by Linda Healan | Oct 31, 2018 | Blog
Oftentimes public relations professionals think of content calendars as a tool for marketing communications programs. Having an internal editorial calendar is absolutely important for any content program. Since an integrated public relations campaign has evolved from just media relations, PR pros should also consider a content calendar as part of their overall strategic PR plan.
Knowing your audience(s) is one of the primary tenants of public relations, and the purpose of any good content is to engage, educate and encourage action. Therefore, it is necessary for us to identify those people who really are influential and approach them through high-quality content rather than corporate or product blurbs.
It is also essential to make sure that a content calendar is developed based on your overall marketing goals. What do you want to accomplish this year? What new products will be announced? Are you a start-up just entering the market or are you positioning for an IPO, other investments or hoping for an exit strategy? Positioning your executives as subject matter experts and/or thought leaders is always a good strategy in any PR Plan.
So, what should be incorporated into a public relations content calendar to reach appropriate audiences and support marketing objectives?
Events
Events are one of the best opportunities to make your public relations strategy successful, whether it is through external trade shows such as HIMSS or other health/medical conferences or internal events such as webinars and user groups. Listing upcoming events in your content calendar allows you to develop content that strategically targets potential buyers as well as current customers, and position executives and thought leaders, all based on the timeline for the events. You can tie press releases and customer case studies to events, announce executive speakers or even blog about your giveaways at a trade show.
Press Releases
A well accepted strategy in PR is to average one press release every month. This allows you to keep your name and messaging top of mind and fresh with reporters. Scheduling your press releases in advance of industry events and around product launches helps your PR team coordinate with your marketing team to make sure the news is ready to be disseminated at the right time.
Articles/Case Studies
Thought leadership articles and case studies are excellent tools in the arsenal of any PR professional to demonstrate your knowledge and experience. Planning to develop these types of articles in your content calendar and then pitching for placement in key media outlets is the kind of valuable coverage many organizations desire. Compare the articles you plan to develop to the next category editorial opportunity calendars and you’ve got a head start on content that can be published.
Editorial Opportunity Calendars
Years ago, editorial opportunity calendars were the bread and butter in any PR campaign. With the move towards online media, many publications no longer publish or adhere to editorial calendars. But some still do and researching those calendars and adding key opportunities to your PR content calendar allows you to develop content in a timely basis to pitch to those media outlets. Make sure, however, that you build in lead times into your calendar. Another benefit to editorial calendars is they give you an idea of what topics the media is interested in covering and can help you develop a list of content ideas for the year.
Other categories that can be included in an integrated PR content calendar are blogs, customer newsletters and social media outreach. There are plenty of free tools on the web that you can use to develop a content calendar.
In the end, it all works together. Having a calendar of events, press releases and editorial opportunities allows a public relations professional to strategically plan to develop content that meets deadlines, achieves marketing goals and engages, educates and encourages action from your key audiences.
by Ken Terry | Oct 24, 2018 | Blog
One of the trickiest jobs of a PR professional consists of guiding corporate executives to the proper mix of marketing and thought leadership in various types of writing.
The easy part, relatively speaking, is persuading them that if they insist on promoting their product directly in a bylined article, it won’t be published. In case they have any doubts, you can just suggest that they take a look at the publication online and see if any of its articles are marketing-oriented.
On the other hand, by its nature a case study or a press release is strictly promotional. Readers expect that the story will focus on a product or a business deal and that it will be structured to make the company and the product look as good as possible.
But the boundaries are much more porous when it comes to white papers, sometimes known as position papers. Over the years, I’ve worked for clients who have had many different ideas about what such papers should be.
Ultimately, of course, they all wanted to sell their products. But only some executives grasp the concept of a truly effective white paper: It should draw in readers with a point of view about an industry trend and promote the company’s product indirectly by showing the need for it.
The rest want me to blatantly list the advantages of their product somewhere in the paper. To them, it’s just another form of advertising.
I don’t know whether a rigorous study has ever been done to measure the readership of these two kinds of papers, controlling for length and the demand for information on the topic. But I’d venture to guess that industry stakeholders would be more interested in a paper that gave them information they could use than in another piece of marketing collateral.
Interestingly, big companies are no more likely than small ones to embrace the concept of true thought leadership pieces. Because they’re big, they may commission longer papers that have space to discuss industry trends or government regulations at greater length. But in the end, they still usually want their product promoted, with hardly a fig leaf to cover it.
It was actually a small, rapidly growing firm that gave me the widest rein to show its thought leadership and vision. Over a period of several years, I wrote a dozen or more white papers that helped build the company’s reputation for expertise in population health management.
I always mentioned the need for health IT solutions that could help healthcare organizations manage population health. But for the most part, the papers focused on topics that people needed to know about, ranging from accountable care organizations (ACOs) and patient-centered medical homes to care coordination, patient engagement and post-discharge care. Eventually, the company pulled together my essays into a book that it used effectively as a sales tool.
White papers and byliners are not the only vehicles for thought leadership. Occasionally, if a company CEO is a recognized expert in a particular area, you might be able to get a major publication such as the Wall Street Journal or the Washington Post to publish a thought leadership piece by that person.
The easiest way to do this, by the way, is to pitch a letter to the editor. But it has to be on a hot topic, and you have to get it in very quickly.
One way to show a company executive the difference between marketing and thought leadership is to ask him or her where they see a bylined article or position paper being published. If they say they’d like to reach a broad universe, you advise them to think about thought leadership. If they insist on a marketing message, you tell them that it’s probably only going to be posted on their website or printed up for use by their salespeople.
A sophisticated PR professional or marketer knows that organizations need the right mix of these two kinds of communications to be successful. But thought leadership should be part of the package so that companies can impress potential clients with their deep knowledge and brilliant insights.
After reading a white paper or a bylined piece of this type, the potential buyer will probably not go running to your client. But when the organization’s salesperson comes calling, they’re likely to remember something about the company that caught their attention.
Like medicine and angling, PR is as much an art as a science. What it takes to help organizations succeed depends on how many tools you have in your toolkit, and how many different approaches you try. Eventually, if your executives trust you, they will land a fish or two.
by Heather Caouette | Oct 10, 2018 | Blog
The signs of autumn are all around us shorter days, pumpkin spice in abundance and 2019 budgets looming over our heads. Take this opportunity to revitalize your efforts. There are some evergreen items that are important to any successful marketing and public relations campaign, including pertinent social media, thought provoking content and strong media relations programs. However, what additional PR and marketing must-haves can you explore now to supplement these programs and make sure the budget is in place for them in the coming year?
As we say goodbye to summer, there are a few additional initiatives that are essential to giving your company an additional marketing edge:
- Website refresh: A bit like spring cleaning, updating your website is a chance to rejuvenate it, make sure the messaging projected is current along with any facts and figures that are used. Still citing 2008 statistics? Time to find new content. Verify links and calls to action, ensuring they are all still relevant. Criteria to enhance SEO benefits are always being updated, so this is a chance to check meta tags, keywords and make sure that your site adheres to Google’s Mobile First push, which uses the mobile version of a site’s content to rank pages from that site. Adding fresh content, including blogs and video, helps with your search ranking and keeps visitors returning for more.
- Webinars: Continue building thought leadership and trust with your target audiences through webinars. Increase brand awareness and get your messaging across while adding a human element to your company. People often view speakers as authorities on a given topic, so take this opportunity to show your knowledge. Webinars also are a chance to gather information on potential leads to supplement your sales funnel. These sessions can be recorded for future use and repurposed into whitepapers, eBooks, blogs or bylined article. Video bites can be captured and shared on your website and social media.
- Customer testimonials: A recent study found that 86 percent of respondents felt online reviews were extremely, very or moderately important before making a purchasing decision. No matter how good you are, it carries more weight if someone else says it. Whether via text or video, having the people that use your product discuss how it helps them humanizes your company, lends credibility and illustrates the power of your solutions. These “reports from the field” give media and sales prospects narratives about how a solution is applied in a real-world situation and serve as tools for your sales team, along with fresh content for your website, lead generation and social media efforts.
These three tactics each have value on their own, work well together and will enhance an established public relations program or kick-start a new one. Better yet, there is no “one size fits all” approach to any of the above programs, so they can be tailored to your comfort level. Start at one level and scale up once you see results. Use your 2019 budget to employ tactics that will establish brand loyalty.
by Jenna Warner | Oct 3, 2018 | Blog
On this blog we often talk about how to use PR and marketing to help build the brand and drive sales for healthcare and healthcare IT (HIT) products. Most of the time the activities we discuss require some significant effort. But there’s an online event coming up next week that can actually pay big dividends with considerably less of an investment on your part: National Healthcare IT Week. Here’s the skinny”
Who: Thought leaders, Health IT companies and future Healthcare IT entrepreneurs
What: National Healthcare IT Week #NHITweek
When: October 8th – October 12th
Where: Online and locally
Why: It’s easy, relevant, it’s a great cause and great for building trust as a brand
Founded by HIMSS and the Institute for e-Policy, U.S. National Health IT Week (NHIT Week) is a nationwide awareness week focused on catalyzing actionable change within the U.S. health system through the application of information and technology. The week-long event is celebrated through partner-driven, national and local events along with online conversations through social media. It’s easy to get involved, so what’s the holdup?
Social media is often misunderstood as an unnecessary evil, especially in healthcare, but it is an amazing tool that allows you to reach your audience in a way that was never possible before. While developing and maintaining an online community does take time and resources, events like this allow users to reap some of the benefits quickly.
Even if you don’t have an internal social media coordinator or an amazing agency managing your online presence, you can still participate in National Healthcare IT Week and other similar events. Here are six reasons to jump on board if you haven’t already.
- Engage with like-minded people and companies. These types of events create a community around the cause. By finding like-minded people you may be able to make beneficial connections that wouldn’t be possible otherwise.
- Gain a better understanding of the conversation. Conversations during these events come from a variety of perspectives. It’s common to get stuck viewing the world with tunnel vision by reviewing the same new sites, having favorite writers and viewpoints.
- Find new influencers. Participating in events like this including tweet chats are a great way to quickly find people with similar ideals with your company. You might find people experiencing problems you can solve.
- Gain trust with your target market. Trust is one of the most important aspects of the customer experience. These events offer a condensed time-frame that allows you to be a part of the conversation. It’s a great opportunity to show other users that your company actually wants to help. Humanize your brand and spread awareness for the cause.
- Stay top of mind. Your competitors are likely participating in these events. Stay top of mind with your prospects and target market. Bonus: you will be top of mind with good sentiment.
- Take advantage of scalability. These events allow your organization to really adjust your involvement based on your resources. Participate in every aspect or do what you can with the time you and your team have available.
Here’s how you can get involved:
- Become a partner
- Share on social media
- Share your story
- Create or participate in an event locally
Be sure to let us know how you participate in the comments below too!
by Jodi Amendola | Sep 26, 2018 | Blog
Social media is often misunderstood as an unnecessary evil, especially in healthcare, but it is an amazing tool that allows you to reach your audience in a way that was never possible before. While developing and maintaining an online community does take time and resources, events like this allow users to reap some of the benefits quickly.
Even if you don’t have an internal social media coordinator or an amazing agency managing your online presence, you can still participate in National Healthcare IT Week and other similar events. Here are six reasons to jump on board if you haven’t already.
- Engage with like-minded people and companies. These types of events create a community around the cause. By finding like-minded people you may be able to make beneficial connections that wouldn’t be possible otherwise.
- Gain a better understanding of the conversation. Conversations during these events come from a variety of perspectives. It’s common to get stuck viewing the world with tunnel vision by reviewing the same new sites, having favorite writers and viewpoints.
- Find new influencers. Participating in events like this including tweet chats are a great way to quickly find people with similar ideals with your company. You might find people experiencing problems you can solve.
- Gain trust with your target market. Trust is one of the most important aspects of the customer experience. These events offer a condensed time-frame that allows you to be a part of the conversation. It’s a great opportunity to show other users that your company actualThe question I hear most often from new clients and prospects is, “How do we know if PR program is working and how can we measure our success?”It’s not an easy question!To begin with, the goal of PR is to increase brand awareness and that’s not an easily quantifiable objective. It almost always comes from multiple touch points, plus calls for insight into different media outlets true audience numbers. That’s something my team works hard to get, as we’re not content to just take as a given the numbers these outlets report.
But here’s where the questions about PR success get scary for some in our profession. What customers and prospects really want to know is, how many leads will a PR program generate?
Honestly, this is only quantifiable if you put the work into web analytics and lead scoring, and tightly align your PR and marketing teams. We love our clients that go these extra lengths! Even better if you can align with a service such as Meltwater to measure and track placements and sentiment.
But that said, I have to tell you we hear from clients regularly that lead gen is a happy byproduct of PR, even when they aren’t taking those extra steps!
Here are just a few real examples of this PR magic:
- After securing a case study commitment from a hospital that used our client’s predictive analytics, we were able to place this customer success story in a healthcare publication that hospital CIOs regularly read. Sure enough, our client’s phone was soon ringing from a CIO who had read the story and said, “This is the tool we ought to be using.” Shortly after, this hospital launched a pilot of our client’s solution, and from there, became a full-fledged and highly quotable customer.
- We landed one of our clients a coveted spot on a leading publication’s symposium on the opioid crisis. After the panel discussion, a prospect approached our client, who shared with us, “We basically closed a $1 million deal right then and there.”
- One of our telehealth clients has raced up the Google rankings thanks to the many PR placements we’ve secured. This has been particularly meaningful for our client’s marketing department, which typically expends significant resources on keeping these rankings high. According to our client, PR has organically done what paid SEO never did: garner the top ranking in the client’s respective space. “And made our competition a distant spec in search ranking!” said our client.
- 10 minutes after a story we pitched to a trade publication ran the client received a qualified lead.
- Industry conference publications are a hard outlet to crack unless paying for a spot, but this past year, we managed to secure a number of write ups for Amendola clients, at no cost, in one of the most widely read publications in the lead up to HIMSS18. This resulted in prospects reaching out to our clients, including to one client whose CEO subsequently sent out a memo stating, “This is what PR and marketing does for us.”
Check out more examples of Amendola’s PR magic at our collection of customer success stories here. As you’ll see, PR does work in many ways, to achieve many different business goals.
Interesting in making some magic with us? Shoot me an email at jamendola@acmarketingpr.com. I’d love to hear from you!ly wants to help. Humanize your brand and spread awareness for the cause.
- Stay top of mind. Your competitors are likely participating in these events. Stay top of mind with your prospects and target market. Bonus: you will be top of mind with good sentiment.
- Take advantage of scalability. These events allow your organization to really adjust your involvement based on your resources. Participate in every aspect or do what you can with the time you and your team have available.
Here’s how you can get involved:
- Become a partner
- Share on social media
- Share your story
- Create or participate in an event locally
Be sure to let us know how you participate in the comments below too!
by Morgan Lewis | Sep 19, 2018 | Blog
Prior to joining Amendola Communications, I was a senior editor at Medical Economics, the largest monthly business management journal for primary care practices. Before that, I was a senior editor at a couple monthly city business publications as well as a daily newspaper reporter.
The journalistic experience has proven invaluable as a public relations writer because it gives me a deeper understanding of how to create the articles that editors want in their publications. As an editor, I would receive pitches daily from PR professionals. I admit that not every pitch received the time and attention that were clearly put into them, for various reasons which I will describe later.
My last day as a publication editor was in May 2011. Judging from my experience since then as an independent and agency PR writer, however, not much has changed, other than the growing importance of social media, which you can read more about from one of our experts here. In that light, here are five confessions from my time as an editor reviewing countless pitches from PR and marketing professionals that might help your company score an interview or article placement.
- If it wasn’t relevant to us, it was deleted. Explain clearly in the pitch how the potential article’s information would be relevant to readers. The editor may not agree, but at least it demonstrates that you took the time to learn about the publication instead of just sending out a mass email with the editor’s name at the top.
- Data/outcomes were always interesting. Quantifiable results jumped out in a pitch, especially when there was a “$” before those numbers. Business management publications, even in healthcare, love to publish articles about dollars earned or saved. Numbers were even more powerful if my publication was offered the first chance to share them with readers, which brings us to another attention grabber.
- Exclusivity was exciting and appreciated. Offering just one publication the first opportunity on a story can be difficult for a company because it limits or delays spreading the story to a wider audience. Exclusivity, however, is alluring to many publication editors, especially web or breaking news publications where being first is mission critical.
- Sharing research builds trust. This tip is somewhat unique to healthcare, but as a trade editor, I always appreciated when a company representative presented medical journal literature that supported the claims in the pitch. Medical journals, unlike marketing content, are objective and critical, which are two qualities journalists prize. Presenting literature in the pitch showed me that the company was trying to be as transparent as possible, which built trust and fostered a stronger relationship with the company representative.
- Offering a real customer was almost a sure thing. Interviewing or publishing an article by a senior executive didn’t intrigue me as an editor as much as speaking with a physician or other customer of the company’s solution. This rule especially held fast if the company was relatively new. Readers want to learn from other readers like them, which is part of the reason today why blogs and YouTube channels from ordinary people are so popular. Sharing the perspective of an actual customer also builds credibility, and again, earns trust with the editor and readers.
There are plenty more tips I could share to grab an editor’s attention, but another quality I appreciated in pitches was conciseness, so I’ll stop there. Fortunately for Amendola Communications, we have lots of former print and web journalists working here, and many others with extensive media-relations expertise. Give us a call or email and we can discuss how we can help spread the word about your company across all types of business and consumer print and digital media.
I promise that we will respond.
