Categories
Outreach

6 Methods for Improving Any PR Outreach Plan

Just 30 years ago, the bulk of a business’s PR outreach campaign was connecting with members of the press, getting articles published in newspapers, and running local events to connect with one’s community. But that’s far from enough in today’s digital world, where the right relationship or visibility can dictate your success.

I’ve said before that outreach is one of my favorite topics – that’s still true. I believe great outreach campaigns benefit everyone involved, including the person reaching out and the person receiving the connection. To that end, I’m dedicating this post to helping you improve your outreach campaign with my favorite tips and strategies.

Review Your Content Marketing Plan

Content is far more than just text, images, and information – it’s also a form of PR outreach in its own right, especially online. If you’re struggling to make the right connections, it may be time to review the quality of the content you’re putting out to attract attention.

What kind of content should you be creating? The answer really depends on your niche, industry, and sphere (B2B or B2C), but there are a few “golden rules” you should always follow:

  • Put your own spin on it
  • Come up with your own ideas
  • Keep a consistent schedule
  • Mix up your content formats
  • Make it easy to digest

 

Essentially, your content is your contribution to the industry as well as your opportunity to show your audience you know your craft. The more consistently you delivery well-thought-out, interesting content that’s easy to digest and recognize as part of your “brand,” the easier it will be for your outreach targets to recognize.

Cultivate Better Connections

Sometimes, the biggest problem with a PR outreach plan isn’t content, but the connections themselves. If you’re consistently pushing out great content, such as email connection attempts, articles, blogs, press releases, and videos, but still aren’t having any success, you may need to re-work your targets and review your demographics.

Check your non-successful contact attempts to determine whether they really align with your brand. Create a media database that lets you segment your list into categories, groups, or demographics to make it easier for you to sub-target specific groups. Then, narrow down your campaign to target these sub-groups instead of your broader overall audience.

Don’t forget that aligning too closely can also be a red flag; you may be accidentally targeting an entity who sees you as a competitor, not a friend.

Create More Press Releases

Businesses often get lost in the process of reaching out to other entities and individuals, forgetting about the noble press release. But press releases disseminated across multiple platforms can be immensely powerful especially in the B2B sphere.

Time your press releases to coincide with important happenings, and pair them with SEO backlinking campaigns for extra effect. Just don’t fall into the trap of posting a press release for every inconsequential change; this comes across as abusing the process, and can make you appear desperate – the last thing you want.

As for where to post, sites like VentureBeat are okay, but they pale in comparison to real journalistic outlets and newspapers. Skip sites like Facebook and Twitter; they’re targeted to a younger crowd who are less likely to pay attention – but do target LinkedIn and other industry-oriented sites instead. They’re more likely to be read by your targets in these locations.

Review Your Backlinks Profile

Who’s linking to your website or social media profiles right now? If you don’t know, you’re missing out on an incredible opportunity for outreach.

Using backlink monitoring tools, create a list of all of the entities linking to you, then segment that list by demographics and how closely they align with your brand. Determine which linkers you were already aware of (such as guest blogging opportunities) and which have developed organically without your input.

If organic backlinking entities fit within your targets, reach out to them with opportunities for additional collaboration. Since they’re already linking to you, they qualify as “warm leads, making it easier to grow the relationship.

Improve Follow-Ups

You put a ton of effort in the world into identifying targets, reaching out, and sounding really compelling. Your target audience loves it – but when they respond, you’re too busy and miss their email, leading to lost opportunities. Or, maybe they don’t respond, and you mean to ping them back with a reminder, only to realize three weeks have passed and they’ve totally forgotten who you are again.

Or maybe you suffer from the opposite issue: in your haste to make connections, you send out too many follow-ups. Connections feel attacked by your rapid-fire follow-ups, gingerly and quietly hitting the “spam” button without your knowledge.

To improve your follow-up success rates, send your first follow-up on the third or fourth business day after your initial connection. Don’t frame it as a simple reminder; add something new and valuable in they can really use. Think of it like dangling the carrot, not as a “hey – hey you!” attempt. Your targets will feel more appreciated because it shows you’re already striving to be a good corporate friend.

Engage in Corporate Altruism

As a business, you have something to offer the world – and often, that something can be very helpful or useful to your connections. One of your connections writes a blog stating that they’re struggling with something you specialize in. Or, maybe they post on social media looking for a specific connection or expert, and you just happen to have a colleague who fits the bill.

Take the opportunity to become a business “white knight” here when you can lend a hand. Reach out to them and offer your help (freely, as long as it makes sense) with making the connection, solving the problem, or answering their most pressing questions. Corporate altruism inspires some of the strongest relationships in outreach, especially if you don’t try to instantly turn every communication attempt into a sale.

Just remember that relationships are about give and take. An entity who repeatedly takes your help, yet never provides as much as a backlink in return, doesn’t necessarily qualify as a “good connection.”

Categories
Social Media

Worried About Muting on Instagram? Here’s the Fix

Frightening news for Instagram marketers who already need to jump through hoops to ensure they don’t break the platform’s in-depth advertising rules: you now need to worry about your target audience muting your account, too. Instagram just rolled out the new feature a couple of weeks ago, which gives users the right to “mute” annoying accounts for virtually any reason at all under the sun.

How Muting Impacts Your Business

If you’re marketing your business through the platform, the new mute button essentially means you’re at the mercy of your audience when they don’t like something you post. If viewers find you annoying, they can now turn you off or silence you on a whim. With the wrong content you just might find your campaign crippled by a mass muting spree.

Aggravatingly, the platform doesn’t even tell you when someone mutes you, and doesn’t require that they unfollow. There’s virtually no way to figure out how many people actually have your account muted, so being proactive matters.

Before you give up on Instagram altogether, let me brighten your day a bit: the mute button isn’t the herald of doom it sounds like. Remember: most established marketers use best practices so they don’t become overly pushy or annoying anyway. Even so, grey areas do exist, and nearly nothing on social media is ever black and white. Use the strategies in the next few sections to eliminate as much muting risk as you possibly can.

Improve Your Targeting

Instagram users mute accounts because they feel annoyed, offended, or somehow “put off” by the account. If you’re doing a poor job of targeting a specific demographic of users on the site, you’re more likely to offend or be annoying.

Think of bad targeting like a horrendous blind date. Both people are probably just fine separately; together, they just don’t make any sense. Worse yet, they probably bring out the worst in each other, making everyone cranky and unsettled.

Here’s a marketing-specific example: a corporate cleaning supplies company attempting to market their products to a teenage girl. Or, a men’s clothing company attempts to sell their products to pregnant women. Sure, someone among that demographic will buy, but otherwise, it’s a waste of everyone’s time.

Bad targeting leaves people with a bad taste in their mouths – and that bad taste just happens to be their experience with your business. It’s what leaves consumers saying things like, “Ugh! Why do I keep seeing messages about men’s clothing?!” or “OMG! I don’t want your product, stop tagging me!”

Enough of bad targeting and your consumers will mute you so they don’t have to be annoyed anymore, but there is a preventative fix.

First, figure out who it is you’re targeting in the first place – how old are they? Are they male, female, or gender non-specific? Create a persona for your average audience member, then review who you’re following and/or advertising to and adjust your campaign as needed.

Keep in mind that the more vague your demographic is, the greater the opportunity for bad targeting to happen. In the words of WordStream writer Dan Shewan, “Everyone” is not a demographic.

The more narrow your demographic, the better your targeting. Sending out ads to all women over 40, for example, leaves a tremendous amount of room for mismatches. Sending out ads to women over 40, who have children, who are married, and who have an interest in, say, sports, is much more in-depth. Of course, common sense applies; if you get too specific, you may find your niche too small.

Put Your Consumers First

In today’s episode of “which came first, the chicken or the egg?”, let me ask you a question. What’s more important in marketing, your campaign’s success or your consumers and how they feel about you?

No matter what you answer, you’re partially incorrect; it’s a trick question. Campaign performance is deeply connected to audience satisfaction with your business; really, one can’t exist without the other. You can follow a genius campaign to the letter and still never see results if your audience is already disgruntled.

If your current campaign involves little more than spamming similar messages about products or sales every few hours or days, you may already be at risk. Mix it up, add in some value with content your audience loves, and spread out direct sales requests so they aren’t as staccatoed.

The fix? Put your audience’s needs first, not your sales. Use demographics, market analysis, split testing, and feedback to figure out what the heck it is they want to see or experience, then tailor your campaigns around that. Providing your audience with value will always be the key to better conversions – Instagram muting notwithstanding.

Don’t Steal Content (Even Inadvertently)

Instagram marketing is really content-heavy; the site relies on pictures and videos, and you need to be able to capitalize on that quickly to catch trends. Unfortunately, this is exactly what leads many businesses to grab a meme, gif, or picture off the Internet, attach a few hashtags, add a positive message, and post – all without realizing their curation has turned into content theft in the process.

Suddenly, angry reactions and comments accusing you of plagiarism and theft begin to flow onto the photo. You went viral for all the wrong reasons, and people are now actively muting you over it because they don’t want to be associated with a business that steals content. Your well-meaning self feels baffled; after all, all you did was share a meme, right?

Unfortunately, content theft just isn’t that black and white, and many, many people misunderstand what plagiarism even is in the first place. You don’t need to take and recycle someone else’s content word-for-word or image-for-image exactly to qualify; in fact, simply sharing someone else’s content (respun or not) as if it was your own is enough.

Real content curation – the process of gathering, structuring, and presenting information you find online to your audience – isn’t the same. In curation, you give credit where credit is due, always link to the creator when you can, and disclose that you aren’t sure of the source when you don’t. It’s all about being transparent while still showing appreciation for other creators.

So, what happens if you inadvertently find yourself accused of stealing content you thought was CC0 on Instagram? You can save face by asking the commenter to send you information for the creator so you can contact them for permission, or at least credit them correctly in the subtitles. This can also be a great opportunity for collaboration and outreach if you play your cards right!

Ask for Feedback

Instagram is unique from most other social media sites because users love when businesses interact with them, ask them questions, and encourage back-and-forth communication. It’s a much more organic and communicative environment than sites like Twitter or even Facebook – which is exactly why the platform exploded Influencer Marketing in the first place.

If you’re not sure whether you’re hitting targets right, or if you’re pretty sure you’ve managed to annoy at least some people into muting you already, ask your audience for help. Ask them what they like or dislike. Alternatively, try flipping the script by saying you want to get creative and branch out into new content themes; create a survey with a few options and ask them to respond with tags.

Another great way to get the conversation flowing and encourage brand loyalty without being overbearing and annoying is to get out there and be helpful. Offer to answer questions about your business or product, or encourage them to show how they interact with your brand through images and tags. Use what they share to learn more about them and adjust your content marketing strategies to match their needs.

Remember: feedback is also a form of user-generated content (UGC). Research tells us that the presence of UGC on social media can boost overall engagement by up to 7 or more percent if it’s positive. Get the conversation flowing and you just might find you get more interaction and fewer struggles with muting, too.

P.S. – If you’re struggling with your audience, including gaining followers in the first place, I can help. I wrote a piece on how to get more Instagram followers early in February; check it out at the link.

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