Industry veteran Jodi Amendola, CEO of Amendola Communications, shares how digital media is changing the world of public relations. Watch this video to learn how the lines between earned and paid media are getting blurred.
For what seems ages, you’ve mulled over an issue that you’re now convinced deserves a wider platform for passionate debate. Perhaps it’s an alarm to sound that no one in your industry is articulately ringing or a bold challenge to wake up a complacent profession. Whatever the intent of your message, if you’re a credible messenger, it’s time to start writing your manifesto now for a January 2017 release. Likely what you have to say is too important not to get started ASAP on one of two strategies (more on both coming up) until you have something sweepingly profound to share with the world, at the start of the new year a highly symbolic, and thus, effective time to share your message.
What all good manifestos have in common
Stylistically, how you craft your message is up to you. Take a look at these three notable manifestos, each very different, from word count to the writer’s level of fame. Yet all are an industry clarion call from a credible industry insider the recipe for a message that gets passionately discussed and debated.
Here’s a second important ingredient for a message that gets noticed: the element of surprise, either in content or the messenger. Grove’s manifesto definitely caught a lot of people off guard who couldn’t fathom why a capitalist was warning about unfettered global capitalism. This shock generated the necessary attention on the point he really wanted debated: that massive job creation doesn’t happen during the invention phase of a product (directly contradicting an oft-repeated trope that the best economic prescription is to invest in technology innovation), but rather, the scaling out phase in which the now-invented product is ready for mass manufacturing. The latter, of course, has been taking place outside of America for some time now.
Dash’s message to Silicon Valley also shot a dart through some prevalent platitudes. An excerpt: “We could start to respect legal processes and the need for thoughtful engagement with policy makers but still be cavalier about the privacy and security of our users data. We could continue to invest in design and user experience but remain thoughtless about the emotional and psychological impacts of the experiences we create. We could continue to bemoan the shortcomings of legacy industries while exacerbating issues like income inequality or social inequity.”
Honest question: are you prepared to similarly hold up to examination and directly contradict some commonly held gospels in your own industry? If so, read on to learn how to get started.
Two writing approaches to a manifesto that mesmerizes
There are a couple of paths you can take to execute this important project, both aimed at getting a compelling and effectively structured message out by early next year. One is to conceptualize and outline the entire piece now and then begin the research and writing work on it. Or you can take a more incremental approach by writing a series of thought leadership articles that touch on various aspects of the manifesto you eventually want to write, and eventually pull them all together into a single piece.
The primary benefits of the second strategy are 1) you have multiple pieces you can distribute earlier than next year and 2) you can test the waters of the over-riding message of your eventual manifesto that is, assess the reception and feedback you receive from each point raised in your various thought leadership articles. Both important merits, but take care that you don’t end up writing your longer message based solely on which thought leadership articles garner the most attention. The end goal is a truly authentic and substantive piece. Not “click bait” with a short shelf life.
On that note, I’ll now deliver the single self-promotional message I have to deliver on this topic: unless you can (and have the time) to write any of the above very well, team up with a professional writer and a media consultant on this project. Benefits abound, from formulating your message more clearly, to delivering it with maximum impact.
Once written, what do you do with it?
Actually, a true clarion call should be a fairly evergreen piece. Initially you would want to secure coverage in one or more publications, get it out on social media, and so on. Obviously the higher your profile, the more likely Bloomberg, Computer World, Forbes, et al is going to feature your message on their home pages. But if you’ve got a killer message and a credible background, you’re going to get good coverage, regardless of how famous you are. (For example, I’d actually never heard of Dash until I read his essay on LinkedIn. I’ll certainly be following him now.)
Your essay can also follow you pretty much wherever you go, including your company website, as a hyperlink in your online bio and resume, and as part of the pitch materials given to reporters in advance of your various media interviews. It can even form the basis of a speech or presentation you become well known for.
Piqued to learn more about getting your manifesto off the ground? Get in touch with me at sjanard@acmarketingpr.com. I’m interested in hearing your proposed message…and if you’re a credible industry insider, chances are, so is your target audience.
It’s happened to me. It’s happened to my friends. Sooner or later it happens to just about everyone in marketing communications. Someone (usually someone who doesn’t have to execute it) decides, “Hey, let’s create a marketing newsletter!” and the next thing you know it’s your job to pull it together out of cotton candy and unicorns.
In the era of Facebook, Pinterest, Instagram and a million other social media applications, an email newsletter may seem quaint. “Someone needs to update their marketing playbook,” you think. But the reality is email newsletter are still highly effective. Like 95% effective if they are done right.
That’s the key, isn’t it? Because newsletters can be time-consuming, especially if content is tough to come by, they are generally handed off to the newbie, or the least experienced member of the team, or the person who just doesn’t know how to say no.
It doesn’t have to be as heinous of a chore as it may seem. In fact, it can be rather fun if you approach it the right way. Here are a few suggestions for not only taking the pain out of producing a newsletter but creating a finished product you’ll be proud to send to your customers and prospects.
Keep it simple
One of the most common newsletter mistakes is thinking you’re publishing the New York Times Sunday edition, i.e., stuffing it chock full of too many articles. Keep in mind who your readers are and how they’re consuming the content.
These days, many are opening the newsletter on their smartphones. With roughly 4-7 inches of screen space, too many stories too little readership. Offering two or three in-depth articles supplemented by shorter, easily consumable content (see the next section) will be easier on the eyes and will keep readers from becoming easily overwhelmed.
Keeping it simple solves another dilemma every marketer has experienced with a newsletter at one time or another: the first issue comes out on time to great huzzahs. The second issue comes out a couple of weeks late, and the third issue never sees the light of day.
Keeping the number of stories lower helps ensure there’s plenty of fodder for the next issue. Besides, it’s a lot easier to herd three cats, er, subject matter experts, at a time than six or eight. Especially if you’re “managing up.”
Mix in “snackable” content
Yes, you have some great thought leadership to share, and it can only be delivered in a longer article. After all, you want your audience to be informed.
Sometimes, though, people think they don’t have time to read a longer article. If you include fun, entertaining and/or informative content that can be consumed at a glance (like grabbing a handful of M&Ms you can chew and swallow quickly so no one knows you’re cheating on the diet) your readers will be more likely to open the newsletter to give those pieces a look.
While they’re there, they may decide they might have enough time to read one of the more in-depth pieces. Why not? The newsletter is already open anyway.
Fun facts, trivia or statistics related to your industry (even better your area of it) are always welcome. For example, if your business involves blood transfusions, you could share that the first recorded successful blood transfusion was in 1665. Or that nearly 21 million blood components are transfused each year in the U.S. Anything that will make your audience stop for a second and say “Hmmm.”
Quotes from famous people are another great source of snackable content. Even an infographic can work, as long as you keep it simple. Give readers something they can view quickly (and find interesting) and you’ll make opening your newsletter habit-forming.
Include graphics
Nothing says uninviting (or “hard to read”) like wall-to-wall type. Look for ways to include graphics as part of your stories.
Maybe it’s a photo of the author. Maybe it’s a relevant illustration or photo. Maybe it’s a cartoon if you have someone on staff who likes to draw. Find a way to include some graphics and you’ll improve the look. Just be sure they don’t also slow down how quickly the newsletter loads.
Focus on them, not you
Let’s face it ” we live in a very “me”-oriented society. The old acronym WIIFM “what’s in it for me? ” applies now more than ever. So if your newsletter is all about your product, your services and your company, it’s going to be of very little interest to anyone outside the company.
Think about what happens at a party or other gathering where people cobble together posters filled with pictures of the guest of honor. The first thing visitors do when they look at the photos is check to see if they are in them. (Ok, maybe it’s just me who does that.)
Keep the “Inside Baseball” stuff to a minimum unless this is an internal company newsletter. Offer up information that will help readers do their jobs better, or improve their relationships with a boss or co-workers, or enjoy their leisure time more. Anything that offers a promise of making the reader smarter or happier or better-prepared in some aspect of their lives.
That doesn’t mean you can’t include something about your company and its products or services now and then, especially if you have a truly exciting announcement. But be careful, because the more readers perceive the newsletter is about you instead of them, the less motivated they will be to read it. Or even open it.
Keep the language friendly but genuine
There is always a temptation, especially among those who are new to writing, to try to show off their college or post-graduate educations by creating deadly serious tomes that read like textbooks. Remember how much fun textbooks were to read?
If you want to get your audience engaged with your newsletter on a regular basis, write it more like a friend sharing great information with another friend. As a general rule, newsletter articles should be conversational, much like a blog post. In fact, this blog post by my colleague Michelle Noteboom offers some great tips that apply to newsletter articles as much as they do blogs. Not to mention an example of writing style.
At the same time, you also want to be genuine in your writing. If you’re ghost writing for a company executive who is known to be rather dry or formal in their day-to-day life, suddenly adopting a breezy attitude in a newsletter article will immediately scream FALSE and hurt the credibility of the article and the newsletter.
For more down-to-earth types, however, you can inject some fun. Find out what their hobbies and interests are and tie them in if you can. Keep sentences and paragraphs short again a must for those reading on smartphones. The easier the story is to read and comprehend, the more likely it is to make a lasting impression.
Not so bad
See? Being in charge of the newsletter isn’t so bad. And the more you do it, the easier it will get. Before you know it you’ll be the one doling out advice and shaking your head at every bad newsletter you get.
Have you ever been in charge of a newsletter? What has your experience been? Is there anything you would change about what I suggested? Or anything you would change in your approach for the next time?
Contributing a bylined article in a print or online healthcare publication is one of the best ways to up your PR/marketing game by building your organization’s reputation as a credible information source and bringing attention to your capabilities as a solutions provider.
Here’s what the research tells us:
In addition to its stellar performance against traditional marketing and advertising tactics, earned media bylines have the potential to enhance every facet of your current PR and marketing efforts.
Think of vendor-neutral, solutions-agnostic bylines as the stock base of a really great soup or stew. Home cooks and professional chefs use these flavorful stock compounds to enhance countless dishes. Similarly, contributed articles can refitted to enhance any number of PR and marketing vehicles, including social media and blog posts, white papers, and case studies. Positive coverage that earned contributions garner can also be a stepping stone to encouraging existing customers to participate in media interviews or as co-authors on future articles.
They can also serve as key collateral for your organization’s sales team. IGD Enterprise notes that 74% of technology influencers and decision-makers turn first to third-party content sites for information on vendors and solutions in order to develop RPFs or RFIs. A glossy reprint or simple PDF of a contributed article is a great for prospects seeking additional information and validation on your solutions and services.
Producing regular bylines will help you build lasting relationships with editors and the audience their publications reach. I helped a client develop an editorial calendar that included topics and targeted publications. After three or four placements, we found that we no longer had to solicit editors they were coming to us.
Whether you are penning listicles, high-level thought leader pieces, or granular articles in the style of long-form journalism, earned media contributions are proven, long-lived, and essential components in any PR/Marketing toolbox.
When healthcare and health IT organizations send out an RFP, they tend to think in terms of things they want targeted agencies to do. They tend to talk in terms of deliverables, e.g., write and distribute X number of press releases, perform media and analyst relations, secure speaking opportunities, write case studies and so forth.
While all of those capabilities are important, they’re hardly unique. Any halfway decent PR agency should be able to accomplish all of those tasks and more with some level of success on a regular basis. It’s actually one of the things that makes developing content for an agency so challenging.
To find the real differentiator you have to look much deeper. For example, if you look through the Amendola Communications website you can get a pretty good sense of our services. A quick survey will confirm that we can do all the things you need done to make your marketing program a success.
The real value, however, isn’t in what we do, or know how to do. It’s in what we know about healthcare and health IT in terms of its history, its evolution, the impact different decisions and regulations have had and continue to have on the organizations and people who work within it, and the interconnection between your organization’s messages and the bigger picture of the industry.
In other words, it’s the unique ability to present a message within a larger context that helps an organization differentiate itself. That context can only come from a PR agency that is deeply immersed in an industry as complex and nuanced as healthcare and health IT.
Broader perspective
Perhaps one of the greatest values a top PR agency can bring to clients is a broader perspective. Subject matter experts and marketing teams within a healthcare or health IT organization tend to develop tunnel vision about their products and/or services. They know the problem their solution is attempting to solve and how it solves it, and tend to view everything through that lens.
Savvy organizations will also look at competitors to see how they compare. Still, that view is limited to a narrow sliver of the entire healthcare/health IT industry.
Because of the nature of the business, PR agencies have a very different view of the market. Rather than being a mile wide and an inch deep in a subject area, agencies will tend to bring more of an inch deep/mile wide perspective. They will be aware not only of the issues at the center of what the client’s products/services offer, but other areas that impact it ” or it impacts “as well.
Example: population health management
The current buzz around population health management (PHM) helps illustrate the agency perspective. Even a casual walk through the aisles at HIMSS 2016 demonstrated how important PHM has become in the overall healthcare/health IT discussion. Ironic given that just a few years ago PHM was hardly in the mainstream of discussion.
Yet PHM isn’t just one thing. There are many different aspects to it, and carries different meanings to different people within healthcare organizations. When clinicians think of PHM they may think in terms of care gaps and how to reach specific populations, while finance may be more focused on the revenue opportunity (and cost to implement) and the C-suite may see it as a mechanism to transition into value-based care.
Each of these perspectives is valid from a particular point of view. If a health IT vendor gets too deep into the weeds in a specific area, it may make the job of selling its technology to these prospects more difficult.
A knowledgeable healthcare/health IT PR agency will understand the broader implications of the technology because it has had exposure to multiple areas and is already on top of other considerations that aren’t on the client’s radar. Its value, then, will be to make the client organization aware of these additional aspects and use them to tell the client’s story to the media and through content.
Cumulative knowledge
I know this idea certainly applies when I or one of the other writers here is developing content for clients. The typical process for developing a byline article, executive article, white paper, blog post, etc. is to review materials sent by the client, research what’s being said in the market generally, develop questions and set up a call with the client’s subject matter expert. Then we take all that information and create a compelling story.
In the process of writing the story, however, I will often find myself tapping into knowledge gained from working on another Amendola Communications client, past or present. Having already delved at least somewhat into the deep end of a particular topic, such as the crisis around chronic conditions and how best to manage them, I can add information that wasn’t part of the original call or client-supplied information review. This non-competitive, big-picture information delivers additional context that makes the story richer, and thus more valuable to the reader.
Fortunately, I don’t have to rely on just my own knowledge of the industry either. In an agency like Amendola Communications that is focused solely on healthcare and health IT clients, there is a tremendous store of institutional knowledge about a broad range of topics. As opposed to a general agency that may only have one or two people with healthcare knowledge.
A simple email asking if anyone here has a perspective on a particular topic will usually elicit an incredible wealth of information that beats anything you could find with a Google search. Especially since even that context often comes with additional context.
That doesn’t only apply to content, by the way. This same sort of cumulative, institutional knowledge is applied to media relations as well. Not just in sharing contacts, although that is certainly valuable, but also in how to approach a story pitch. One media relations expert’s knowledge of a particular aspect of predictive analytics, or telehealth, or some other hot topic can often guide another to a better way to present the story and demonstrate the reasons a media outlet’s readers or viewers will care about it.
It’s the expertise that counts
When you line their capabilities up side-by-side, most PR agencies will look the same. While who they know in the industry is helpful, it’s the agency’s overall domain knowledge that can really make the difference between a program that performs ok and one that exceeds expectations.
To gain the most value you want one that can connect the dots on their own and apply industry knowledge your organization may not possess internally to round out your story. That’s the hidden value the right healthcare/health IT PR agency can bring. Not just for ours, but in any industry.
Do you agree that domain knowledge in healthcare and health IT is critical? Have you ever worked with an agency that didn’t understand the industry? If so, what was the result? What aspects do you think are most important?
Having worked for a professional hospital CIO association for over six years, I’ve moderated and attended my fair share of health IT vendor webinars. I’ve seen the good, the bad, and the ugly. Webinars should not be taken lightly, and should ultimately provide educational insight to attendees and your business. Webinars can help establish you as an industry expert, attract new customers, and add value to your brand.
Here are seven tips to help boost your next webinar and key mistakes to avoid.
With the above in mind, here are a few other tips to ensure your next webinar is a winner: