by admin | Mar 11, 2020 | Blog
Your company has a story and people want to hear it.
Remember the last time you heard a great story? If you’re anything like me, it was probably a movie or T.V. show. Since the entertainment industry makes money by telling good stories, this makes sense. But in our fast-paced, tech-driven society, we rely on text messaging (guilty!), email and IMs and we don’t take the time to tell stories like we used to.
In the Don Draper, Mad Men, days of advertising storytelling was relatively simple. Come up with a catchy phrase and call it day. Now that we are bombarded with marketing campaigns on a 24×7 basis, it is harder to cut through the clutter.
That’s where storytelling and public relations come in. But what does it take to tell a really good story? Especially in a B2B environment?
Not too long ago, I was asked by my marketing team to think about a B2B brand that really made an impression on me. Of course, my first reaction was come on. B2B + engaging content = doesn’t add up!
But then I thought about it and remembered a simple phrase that a sales representative from Wrike told me, “what you need is a single source of truth.”
If you aren’t familiar with Wrike, it’s a project management platform that can be shared across teams and business. It really can be that one source of truth rather than combing through endless emails to find that one URL or status update that you might have accidentally deleted because you tried to check your work email on your phone while at happy hour (I’ve only heard via storytelling that these things can happen!).
That phrase single source of truth will never leave my brain. Because it is precisely what my brain needed to hear to solve my need for organizing information.
Now I am an unofficial brand ambassador for this company. And that is the power of knowing your brand’s story.
At the end of the day, your story shouldn’t be about you at all. It should be about the things that matter to your buyer personas, but it should also be personal. (Yes, even B2B can be personal; we’re still humans in the work environment).
Never underestimate the value of making an emotional connection in the B2B world especially in healthcare. With health IT becoming more and more saturated, the B2B landscape is changing and it’s becoming more critical for strong B2B brands to do what strong brands do around the world engender trust and reduce perceived risk.
We have critical problems to fix in healthcare and every single client I work with creates technology that betters the lives of so many patients, physicians, nurses, payers the list could go on for days. But sometimes getting to the root of how this technology is shifting the healthcare environment is challenging.
Successful public relations activities rely on being able to tell powerful and insightful stories. Storytelling is an important aspect to public relations strategies because it allows companies to better connect with their audience.
Here are four ways your B2B brand can become a good storyteller.
1. Start with a broad narrative that helps tell the story of your company.
Purpose is essential to a strong corporate culture and it is often activated and reinforced through narrative. Individuals must learn to connect their drives to the organization’s purpose and to articulate their story to others.
A professor at Harvard University developed a simple framework for those hoping to develop a narrative approach to their purpose-driven organizations: “Self, Us, Now.” “Self” looks at the real-life events of the leader or leaders that created a company it helps to establish the values that will ultimately become the values of the organization.
“Us” aims to connect those values with broader shared values of your audiences or stakeholders, e.g., clients or employees. By weaving these personal narratives into the narratives of others, you create a common narrative for the group or organization.
And finally, “now” is the urgent call to action for those who wish to achieve the same purpose as your organization.
2. Consolidate your narrative into an elevator pitch.
Now that you’ve develop what I like to call the soul of your company, it’s likely a lengthy narrative as it should be since your company is solving some of healthcare’s most complex challenges. The elevator should pull out some of those key emotion-grabbing narratives and concisely explain:
- Who are you?
- What do you offer?
- What problem do you solve?
- How are you different (unique selling proposition)?
- Your call to action
3. Adapt your elevator pitch into something that could be used as an “About Us.”
Now that you have a well-developed narrative that explains your unique identity, craft your story! Evoke an emotional response in your buyer persona. Provide a simple and clear value proposition, establish your credibility, and give a call to action. As they say, the best way to sell something is to not sell anything. Earn trust and loyalty by telling a compelling story to help stick in your customer’s mind.
4. Frame up your narrative against core themes that can represent your overall business.
Likely you’ve got a lot of products but talking about each product separately can quickly become overwhelming. If it’s overwhelming for your marketing team, then it is overwhelming for your customers too. Work to identify the core themes that your products can be categorized into. Then tell how those themes are solving our most critical problems.
Storytelling can’t be mastered overnight. It takes practice but it is worth it as there is nothing more powerful than making your content and news relatable to your audience. Tell good tales, and you’ll quickly find your audience will see you as a true thought leader and they will come to you.
by Ken Krause | Mar 4, 2020 | Blog
It may not quite be Lincoln and Douglas, or even great taste/less filling. But the debate about which is more important to a brand’s online presence great content or search engine optimization (SEO) continues to rage on.
On one side you have the writers. Especially the “old school” writers (like me) who launched their careers long before Al Gore invented the Internet.
When I started writing we used typewriters electric ones. I’m not that old. The total focus was on the quality of the content. Clever, attention-grabbing headlines that led into powerful, motivating body copy that carried the message in an interesting way was “all” that was required.
Then came the Internet, and with it the omnipotent search engines. No longer was it enough for headlines and copy to be creative and interesting. The data wonks said it also had to include certain keywords that would tell the search engines a particular page or document was relevant to the search the user was conducting.
In other words, if the user is searching on the term “crazy bunnies” it was important for those keywords to appear in the headline, and in the little words that came after. Especially the first paragraph.
While that makes sense from a data point of view, it definitely created a dilemma for writers. Having a brilliant headline was no longer enough, because you weren’t just trying to capture the attention of humans. You also had to capture the attention of the machines.
That situation set up a sort of chicken-and-egg dilemma. You could write the best website, or article, or other content in the world, but if no one could find it in a marketing world that increasingly relied on search what was the point?
On the other hand, if your document was easy to find due to liberal use of keywords but not very interesting or engaging, again what was the point? You’d lose the audience you’d worked so hard to capture.
It also led to practices such as keyword stuffing (including keywords out of context for the sole purpose of raising searching rankings) and a host of other tricks such as putting keywords on a page in the same color as the background so they couldn’t be seen by humans but would be read by web crawlers. Didn’t take long for the search engines to figure that one out.
Keeping the balance
Fortunately, Google (and other search engines no one really cares about) have continually updated their algorithms to go beyond simple keywords. They are getting better and better at determining the context of the content to ensure it’s actually relevant.
Still, keywords are important to success. So how do you reconcile the desire to write content that reaches people on a deep, human level with the need to tell the machines yes, this is the information they’ve been looking for?
Here is a process I’ve found to be effective.
- Start by knowing which keywords are ranking for the topic you want to promote. If you don’t already have a list, you can use Google AdWords, a free service, to plug in some terms that are relevant to your product/service. Then see which ones have relatively high search volumes with low competition. That will tell you what terms your audience is likely to be searching on, and how difficult it will be to rank high for them. The goal, of course, is page one above the fold. Be sure to check Google’s suggested substitutions too. There may be a more effective word or phrase lurking in there somewhere. Of course, if you have an agency (such as, oh, I dunno, Amendola Communications) you can hand that work off to them.
- Once you have your list, set it aside. Then develop the content in a way that is the most interesting and speaks to your audience(s). Don’t worry about keywords right now. Just make sure you’re telling a good story that demonstrates your knowledge and/or experience and convinces your target audience that you would be the best choice. In other words, write as though the Internet doesn’t exist.
- After you have great content, go back and look for places to plug in your keywords. Start with the headline and the first paragraph. Is there a way to work in your most important keyword? Then sprinkle in others throughout the rest of the content. In some cases it may require a bit of rewriting, but often you’ll be surprised at how easily a keyword can be substituted for another word or phrase. Writing in this fashion, rather than trying to write to the keywords initially, will help the keywords fit more organically, and will keep you from writing dull and, well, robotic content.
- Finally, when you think it’s ready to go have someone who hasn’t been involved in the process read it to ensure those keywords are fitting in as well as you think they are. Taking this extra step doesn’t just help with human readers, by the way. With the sophisticated machine learning many search engines are applying these days it will also help minimize any appearance that you’re trying to “game” the system. Instead, your keywords will fit in the context of your content, and you will be rewarded by Google, the Great and Powerful.
Walk the line
Great content and SEO don’t have to be treated as opposing forces. In fact, they can (and should) work very well together.
By focusing first on what you want to say, and then bringing in the flags that will help that great content get seen, you can bring customers and prospects to your website and make sure they’re delighted once they get there.
by Stacy State | Feb 19, 2020 | Blog
We are a few months into the new year and it’s that time when we begin to reevaluate the resolutions we originally set. Were we being overly optimistic? Are these goals still achievable? Do we restart again?
The New Year has always marked a great starting point for assessing the changes we want to make in our lives both personally and professionally. The personal goals seem to be easier to make while professional goals sometimes get shoved to the side.
With the fast-pace and pervasive changes that occur within public relations and marketing, it’s important that we as PR and marketing professionals set meaningful goals and track our success toward them throughout the year. In speaking with colleagues within this field, what are some of the common resolutions we set for ourselves?
1. Set a content strategy at the beginning of the year. Lofty, yes, I know. But as professionals responsible for content marketing and thought leadership, knowing what topics to focus on according to a set calendar greatly speeds the delivery and production of great thought leadership pieces, white papers, blogs, e-Books and many other content deliverables.
Aligning topics with the content calendars for relevant media publications is also critical to success. If you know a certain trade publication will focus on health for the month of February then aligning your content accordingly will not only make it easier for your teams to deliver. It will also make it more likely that it gets published so you can reap the rewards of utilizing the information in multiple outputs across multiple channels.
2. Use data to drive strategy. While marketing and communications was once a more ambiguous and subjective art form rather than a science, it is now becoming easier to track results of activities due to the introduction of technology. In fact, many companies now demand to see results such as the number of new leads, the click-thru rates, and share of voice.
And as PR and marketing professionals, we too should demand and want to see the results of our labor. Knowing what messaging works and why for which type of customer is key to delivering even better communications and campaigns moving forward. It benefits everyone when we “work smarter and not harder” and being informed about how our past activity has performed is an important step to achieving that.
3. Don’t make perfect the enemy of good. This quote, often attributed to the French writer, Voltaire, really resonates with many in the PR and marketing profession. As writers and creators of content and design, there is often a pride that comes with a beautifully written piece, a new innovative spin on an overly discussed topic or a flawless pictorial of a convoluted concept.
After all, these are the moments we live for the times we get to deliver into the world a masterpiece that shows our years of schooling and experience. It’s times like these though that we must remember Voltaire’s words of wisdom for it is easy to get caught up in trying to make perfect what is already seen as great by many.
4. Read more but don’t get lost. As great PR, media relations and marketing professionals it’s often in our nature (and part of the job) to learn what’s going on in the world around us. We want and need to know what our competitors said in the New York Times yesterday or what topic is trending with our consumers/buyers.
While the expectations and deliverables can pile on us quickly, it’s nearly impossible to do our jobs (or do them well) without taking time out to understand the market, read what consumers are saying and stay ahead of the next big news story or product development. The caution here is that while reading and being aware of the industries we serve is critical to success, it can also consume hours and hours without realizing the time that’s gone by.
5. Find the best local coffee (or tea). The markets and the news never stop from east coast to west coast or one country to the next so there is always something going on and someone awake to report on it. As marketers and PR professionals we often are early to rise and are rarely without a pile of stories or new strategies to deliver. Finding the best caffeinated beverage, therefore, is key.
If you’ll be consuming it daily (or multiple times a day), then the taste is critical, but the cost must be reasonable as well. We’re marketers, we’re media relations you can’t fool us. We can write great thought leadership for the best coffee in town. We can create amazing brand awareness and even help you generate new leads and customers. Yes, we’ll work in trade for great coffee or tea.
by Jodi Amendola | Feb 12, 2020 | Blog
Throughout my career, whenever I have done a SWOT (strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, threats) analysis with a health IT startup one of the most common weaknesses or threats their executives offer is the small size of their organizations. They may have the greatest innovation in healthcare since the Xray, but they fear it’s going to be difficult to get cost-conscious providers or payers to implement the technology or even listen to their pitch when it comes from an organization they don’t know.
Of course, that problem isn’t limited to health IT. It’s common across most industries. Unless an organization is in that 2.5% of all companies that Geoffrey Moore classified as “innovators,” or maybe the 13.5% that are “early adopters,” most organizations are too risk-averse to try a new product or service from an unknown entity.
So what’s the solution? Stop being an unknown. That’s where a thought leadership campaign can be a difference-maker.
In my latest post for the Forbes Agency Council, I explain how thought leadership can take a small organization and, following the advice of Chinese general Sun Tzu, make it look larger than life. Here’s a quick excerpt:
“You can use this to your advantage by engaging in an organized, consistent thought leadership program that shares that knowledge and helps you get prospects and customers aligned with your way of thinking. Once they believe in what you’re saying, you can guide the conversation more effectively and negate your competitors’ bigger marketing budgets. When you do that through earned media, such as media interviews or bylined articles that are accepted for publication, rather than paying for advertising or content, your thought leadership will carry even more weight and can have a halo effect.”
The post then covers five keys to taking advantage of this strategy, including:
- Offer different types of content. This is especially important if your media universe is small. The more different types of content you can offer (articles, infographics, eBooks, etc.) the more tools you have to reach an audience.
- Know things that others don’t (or at least don’t share). No one wants to hear the same old ideas being hashed out. Most businesses are started, and products are introduced, because there is a belief that there has to be a better way to do something than what currently exists. Share those ideas with others.
- Be controversial. This is especially true these days, in the era of social media when it seems like everyone is up in arms over everything. Taking strong stands instead of playing it safe and bland generally moves you to the front of the line in the media’s eyes.
- Make the content understandable. People won’t buy what they don’t understand. Keep explanations in thought leadership pieces simple and you will have a much better chance of reaching a broader audience.
- Reduce, reuse, recycle. In a small organization it can be difficult to get enough time with the subject matter experts to constantly develop new content. But all content doesn’t have to be new. Look for ways to re-purpose content (or pieces of it) in various formats to get the best mileage out of every piece you create.
Those are the highlights. For a more in-depth explanation of these points (and a lot of other great ideas from other contributors) be sure to head over to the Forbes Agency Council blog. It will be time well spent.
by admin | Feb 5, 2020 | Blog
You wake up and reach for your phone. Despite the many times you’ve heard it’s not healthy to check your email before your feet even hit the floor in the morning you immediately check your email.
This time, at the top of your inbox, is a message from your biggest client. It came through just after 6 a.m. At the top of the message is the first indication that your day is going to be interesting that good ol’ red “Urgent” exclamation mark.
The subject line reads “CALL ME ASAP.” You accept the fact that starting the coffee machine will have to wait awhile.
If you have been in PR for much time at all, some version of the above scenario has happened to you. The crisis could be any number of things.
In the healthcare industry, it could be a data breach that compromised thousands of electronic health records; a lawsuit; a massive bill from insurance; a disgruntled former employee spreading rumors on social media; or an important piece of medical equipment malfunctioning.
For nearly all enterprise organizations, and a good number of small to midsized business, a good PR firm is the first place they turn in the middle of a crisis. If you have done your job well as an agency, and earned the trust of your client, you are their emergency room in these situations. So you better have your scrubs on and your scalpel ready at all times.
When it comes to crisis communications, nothing is more important than having a solid predetermined plan in place. Before any sort of fire drill ever hits and the alarm starts blaring, the agency and the client should have had several proactive discussions during which they identified scenarios that might damage the brand or cast the company in a negative light. From there, messaging needs to be developed for each of those situations.
Of course, no one can anticipate every possible crisis. But if the most likely ones have been targeted, you can take your base messaging and create draft responses that are ready should one of those scenarios occur.
It likely won’t be the exact situation you planned for, but it will be close enough that you will only need to make tweaks and edits rather than developing your message from scratch in an already stressful situation. Better to hash out these responses over coffee and donuts when everyone is in a good mood, rather than at six in the morning when you haven’t even had the chance to brush your teeth, let alone get some caffeine into your bloodstream.
Once you have the messaging, you have a huge chunk of your prep work done. But it needs to be part of a larger plan that also includes:
A team leader from both the company and the agency
These two will be the main points of contact to keep leadership in the loop and field incoming calls from media to coordinate responses and/or interviews.
A spokesperson
It depends on the severity and level of attention the crisis has caused, but this should almost always be a C-level decision-maker whose name and voice carries the appropriate weight. This is the person who will give interviews and to whose name the statement will be attributed.
Internal communications
It is incredibly important that someone is assigned to internal communication to keep employees posted on the steps being taken during a crisis. There might be information that isn’t appropriate for you to share company-wide, but you need to share at least some details.
If not, staff will begin talking among themselves, to their families, and maybe even posting on social media. They can’t be in the dark.
On top of that, reporters might take some shots in the dark and start randomly reaching out to anyone who works for the company. If your staff hasn’t been told the plan, including that they should forward any media on to the company’s comms team, the problem can spin out of control fast. And once that happens, it’s nearly impossible to course-correct.
It might not be fun to imagine worst-case scenarios. It might even raise your heart rate. But once you do it, and your teams has a nice, neat folder saved on a shared drive somewhere with all the documents and procedures necessary for an organized response to an emergency, you will rest much easier.
You might even be able to pour a cup of coffee before you spend the rest of the day firing off emails and fielding phone calls.
by Morgan Lewis | Jan 29, 2020 | Blog
In our 24-hour news cycle increasingly driven by social media virality — public relations disasters occur and are crowded out so quickly that many people, including me, don’t even notice them. In 2019, there have been a few exceptions to that rule, which are listed below.
These companies and individuals didn’t just commit one PR blunder, but rather a sustained or repeated series of PR fails that withstood the shortening attention span of the news media and public. The biggest PR disasters in of 2019 include:
PR Fail #1: Boeing Appears Callous After Crashes
After crashes involving its 737 Max airplane in late 2018 that killed 189 people and in March 2019 that killed 157 people, Boeing continued to publicly insist that its planes were safe instead of recalling all the aircraft immediately and launching an investigation.
It didn’t help that a National Transportation Safety Board investigation revealed later that the aircraft’s new MCAS software was a contributor in both crashes or that whistleblowers emerged to allege the company cut corners to reduce costs and speed production while not documenting safety faults. Boeing continues to lose
orders from airliners and its stock price and revenue dropped precipitously throughout the year.
Boeing treated a major crisis involving the loss of hundreds of lives as if it were passengers complaining on social media about uncomfortable seats and lack of luggage space. Their response should have been contrite, swift and comprehensive.Heren gym T-shirt grijs bodybuilding trainingsshirt training ijzeren tanks proviron kopen tbol strikt als een pre-workout.
Even if human error was a factor in both crashes, such major catastrophic events involving the same airplane required the company to demonstrate that it was
doing everything possible to investigate and protect passengers. Instead, it denied anything was wrong and let public opinion take control.
PR Fail #2: Facebook – Here We Go Again
After a very rough 2016 presidential election where the social media giant was accused of enabling the spread of misinformation from fake accounts, it was revealed the site sold user data to Cambridge Analytica and other outside groups for political research. This led the company being ranked as the “least
trusted” tech company, according to a Fortune poll.
In 2019, even after Google and Twitter issued strict guidelines limiting political advertising, Facebook, as of this blog post, was still undecided about what it would do about the ads.
Its first public comments stated the site would do nothing in fairness to free speech, regardless of how false the claims were. Recently, a story leaked that Facebook might flag all ads as not fact-checked, which some pointed out would paint even well-cited ads with the same brush as those with fabrications.
Considering the hundreds of millions of dollars Facebook takes in from these and similar ads, it’s not surprising they are reluctant to push back, but the indecisiveness only ramps up the lack of integrity and untrustworthiness perception it has in the market.
PR Fail #3: College Admissions Scandal
Two famous TV actresses were implicated with at least 51 other parents in a scheme involving bribes and hired test-takers to help their children gain admission to prestigious colleges.
One would assume that the celebrities would have memorized and rehearsed a carefully worded script within 48 hours to perform before the news cameras. Instead, there was silence.
One of the actresses, Lori Laughlin, even signed autographs before a court appearance. The colleges involved in the scandal, namely Yale and UCLA,
were far more transparent about what they knew about the fraud committed by the parents’ hired conspirators and then revoked offers to the students involved,
which was a much better PR response to the crisis.
These institutions also have strong reputations that can withstand this tertiary involvement in such a scandal. I can assume the actresses’ legal teams urged them to remain silent. I would also bet their publicity teams had a crisis communications game plan ready, but they just weren’t allowed to execute it.
Regardless, in a society obsessed with celebrity, it seems like a missed opportunity by the actresses’ legal teams to sway the court of public opinion before the accused appeared in federal court.
PR Fail #4: IHOP Wearies the Market
In 2018, IHOP pretended to change its famous acronym to IHOb (for burgers), which, albeit quite intentionally, generated a news and social media storm. Depending on who you talk to, the stunt was either ill-advised because it was just a trick, or quite successful because it got people talking about and buying the restaurant’s burgers and it gained 60,000 Twitter followers.
After such a big response, IHOP went back to the well in 2019 to launch a new line of burgers with a marketing campaign that referred to them as “pancakes.” Get it?
Well, it didn’t generate quite as much news or social media attention as the fake rebranding and it just further confused the market. While more of a marketing misstep than PR, it does show how important brand trust is, even with tongue-in-cheek marketing.
After the name-change stunt and follow-up, what are consumers going to believe? Will they even bother paying attention to from the pancake-restaurant chain?
PR Fail #5: Uber is Lost
The PR and reputational struggles of the ride-sharing service continued in 2019.
After hiring a new CEO and its first chief marketing officer, the CMO and chief operating officer resigned and Uber laid off 400 marketing employees. This is despite a $500 million rebranding and reputation management effort launched after news media coverage of its toxic culture and driver underpayments emerged in 2017.
Unsurprisingly, the company’s stock price plummeted after its IPO in May 2019, although not solely related to its PR struggles. Not helping the reputational renewal was a report the company released in December 2019 showing nearly 6,000 reports of sexual assaults involving rides in the U.S. in 2017 and 2018.
The only positive aspect of this horrific PR moment is that Uber released the report itself, demonstrating some degree of transparency. Its top competitor, Lyft, which has its own similar problems, has yet to release such a report.
Bottom line
There is plenty to be learned about crisis communications and reputation management in these incidents and others, namely the importance of responding quickly, being transparent and controlling the narrative.
There are plenty of experts on such matters here at Amendola and you can read their insights here and here. Better yet, give us a call and our media relations and crisis management team can help you design a plan and keep your stress levels down and reputation up if such an incident occurs involving your organization.
