As a small company, you don’t always have a large marketing budget. Because of this, you often need to find alternative ways to get the message out about your firm.
In this post, we take a look at some of the actionable steps that you can take to attract media attention and use the press to generate leads. If you get this strategy right, it could prove to be highly lucrative for your enterprise.
Journalists are continually looking for up-and-coming people who offer something new to the narrative. That’s why they will often scour top blog outlets and channels to find people who are saying something a little different.
It is a good idea, therefore, to guest blog on reputable outlets. This gives journalists a kind of “anchor” that they can use to see who you are and where you’re from. It also establishes your personal brand, giving them confidence that you are somebody who is worth listening to.
Attend Networking Events
Journalists and the media also regularly show up at media events. In the business community, many want to see what brands are doing, their new products and elevator pitches.
These are a great way to introduce yourself to media personalities. You can become their go-to expert whenever they need quotes for stories on a particular topic.
This is a tactic that technology public relations firms use a lot. When trying to forge closer bonds between their client brands and news outlets, they will often present their clients as experts in their field. This approach helps them to generate long-term exposure in the media because journalists often return to them with more and more questions.
Host Events And Notify The Media
Leveraging the media also sometimes requires hosting your own events and then notifying the local news. Often, news stations will dispatch journalists to the event to cover it on your behalf and then report it later to their audiences.
If you can, try to organize an event with a newsworthy twist. So, for instance, you might host an event to help a local charity or do work in the community. The news media loves covering companies that embark on projects for good causes.
Contact Journalists Directly
Sometimes, your company is doing something so interesting that you can get away with contacting journalists directly. Simply emailing them and telling them that you have a story to share can be enough to pique their interest.
Whenever you communicate with a journalist, try to see things from their perspective. Think about the type of audience they want to appeal to and why. Then craft your proposal around that.
If possible, build the relationship up ahead of time. Look for common friends that will introduce them to you. Send them emails saying how much you liked their articles when they write them.
Also, be sure to provide them with plenty of resources that could help them. For instance, you might provide a guide that they can use to write in an informed way about what your company actually does.
Try to avoid being overbearing. Getting journalists on your side requires carefully crafting a relationship with them. You need to build it up slowly so that you have somebody you can go to whenever you need to increase your publicity.
Press releases are one of the most powerful ways to quickly and easily start talking about your company. The way the process works is actually quite simple. First, you write a press release describing a newsworthy aspect of your company (such as launching a new product). You can either do this yourself or get a professional writer to do it for you.
Then you submit it to an agency that distributes news stories across various channels. Usually, their standards for the quality of writing are quite high. However, if you can pass these, you can get the information out to hundreds of publications. Newswires distribute articles among their associates.
Please note, however, that press releases can be a little expensive. The cost of writing them is low, but distributing them is high. Essentially, you’re paying for space on the page which comes at a premium.
Boost Your Social Media Posts
Lastly, some companies like to attract press attention by boosting their social media posts. Things you put up on social media won’t always perform on their own. Often, you need to pay for platforms to increase your visibility and get them in front of more people. As with press releases, you get what you pay for, so prepare yourself to spend some money.
A brand is a unique business concept that allows people to identify a product or company. In other words, it is the way people perceive a particular company or product. Your brand is also how you interact and communicate with customers in the market.
Companies have their unique branding style, but a basic one will include things such as a logo, color, web design, illustration, video, photography, and more. Businesses need to foster a good brand as it significantly contributes to their growth.
Foremost, a strong brand can give your company a competitive edge in the market. If your company wants to launch a new product, having strong brand recognition can make the launching process more manageable and less costly. Furthermore, excellent brand recognition can enhance your credibility with clients, directly connecting to their buying behavior.
Building a brand can be daunting, especially for a company with a deficit of various resources such as time, finances, and knowledge. Even so, building one can be one of the most straightforward processes if you consider the following practical steps.
Define Your Purpose
To begin building a unique brand for your business, you should first define your organization's purpose. Knowing what your company wants to achieve in the long run can jump-start your brand-building process adequately.
By identifying your overall goal, you can create a brand strategy that will guide you to achieve your goals. Your brand strategy is also an effective tool your company can use to communicate to your employees about actions to take.
Know Your Target Audience
Once you define your company's goals and brand strategy, you should identify your target audience and assess their needs. Next, you need to understand your current and potential customers to build a unique brand for your company.
There are several ways to know more about your market. One of the most effective techniques includes interacting with customers via social platforms or physically. For example, Vitalik Buterin, the co-founder of Ethereum, sought feedback from his colleagues on the Ethereum white paper to identify how to improve.
With such inspiration, you should also communicate with your customers to get their honest reviews and feedback about your products. In return, you will be able to work on your weaknesses, allowing you to build a strong brand by satisfying their needs.
Know Your Competitors
Before you make any critical decisions on promoting your brand, it is vital to assess your current and potential competitors within your industry. Learning more about your competitors is an excellent way to build a strong brand allowing you to gain a competitive edge in the market.
To effectively assess your competitors, you must first understand their strengths and weaknesses. Knowing what your competitor is weak at can unveil particular opportunities you can take advantage of to foster a great brand. Furthermore, assessing their capabilities allows you to identify where you can improve to reposition your brand.
Assess Your Current Brand State
Another step you must look into is defining and analyzing your current brand state. For example, do people in the market perceive your brand positively or negatively? If negative, what led to that, and what can you do to change such perspectives? And if positive, what is contributing to that, and are there ways to improve it?
If you want to reposition your brand, you need to approach this process from a realistic standpoint. First, you need to know where you currently lie; that is your brand's current situation.
It is only through this that you will learn how to proceed to the next step. Next, you should identify where to craft new strategies or tweak existing ones to align with the new branding goal. Luckily, there are plenty of ways to attain this.
For instance, you may issue a questionnaire to your employees, customers, and stakeholders addressing questions ranging from your brand's value to position in the market. Their feedback can enable you to know what to work on.
Choose a Look for Your Brand
Once you know what your customers want, how to outstand from your competitors, and understand your current brand situation, you can choose a new look for your brand. If not, you should focus your energy on finding ways to improve parts of it.
If you are starting a new business, you should start by choosing a unique business name. If you have an existing business, you can change its name to reflect your new identity. It is also advisable to develop a catchy slogan that comes in handy in your social media platform bios. You can also use the slogan as a website header which can help draw more attention to your website content.
Once you have a name and a slogan, you should look into visually representing your brand. This may be in terms of color, logo, and fonts.
Colors
Colors have a significant meaning, so you should be more careful when choosing them. The study of color psychology reveals that colors can affect the behavior and perception of something. Besides, specific colors evoke various emotions, which can positively or negatively impact your level of sales.
For instance, red can command attention to your brand leading to more sales. Yellow evokes positive emotions such as happiness and optimism, which can also mean affordability. And green signifies a connection to nature, attracting buyers who are more into preserving the environment.
Therefore, it is vital to choose your branding colors carefully as they are a great way to communicate with your buyers.
Logo
A logo is probably the first thing that will come to your mind when you think of repositioning your brand in the market. Ideally, you want your company's logo to be unique to help differentiate you from competitors. So, you need to get inspiration from famous brands with unique logos and create one.
Incorporate Your Brand into Your Business
The last step to building a unique brand is incorporating it across your business for cohesion purposes and setting the stage for interaction with customers in the market. If all business processes align with your branding strategy, it will be easier for your company to foster a unique brand.
The above are some of the most straightforward steps to help you build a unique brand for your company. Whether you are building a new one from scratch or trying to reposition an existing one, they are a guarantee to help you attain this.
Back in the day, remote work used to be considered a customer care job that attracted below minimum wage. However, the trend is changing thanks to advanced technology, and the Coronavirus pandemic remote work is now becoming a full-time career.
Technology now allows you to get the same job done regardless of your geographical location. With this, you need to figure out how you can adapt to the changing needs of business and technology. This means you must keep up with the need to work remotely. Therefore, it is essential to utilize various tools that make remote work more manageable and efficient. Have a look at these four tools that will enhance efficiency when your team works remotely:
Remote Communication Tools
The chances are that you have used Zoom or Google Meetings before. These tools are excellent for seamless remote communication. However, you should not assume that your team will adapt to any system effortlessly.
First, you should consider teaching your employees the best practices to use these tools to work efficiently. For instance, start by creating a guideline that facilitates communication to ensure that no one is left out. Accordingly, you should train your team how to mute their microphone when not speaking. Whatever you do, the first part is always to ensure smooth integration of the system. You do not want to integrate software that no one knows how to use. This makes remote work even more complex than it should.
Automation and Integration Tools
Automating workflow is always a game-changer, especially in a remote work setting. You will save time and money by automatic tasks using tools such as Zapier.
Automation and integration tools can do virtually everything. For instance, you can use these platforms to streamline production, send emails, generate worksheets, and automate slack messages. This is a great way to help your team make work more manageable. Accordingly, such tools help you keep up with the daily needs of the business. For instance, you can integrate them to monitor progress from different platforms. It is also a great way to ensure that every employee gets the work done according to schedule and time.
Remote Office Tools
With digitized office tools such as LastPass, you may never need to turn to Google Sheet for your passwords and logins. With these tools, all your two-factor authentications are safe and secure. They offer an extra layer of security to ensure that your team does not lose your company information to hackers and cybercriminals.
In short, these are password and login management tools that help you generate, keep, retrieve, and share passwords safely. You may want to turn to TheWindowsClub for all other virtual office tools.
Time Tracking Tools
You always need a time tracking tool, such as Time Doctor, to help your team manage and track progress. This tool allows you to monitor how every employee spends time. Accordingly, you can get reports on how work is progressing and what channels the team is using.
Final Thoughts
With the business environment reverting to remote work, your focus should be on how to increase business productivity using these top tools. Integrate them into your business and maximize output per unit.
Market research is a key aspect of starting any business. You need to know whether people are interested in your product and if there is a market for it. You also need to know whether other similar products are out there and what makes yours different. After doing this initial market research, you should hopefully have a product that performs well. But you shouldn’t stop there.
The best way to maintain long-term success is to predict future market trends and adapt to them. If you can work out what your customers will want in the next 5 years, you can be the first person to give it to them. Unfortunately, without a time travel device, it’s impossible to know for sure how the consumer’s wants and needs will change. However, you can make a very good estimate and this will drive the decisions about the future of your company. These are some of the best ways to predict long-term market trends in your industry.
Use Big Data
If your business is not already collecting and using data about your customers and your industry as a whole, you are at a huge disadvantage. Knowing which products and services perform well and what the buying habits of your target customers are like can be so valuable when trying to predict trends. Comparing your own data with wider data points about the industry as a whole helps you build a full picture. There are some excellent platforms like Live Earth that can help you do exactly that. By creating simple visualizations of data, you will get a much clearer idea of how markets are moving and what direction they are heading in. You can then use this information to drive your marketing campaigns and the overall direction of your company.
Listen To Influencers
Hopefully, you already know that influencers are excellent for creating successful marketing campaigns. But have you considered how they could help you predict long-term market trends? These are people that live and breathe your industry and many of them are brand ambassadors for your competitors. So, take note of what they are saying because, more often than not, their predictions are spot on. Look at their social media accounts and look in the comment sections too because the insights of their followers can be equally as valuable.
Read Industry Publications
Industry publications are also a great source of information. Again, the people writing for these publications are absorbed in your industry and they keep track of everything that is happening. Their job is to research the industry and write about its future, so you should subscribe to as many publications as possible and take the time to read them. They can also be a good marketing opportunity for you as well, so try to build relationships with them and see if you can get any extra information before your competitors do.
If you have your finger on the pulse and you can predict long-term market trends, your business decision making will be so much more effective.
In recent times, the digitization of business activities has created the need for many businesses to develop strong engagement online to communicate with most of their customers. Therefore, it has become dominantly crucial for small business owners to develop a robust online presence to promote their business activities and provide excellent customer service. Blogging is one of the many ways to build a robust online presence. Blogging is a relatively easy, convenient, and less expensive way for business owners to create solid opportunities for their business online. This article will highlight a few benefits of blogging for small businesses.
Improve customer care and service delivery
Customers can share their experiences and leave comments about your business or service on your blog. Blogging is an excellent way to access various feedback from customers. For example, small business owners can write targeted blog posts to gather feedback from their customers concerning a new release or product, then make needed adjustments based on the feedback from their blogs to improve their service or product delivery. Generally, a small business can use blogs as powerful interactive tools.
Any SEO Agency would agree that blogging is a very convenient tool used for Google optimization. Search engine optimization is a simple tactic to increase your ranking above your competition in search engine results. Small business owners can also use blogging to boost their search engine engagements and analytics. The best way small business owners can use blogs to improve the SEO of their businesses is to consistently write blogs around keywords your potential customers will search for.
Building a valuable brand
If you want to build a valuable brand to get enough exposure and awareness, consider blogging. Small businesses can generate enough visibility for their businesses by blogging. In essence, enough visibility will consequently lead to more engagement. In addition, these corporate blogs can hold adequate information about the services rendered by the business or even product services offered by the business. With enough information, readers or visitors can learn more about the business.
Keeping customers updated
Blogging is the perfect way for small businesses to publish exciting offers and announce new releases that will grab customers' attention. So many readers look forward to the exciting new updates and perspectives your business will have to offer. You can take advantage of this and write an exciting blog post about your service that will keep your readers constantly intrigued. When your readers are always interested in your business and posts, you have the potential to build a solid market around them.
Create free marketing opportunities
Every time you update your blog, there is a chance some of your audience will share your content with others. A collective effort by some of your audience to share your content promotes your brand and further puts credence to your business. This can also boost your search engine ranking and increase website traffic for potential customers. Blogging also provides many opportunities to partner with affiliate businesses and promote affiliate marketing strategies.
Reaching a wider audience is every business's aim. It enables businesses to thrive, succeed, and grow financially. No matter if you are a small business or corporation, you will always benefit from having a wider audience. You will attain more business and regular customers. For those looking for easy and fool-proof ways to reach a wider audience, keep reading.
Looking for a content marketing strategy is what every business should be doing. It will help you promote your business effectively and ensure you are reaching out to the right audience.
First, you should decide on the marketing methods you wish to use. Then, decide on a schedule. Regular content will satisfy the needs of your customers and also remind them of your product/service.
Take advantage of social media
Social media will boost customer engagement too. If you are constant with your content, you will engage audiences from all around the globe.
You can pre-schedule content to go live, even when you are not online. This will allow you to reach customers in every country.
Furthemore, social media posts can be promoted. This is often for a fee. When doing so, you can typically select the audience you want to reach. This can help you reach a new, or select, audience. Targeting a wider range of people will result in a wider audience for your business.
Start creating blog posts
Most businesses have a website. If not, then you should probably think about creating one. It allows you to sell products/services, keep customers in the loop, and put your name online. Being present online as a business will instantly boost your brand awareness and help reach a wider audience.
On the website, blog posts can be created as a fun, interactive, and engaging way to inform customers of new releases, brand information, and more. They can be fun to write and fun to read. They can make your business more personable, which can help all audiences relate to your brand.
Having a blog on your website will also help you climb the search ranks as keywords will work as SEO.
Offer excellent customer service
If a customer needs to ask a question or wants to give feedback, they will look for customer service tools to contact you. Every customer's request should be fulfilled to attain their business. If not, you can quickly lose loyal customers.
Excellent customer service (that is quick and friendly) will engage customers and make them feel appreciated. If you can offer every customer good service, then you will attain their business. It will be a good look for your business and will likely increase your word-of-mouth marketing.
Ask for feedback
Speaking of customer feedback, it can be beneficial for your business to ask for it. Asking current customers how you can improve your business will likely satisfy their needs and the needs of new customers.
Growing your business and being more successful through customer satisfaction will likely grasp the attention of new customers of a wider audience.
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