May 2014 Archives

Keeping up with the changes in social media and marketing are keys in developing a strong B2B public relations strategy. 

And, with the latest new feature from Twitter, it's vital that businesses realize how important it is to be part of the online conversation, before they are muted from the discussion.

Last week, Twitter announced a new mute feature for iPhone, web, and Android users.  This new feature gives users the ability to mute or "silence" other users content from appearing their feed.  The mute feature also is a helpful option when a user goes on a posting spree about sporting events, concerts, TV shows, or rants in general.

According to Twitter in a blog, muting a user on Twitter means their tweets and retweets will no longer be visible in your home timeline, and you will no longer receive push or SMS notifications from that user.

The muted user will still be able to favorite, reply to and retweet your Tweets; you just won't see any of that activity in your timeline. The muted user will not know that you've muted him/her, and of course you can unmute at any time.

The feature began rolling out last week, and will be available to all iPhone, Android, and Twitter.com users in the next few weeks.  Twitter provides the following guidelines for users to mute others:

•    To mute a user from a Tweet on an iOS or Android device or on Twitter for web, tap more and then mute @username.
•    To mute someone from his/her profile page, tap the gear icon on the page and choose mute @username.

At Ripley PR, we believe in the importance of integrating marketing and social media engagement into a public relations campaign. Knowing how to stay engaged in the online conversation and reach your customers without overwhelming or irritating them is key.

With new advancements in features, like the mute button on Twitter, it's vital to ensure your business stays part of the discussion by interacting the right way on social media. 

Contact the experts at Ripley PR to learn how to make the best use of your time on social media and fit it into all of your public relations initiatives in a positive way.

Digital advertising has really found its foothold: last year, online ad revenues surpassed television for the first time ever. Marketers are finding it more effective than just about any other form of advertising - but online advertising should come with a word of caution.

Neustar, a real-time provider of cloud-based information services and data analytics, found that companies waste 26 percent of their advertising dollars, by not picking the right outlets or technology for online ads.

What does that mean for you as a B2B marketer? It means identifying the best channels to allocate your advertising dollars and maximize your results.

Neustar says marketers and agencies waste digital dollars in five main ways:

1. Not identifying which channel will reach the target market: It takes some careful planning and market research to identify the target demographic and the best ways to reach people in that demographic. That way you can plan advertising that actually reaches your customer, not that just gets lost in the ether.

2. Overlapping ads: To make the most use of your online advertising, you need to identify unique segments of users on each channel to figure out where you'll get the most outreach. Remember, people use multiple websites, even ones that are very similar to one another, so it's important that you're not reaching the same small number of people with every ad.

3. Too many ads: Like in many other applications, when it comes to advertising, less can be more. Bombarding your market with frequent ads isn't the way to get people to click on them - they're more likely to just get annoyed and ignore them. Monitor your market to determine the best frequency, and then control it for optimum clicks.

4. Assuming first or last impressions are best: don't assume that the final ad a customer sees is the one that convinces him to make a sale - and only track analytics or that ad. Many marketers still use a last-touch attribution system, but that might not be the best way to go about it.

5. Not connecting online and offline efforts: Monitoring your marketing efforts across all platforms, digital and non-digital, will help you determine which channels are working - and which ones aren't worth your time or money.

At Ripley PR, we can help you identify the best options for advertising as part of your B2B public relations and marketing strategy. Contact us today to find out how we can help you with lead generation, franchise sales, and more.

If you're reading this blog post, I can already tell you that you're a step (or ten) ahead of your competition. We're living in a world where only half of small businesses have websites. Yes, you read that right!

The other half? They have websites, but they're struggling to make them great. You want to take your SMB website to the next level.

How do you get there? Every great small business website needs the following:

1.) A phone number on every page

You'd be surprised if I told you how many small business websites don't display their phone number on the home page of their website. Hint: It's over 60%!

You've worked hard to bring potential customers to your website, and now you need to make sure it's simple for them to turn into paying customers. Find some free real estate at the top of every page on your website and insert your phone number. Make it easy to read, bold it if you have to.

If you want customers to call you, you'll need to make it simple. Go ahead and add that phone number!

2.) Basic search engine optimization

It's not possible to ignore SEO these days. Nearly half of all website traffic comes from search engines. If you're not optimizing for search, you might as well not have a website.

SEO can be complicated. So we created a blog post that simplifies SEO for small businesses. Read the blog post to find out exactly what you need:

• Optimized headers and title tags

• Great content

• Internal links to content

• A simple way to measure your results

• And of course, lots of call to actions

3.) Customer testimonials

Approximately 90% of consumers say that online reviews influence their buying decisions. Now there's another statistic you can't ignore!

If you have a great business with happy customers, why not prominently display those on your website? You'll want to create a testimonials page that has the following:

• Names of those who have left their review

• Dates of testimonials received

• Description of product or services that were performed

• Proper schema.org review markup

4.) A clear map with accompanying directions

If you're a local business, you'll want to make sure it's easy for customers to find your address and get clear directions. Google makes it easy to embed maps on websites, just follow their simple instructions.

Underneath your map embed, you should include simple instructions for getting to your business. You can include driving directions from multiple locations, or if you're in a city with public transportation, include bus/train directions as well.

If you're in a complicated complex or office building, put together some clear instructions for finding your specific location.

5.) A blog with content that helps your customers

Last, but certainly not least is a blog with great content. Your small businesses website has to stand out somehow. If you want to step your game up, past the generic "home, about us, services, contact us" sections, you'll need to add a blog.

Content marketing is rapidly growing because traditional advertising, or "shouting" at your customers is slowly dying.

Identify 10 problems that keep your potential customers up at night. It could be rodents getting into the house, wondering if a fallen tree will be covered by insurance, or wanting to know if their small business website is good enough.

After you've written out your 10 problems, commit to "solving" one problem per week through a blog post. Promote your content on your social networks and to your email list. If you aren't collecting emails, find out how to easily start here for only $5.97.

Any business can create great content. If you're struggling to come up with epic content ideas, tweet at us for some free tips and ideas. We think small business content marketing is so important, we've put together a great presentation on it. Download it today for free!

Do you think we missed anything that a great small business website needs? Let us know in the comments!

The post The 5 Things Every (Great) Small Business Website Needs appeared first on LocalVox.

Like most other industries, public relations has a set of unwritten rules, mostly developed through tradition and experience. However, as the saying goes, there's an exception for every rule, and PR is no different in that way, either.

At Ripley PR, we work with clients in construction, franchising, home services, manufacturing, and more.

Each industry is different, but media training is fairly standard across the board. We teach clients how to conduct themselves in interviews and how to prepare for a crisis and handle it in the event that one arises, and we work to find them story opportunities in news, trade publications, blogs, and more.

We found this article from Ragan's PR Daily interesting, because it addresses the rules of PR or media relations that were just made to be broken.

Consider a few of these nuggets from the article.

• It's okay to say "No comment." Especially in a crisis situation, it's important to communicate effectively - but there are times, maybe when you don't have all the facts about a situation, when it's simply best not to talk to the media. And that's okay.

• Your own news isn't the only opportunity for a story. If you have an expert quote to offer to another story, or an interesting viewpoint on an issue, you can find lots of opportunities to be featured, even if your story isn't the main one.

• Sometimes exclusive is best. Traditional PR maintains that it's wise to cast a wide net to media outlets - but sometimes you'll have better luck if you offer one publication an exclusive, before reaching out to others.

• A press conference isn't necessarily your best bet. Many companies think that holding a big event to announce a launch or grand opening is the best way to guarantee coverage, but that's most often not the case. Strategically reaching out to media will generally serve your purposes better.

Ultimately, the best way for companies to get good coverage is to have a good PR strategy - and that's where a B2B public relations agency like Ripley PR comes in.

Contact us today to find out how we can help you achieve great results.

As a small business, doing all your online marketing by yourself can be very challenging. You must build and market your website to build your audience, send out email newsletters to engage customers, and utilize social media to increase awareness.

Having just a company website isn't enough to get found through the search engines. The "if you build it, they will come" mantra doesn't apply for most small business websites.

Your potential local customers are constantly conducting quick searches on online directories. These directories not only have substantial brands/marketing budgets to drive traffic, but they also rank well in the search engines for your most important search terms. So even if you can't get your website ranked high for a specific search term, you can appear on the local directory site that ranks for that term.

Listing your business on these 5 local online directories can really help you generate more customers:

1. Google Places for Business

Since over 80% of searches are conducted through Google, you need to make this directory number one on your list. Your Google Places page allows you to control what information Google has and presents to searchers about your business. You can fill in your Places page with information like a description, images, hours of operation, and contact information.

2. Bing Places for Business

Bing Places for Business is another local directory that gives you all the tools you need to easily and quickly manage your reputation and find local customers online. Enrich your business listing with compelling online content like photos, specialties and services on the second largest search engine.

3. Yahoo! Local Listing

 A free Yahoo Basic Listing helps customers get your business's contact information, including address, phone number, and URL. Simple to create and easy to manage, the Yahoo Basic Listing can be a first step if you're just starting out online. They also offer paid plans that give you additional benefits like enhanced listings, special offers, and analytics.

4. Yelp

Best for word-of-mouth, Yelp Business Accounts offer a suite of free tools for local businesses. Communicate with your customers - privately and publicly. Track how many people view your business page. Add photos, a detailed business description, up-to-date information, history, and specialties. Recommend other local businesses and build your audience with co-marketing.

5. Manta

Manta's free business directory is one of the fastest growing small business resources in the United States. Not only is it a local directory for you to claim and promote your business, but Manta also centers around connecting its community of small businesses with one another, perfect for expanding reach. They also offer a paid plan with additional features and benefits.

Other great local directory listing opportunities

Don't forget to pick the low-hanging social media fruit of LinkedIn, Facebook, and Foursquare. There are more businesses utilizing these outlets than ever before so make sure you're competing on them locally!

Getting listed on these local directories is a great way to maximize your online marketing results and expose your business to more potential local customers, but you should not stop there.

Make sure you're also building co-marketing partnerships to build relevant inbound links to your website and optimizing your pages with your most valuable keywords using a tool like BoostSuite.

Have you ever listed your website on any of these local directories? What was your experience with them? Do you recommend any others that weren't included in this article? Let's hear them in the comments! Thanks!

The post The Five Best Local Directories To Get Listed In To Maximize Results appeared first on LocalVox.

LinkedIn wants to be part of your breakfast.  That part where you open your tablet, review the LinkedIn stream of news &  read some brand advertorials.  Your LinkedIn stream of news has more noise than the WSJ, but you can take steps to edit out the noise & read things are informative and congenial.

And advertorial in a print magazine was deliberately made to look similar to the editorial page.  Although titled "Advertisement", some readers who regularly skipped display ads were interested in the conversational format of the advertorial.  So, they read & some bought.  The newspaper made money matching a supplier with a customer.

LinkedIn is doing something similar.  It is allowing franchise brands to post their ads directly into your LinkedIn update stream, even if you aren't currently following the company. 

These sponsored updates are different from the LinkedIn paid ads which you see around the edge of the LinkedIn stream, usually in widget  on the right hand side.

Since the sponsored update programs was announced a couple of weeks ago, Joe and I have been trying some of the features out -using our company page.

First, buying impressions is relatively simple.  You figure out what a target audience is, fill in a few buttons and then you are presented with screen that looks like this.

Ok, this campaign would cost us $23.74 for each 1,000 impressions we want to buy.  We are targeting the 104k LinkedIn users in Restaurant or Hospitality industry, Senior Director or VP and above.  We are also targeting it to the people who are in business development, sales or marketing.  So, 10K impressions would cost $237.40.  

But, before we tried to buy the interest or impressions, Joe and I thought we should experiment.  How many impressions could we get using the company page?  

Well, we tried out some ideas and look what happened!  

On May 5th, were able generate, just with 2 articles, 29,031 impressions.  This would have cost us $689.19

But, we generated these impressions organically - as you can see we have gone from essentially zero impressions to almost 30,000 impressions in less than a couple of weeks. 

Now here is thing. Both articles that we tested were advertorials or sponsored updates.  We were using articles that were asking people for a sale.  People read them, just like you are doing now.  Because of their conversational tone.

When your brand needs to make an impression in LinkedIn, and you want your brand to go from 0 to 30k, or more, send me an email in LinkedIn.  Use the title "I want to make an impression."

Or, you can just sign up for more of our ideas about how to publish on LinkedIn. Just click here and Mail Chimp will take over.  Thanks.   Oh, and we never give out your email.

Have you heard recent rumors that Google Plus is going away, due to the recent departure of Google's senior vice president Vic Gundotra?

The search engine giant introduced this social network in 2011, in hopes that it would be a competitor for Facebook.

To build users, Google Plus was integrated across Google's platforms, including YouTube, Gmail, and Hangouts.

It's never had quite the reach of Facebook, but many businesses have created company pages where they can make posts and engage with customers.

At Ripley PR, we have recommended Google Plus pages as a tool within clients' B2B public relations and social media marketing strategies. But is it still a valid use of time and resources?

For basic social media interactions with customers going forward, Google Plus may not be the best option for most companies.

Right now, with the shuffling of more than 1,000 Google employees from the Google Plus team to other parts of the company, it remains to be seen what the future of the social network is. Most analysts believe that it will likely become a platform to link the whole network of Google products.

Along with that, Google Plus may evolve to target more people in the business sector, and there may be opportunities for advertising on the platform in the future. For that reason, we believe it is still worthwhile for our clients to have a Google Plus company page.

We will continue to watch the evolution of this product, and assess how it can help meet the needs of our PR and marketing clients now and in the future.