix and test content
• Get Sherpa’s latest email guide

2010 PR trends we discussed

• Adapt to succeed
• Microphone vs interactive PR
• Is PR obsolete because of social media? (no)
• PR is social
• " Someone always pays"
• "'Solution’ is not the solution"

Top 4 tips for improving PR results

• Steadily produce good content
• Know your top 10 keywords
• Write optimized press releases
• Point to helpful landing pages

Get my slide deck.

(I also posted it using LinkedIn's presentation sharing app, here.)

 

Audience questions

 

My co-presenters Donna Chabrier and Ryan McCann were great. Authentic, insightful, and quick on their feet.

Being quick on one's feet was important because the audience was not taking our advice lying down! There were great questions during the session, and lots of post-seminar dialogue. I hope we can continue the Q&A in the comments section.

Special thanks

Laura Good did a great job pulling the event together. She has created a Twitter list of tweeters who came. Thanks Donna and Josh Morgan for recommending me as a speaker. Thanks to my colleague Robert Celaschi - though thousands of miles away yesterday, he was very helpful. And thanks Todd Lebo for access to the MarketingSherpa 2010 Email Benchmark Report.

Plain English Guide Helps People Learn About Quality Health Care

National Business Group On Health publishes "Choosing the Right Hospital" toolkit with our help

By Molla Donaldson, DrPH, MS and Rebekah Donaldson

With all the talk of health reform, one issue that keeps coming up is that people should have access to affordable quality care. But how can we know what quality of care is when it is so complex? Part of the answer is to make quality of care information publicly available. Another part is to take the language of quality ("mortality" "risk" "variation" etc.) and translate it to plain English.

 

See the Toolkit and Employer's Guide we helped write. What do you think? Please comment in the Comments area below.

The National Business Group on Health has published “Choosing the Right Hospital,” an online toolkit developed to help people choose the hospital where they are likely to receive the best care. Molla Donaldson and I helped prepare it, under the leadership of National Business Group on Health President Helen Darling, and Director of Benchmarking & Analysis Karen Marlo.

We also developed a guide for Human Resources officers to help employees use the guide.

“We are grateful that Molla and Rebekah were able to lend their expertise to the development of these valuable tools for employers and employees alike,” said Darling. “Helping employees understand the importance of using quality hospitals and providing them with tools to do just that is imperative to improving the safety of care in our hospitals and helping to control health care costs.”

The National Business Group on Health is an association of many of the country’s largest self-insured businesses. Their website and publications provide a large employers’ perspective on national health policy issues and practical solutions to its members’ most important health care problems.

Through this project, I (Rebekah) learned how frequently medication errors, surgical mishaps, and other patient safety issues occur.  The Institute of Medicine (with Molla’s help in 2000) alerted the public to medical errors almost 10 years ago in a widely publicized report.  There was great hope that safety would improve.  But in a follow up study, the federal government’s 2008 National Healthcare Quality Report found that hospital patient safety measures have worsened by nearly 1 percent each year for the past six years.

When people can choose a hospital, it is most likely based on their insurance, where their doctor practices, and advice from family and friends – but this information may not be accurate.  There are good web sites now, and our work tried to make it easier to understand the quality and safety information–and what patients themselves report — at the federal government’s site, Hospital Compare.

We’ve written in the past about how organizations do well by doing good. The National Business Group on Health has merged doing well with doing good. Choosing the Right Hospital helps everyone compare quality and safety. We believe that the more people know about and insist on safe care, the more likely it is that health care will improve.

 

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(Note: comments were imported 11/6/09 during migration from Wordpress)

B2B Lead Generation Results, By Source

Visits and conversions by source for www.b2bcommunications.com Sept 7 to Oct 6 2009

By Rebekah E. Donaldson

Here is a screenshot showing the sources of our website traffic that converted to leads over the last month. Looking at the chart, I answer:

• What does this chart tell you about lead sources?
• How much did you invest to get the site working this way?
• We need to generate leads - what's the best way?

Visits and conversions by source (1 month)

This chart shows how different sources have driven visits, leads, and customers to www.b2bcommunications.com. The key on the right shows the sources tracked.

What does this chart tell you about lead sources?

To see our lead sources, we open our Hubspot account (more on this below) and go to the "Reports" tab and pick "Sources". There we have a chart showing visit to lead ratios by source:

Totals for Sep 7-Oct 7, 2009
Sources	Visits	Visit to Lead	Leads
Organic Search	590	0.68%	4
Referrals	265	2.60%	7
Paid Search	0	0%	0
Direct Traffic	547	1.50%	8
Email Marketing	0	0%	0
Social Media	86	8.10%	7
Other Campaigns	0	0%	0
Totals	1,488	1.75%	26

According to the chart, visitors from social media sources convert at the highest rate. A visit-to-lead conversion rate of 8.10% means that in the last month, eight out of ten visitors who came to the site via LinkedIn or other networking sites, responded. Visitors referred to our site from an article, blog, or website are the next most likely to respond.

How much did you invest to get these leads rolling in?

Hundreds of hours and tens of thousands of dollars over several years. The site re-launched in 2007 and it's been an ongoing process to make it so visitors find what they need and take the next step. And there's still so much work to do! Meantime, we've been at blogging, search engine marketing, and social media marketing since 2007 - and public relations since 2001. We've tried to always close the loop (see below), so we know which B2B lead generation activities work and which to avoid.

What is Hubspot?

Hubspot provides advice and software that helps businesses get found on the Internet by the right prospects and convert more of them into leads and customers. We use it to build landing pages, attract traffic, nurture contacts, track leads, and connect records about leads and sales with records about marketing efforts.

We need to generate leads - what's the best way?

Here are just two of many ways to get started. Do both or pick the one that work for you:

Get a 60 Minute Internet Marketing Planning Session.

Try Hubspot - Use all the powerful features of Hubspot for B2B lead generation. Free for 30 days.

NOTE: We are pitched weekly by companies looking for affiliates to rep their stuff. So far, we've partnered only with MarketingSherpa and Hubspot. In each case, we bought their stuff and recommended it to others before we were ever a partner. Now that we are a partner, we get a small % of sales we help generate. Just so you know.

Rebekah E. Donaldson ("Red") has led Business Communications Group since 2001. More >>

 

B2B Email: Your subject line can kill your pitch (or, Hi, I want to talk to you about … uh, stuff)

By Robert Celaschi

Something strange happens to people when they send marketing email. They’ll take a powerful, persuasive marketing message, and torpedo the whole thing by slapping a lousy subject line on it.

What makes it really strange is that the email might contain a press release or other message with a really great headline. The sender could have cut and pasted it. But no, instead they type a vague or garbled mess of words that makes me shrug and move on.

I’ll confess I’m sometimes guilty of sloppy subject lines. I’ve struggled and sweated to craft the right message. I’ve set the right tone. I’ve targeted the right people. I’m ready to press the “send” button and then — oh, yeah, gotta put some kind of subject line on this puppy. Zip-zip-zip, done. Instead, I should take even more care with those precious few words that may determine whether the email even gets opened.

Let’s look at a half-dozen real subject lines that real marketing people emailed to me in the past month.

Subj: New Dilemma For Small Business Car Leases After Unemployment

Huh? Let’s see: I gather that there’s a new dilemma of some sort. For whom? Small Business Car Leases After Unemployment. Uhhhhhhh, sorry, does not compute. This one would work better with a simple colon after “Business.” Not great, but better. The story is about businesses transferring the leases on company cars, because they’ve laid off so many of the workers who used to drive them.

Subj: Non-Profit

That’s it, just “Non-Profit.” There are a lot of nonprofits out there. They do a lot of different things. I had to dig way, way down to discover that this nonprofit is a foundation that helps children. They are holding a fund-raiser this month in Miami. If I hadn’t picked this as an example for the blog post, I wouldn’t have bothered to find out any of that.

Subj: Survey: A Quarter of Firms Scaling Back Training

A direct hit. Tells me everything I need to get started. Now I’ll open the email and find out the details. Whoops — turns out that while 26 percent are cutting back their training programs, 28 percent have expanded. But, hey, they got me to read it.

Subj: Boston – Social Media Capital?

I don’t like questions for subject lines. Why are you asking me? Don’t you already know? If not, go do some more research and get back to me.

Subj: Time for Change in Credit Card Game

Maybe it is indeed time for a change in the credit card game, but since I have no idea what this means, it’s hard to say. The easy fix here would have been to condense the first line of the enclosed press release: Consumers now can say “no” to credit card interest rate hikes.

Subj: July home sales increased 12 percent; median home price declined 19.6 percent

This one delivers. I feel like a double winner, because I learn about sales volume and about price. This is about the California housing market, by the way. Bad news if you are a seller with a fat mortgage.

Your turn!

OK, you get the idea. Now take a look at the email you’ve sent in the past month. If someone didn’t already know your message, would they get the right idea from the subject line?

Robert has been a business journalist for 22 years, both as a reporter and an editor. He joined Business Communications Group in 2005.

Get help to make marketing materials that encourage prospects to take the next step.

Someone always pays

By Robert Celaschi

By now almost everybody has heard the Internet mantra that “information wants to be free.” What it really means is, “I want someone else to foot the bill.”

Advertisers paid for most distribution…

There’s nothing new about that. It’s how radio and television have always worked in the United States. The audience never paid for the broadcasts. Advertisers did. The model wasn’t much different for newspapers and magazines. The subscription price covered only a small fraction of the cost of making and delivering the product. Advertisers paid the bulk of it.

The same principal drove the press release and the story pitch. You tried to coax an editor into assigning a story that featured your business or executives. Advertisers covered the cost of getting it out to the world.

The difference on the Internet is that advertisers aren’t nearly as willing to pick up the tab. It’s true that they are starting to support some video sites. If you want to watch shows on Hulu, for instance, you have to sit through commercials. But you probably haven’t been using TV sitcoms as a conduit for your business-to-business marketing.

Selling content gets tougher

Newspapers and magazines are having a tougher time convincing advertisers to pay big bucks online. Most don’t even charge a subscription fee from online readers. And those that do are still working out the bugs.

Businesses are in a slightly better position for getting the word out. There’s already a structure in place for selling content such as whitepapers (see examples). People recognize that it’s worth paying money for. Most businesses also are used to footing the bill for straight marketing materials and press releases, and build it into their budgets.

DIY-ers can flourish

Now it’s time to apply that thinking to areas where you used to rely on coaxing an editor or reporter into telling your story.  As that platform shrinks, other opportunities arise for a do-it-yourself approach.

First, the Internet has made distribution relatively cheap and easy.  Today you can make information available to millions of people around the world without having to own a printing press or a broadcast tower. The White House, for instance, is going straight to the public by posting candid photos straight to a Flickr account.

The lower cost also has inspired the creation of new ways to pass information around, including blogs, Twitter, business networking sites such as LinkedIn, and social networking sites such as Facebook.

Who pays to build the audience?

But now you’ll get stuck with the bill for some of the functions you used to hand off to the print or broadcast media: gathering useful information, organizing it, and presenting it in an attractive way to an audience. You need people to write the profiles and cases studies, others to provide photos, still others to make the material easy for search engines to find on your Web site, and to bring items to the attention of bloggers and people seeking information through social media.

Information has never been free. All that’s happening now is a shift in who pays for it. Don’t let that chase you away from opportunities.

Do you have some tips to share about how you are getting someone else to foot the bill for your marketing efforts? For instance, maybe you’ve made presentations at a conference. Who paid to gather the audience? Not you.

How are you beefing up your marketing budget to deal with the changing media landscape?

How are you getting somebody else to foot the bill for your B2B marketing efforts?

NOTE: This post is Robert Celaschi’s first bylined contribution to the B2B Communications Red On Marketing blog.

Robert Celaschi joins Red On Marketing Blog contributors roster

I’m pleased to introduce Robert Celaschi as a contributor to this blog.

Robert has been reporting and editing business stories since before there was a Web. He spent many years on the editorial staff of the Sacramento Business Journal and is a former managing editor of the Silicon Valley/San Jose Business Journal. He joined Business Communications Group in 2005.

For this blog he’ll be contributing items about effective ways for a business to talk about itself, and how to get others talking.

This he knows. He has helped our clients produce dozens of clear and consistent case studies, press releases, contributed articles, executive profiles, blog and newsletter content, and in-depth guides.

So don’t worry, he won’t be giving grammar lessons. It’s all about what works in the real world.

Please stay tuned!

Discuss The New Rules of Outsourcing B2B Marketing 2009 e-book and checklist

Today Cris Rominger and I published a free B2B marketing e-book (550KB PDF) called The New Rules of Outsourcing B2B Marketing: What Marketing Directors need in a B2B marketing consultant today.

In it we discuss how the shift to inbound marketing affects Marketing Directors; the 5 essential traits your B2B marketer needs and why each is important; 10 questions to ask a prospective B2B marketing consultant; how to cut ROI guesswork; what B2B buyers are looking for; and why B2B marketing differs from B2C.

We’re hoping to hear feedback. Please weigh in. (Tip: to comment, scroll down to the bottom of an article.)

We started this e-book in the summer of 2008, and finished it… well… every time I open it I start tinkering. My file name for it is currently ”Outsourcing ebook FINAL v7″. But give birth we must.

My hope is that this blog post could work as a discussion area for the e-book. To try to get things rolling, here are some questions for you readers:

 

Premise: Changed marketing landscape

1. We argue that the marketing landscape has changed. Did we get it right? Leave anything out?

 

Premise: Specialization not enough

2. We argue that because of a changed marketing landscape, it takes special skills to see and seize opportunities. Did we get that right? Leave anything out?

To engage decision makers today, our view is that B2B companies need to:

• Prove their value through a strong business case
• Build sites and other communications vehicles in a way that fosters trust
• Pull in prospects

… and that doing it requires specialists in both new and traditional marketing disciplines. Still, it’s your B2B marketing partner’s job to see all the options and how they can work together.

 

Premise: higher bar for B2B marketing consultants

The e-book is really about what it takes to help Marketing Directors reach and engage today’s savvy B2B buyers without breaking the bank. We’re trying to articulate a standard to which Marketing Directors should hold us and other B2B marketing agencies.

Are there parts of the e-book you particularly agree or disagree with? We’re hoping to hear feedback. Please weigh in.

Cision’s Navigator moves into Web 2.0 world

Fans of Cision’s Navigator newsletter and website can look forward to a new version soon. Editorial director Kim Roberts says we’ll soon be able to rate articles, access new sections on social media, and dialogue with article authors and other readers.

These days it’s called Cision’s Navigator. Longtime readers might remember when it was Bacon’s Navigator. By either name, it has been a place to find media news, profiles of media contacts, placement opportunities and in-depth articles from industry experts.

The new platform brings The Navigator into the Web 2.0 world. Readers will be able to rate articles and carry on a dialogue with Cision, PR professionals, and the media. Cision also expects the relaunch to increase daily readership of its free RSS feeds, providing updates on editorial changes in special interest communities including health care, technology, lifestyle, business and finance.

Experts in a particular field can contribute bylined articles. Cision is interested in topics such as media relations, the intersection of public relations and Web 2.0, press release writing, public relations technology, consumer marketing, branding, event planning, product marketing, search engine optimization, writing and speaking skills, best practices, strategies and trends.

But Cision will consider any topic, Roberts says, as long as it offers insight, advice or intelligence for The Navigator’s audience of public relations, marketing and communications professionals.