Here’s an example of an About Us page for an online balloon retailer that misses its mark. The company owner wanted to connect with the readers by making his page feel personal. But his message falls flat as a marketing tool. “My love for balloons began when I was a child. From the time my father bought me my first balloon from a carnival clown, balloons have always symbolized joy. Throughout my life, balloons have been part of my happiest celebrations.”

A better way to begin this page might be: “Balloons Unlimited specializes in custom-colored balloons in a wide variety of shapes. We create memorable balloon arrangements to help you celebrate any occasion from birthdays to weddings.”

Always start an About Us page with the most important details. The top of the page should give the reader your strongest selling points. Example: “Widgets USA is the country’s largest distributor of high-end widgets. If you can’t find the right widget in our extensive online catalog, our on-site fabricators can make it for you.” These two sentences say a lot about the company:

o The company name

o What it sells

o The company’s relative size

o Its widgets are high end

o Its widgets are made in the U.S.

o It has custom fabrication capabilities

Even if readers spend just 30 seconds on this page, they will have learned a lot about why they should consider buying from this company.

Marketing content is a specialized type of writing. It requires the ability to identify and clearly describe key value points. Our editorial team is skilled at this type of writing. Give us a try on a project. You’ll enjoy working with us and you will like the results. Get started by calling 612-798-7269.

I wrote the following line 25 years ago when I started a company that sold publicity by story rather than charging by the hour: There’s something crosswise when the longer it takes someone to do a job, the more they make. My feelings haven’t changed.

If you are paying a PR firm by the hour to try to get you media coverage, consider testing us on a project. For 25 years we have spared our clients from worrying about what, if anything, they would get for their money. Heather Champine can explain our rate sheet. Her number is 612-798-7269. Our clients tell us we opened up a promotional channel they barely used. Some have been buying publicity by the story from us since we started in ‘88.

Nothing sells better than a good news story. Except maybe hundreds or even thousands of them.

To accurately compare the value of PR versus ads, you also need to factor in the intangibles. When you run a paid ad, your audiences know they are being sold to. Space is usually tight so you must use a minimum number of words, and hope they are powerful enough to be memorable and convincing.

But with a PR placement, you have a credible third party (the reporter, anchor, radio host) giving a longer, more in-depth explanation of your product’s benefits. Over the years, we’ve gotten really good at telling our clients’ stories by working with reporters and editors who ultimately include our clients’ company or product in their publications and shows.

We deliver TV, newspaper, radio and online media placements that give our clients bragging rights. They repost them on their websites; they send them to customers, prospects and investors; they display framed copies on their walls; and they use them to motivate and congratulate their employees.

With enough budget, you can pay to run an ad just about anywhere. On the other hand, with that same budget you can secure a lot more media placements. Not everyone can be featured in the news, it is tough to meet the media’s standards. That’s why we’re very proud of the fact that every week we have a dozen or more media placements running for our clients across the U.S. and Canada.

If you would like your company’s story or product to be part of the news, call me at 612-798-7269.

“If You Don’t Take Care of Your Customers, Someone Else Will” is a FREE customer empathy seminar provided by MarketSmart Academy on May 14, 8:00 AM to 10:00 AM. Jeri Meola dives deep into helping organizations understand their customers–a critical element in decision making, learning, and judgment to support their vision. Jeri Meola is the founder and President of SMS Research Advisors, and she has been a “Voice of Customer” advisor for visionary business leaders at some of America’s most admired companies, including 3M, Deluxe, Toro, Hearth and Home Technologies and C.H. Robinson.

To register for this FREE seminar, click this link. Register today, space is limited. You can also find more about Jeri on her LinkedIn page here.

Location:

Media Relations, Inc.
350 W. Burnsville Parkway, Suite 350
Burnsville, MN  55337

For small- and mid-sized business, it’s especially important to meet your customers where they are. And where they are is online searching for information and networking with people. They should also be networking with you! If you aren’t actively marketing your business on social media, hiring a pro is a smart option.

Our social media marketing business is growing rapidly because of all the benefits we can provide. These include:

Saving time: Most of our clients do not have enough time in the day to stay on top of social media campaigns. Designating someone to do this on their behalf improves efficiency.

Saving money: It’s more cost-effective for us to concentrate on our clients’ social media presence so that they don’t have to hire someone to take care of these tasks.

Competitive advantage: Our team of experts invests the time necessary to keep up with the constant platform changes. Our clients don’t want to risk making mistakes. Having an entire team of social media experts gives them a competitive advantage.

Engaging content: Our social media writers keep the fresh content flowing so that people have a reason to check our clients’ social media often.

Proactive response team: We are engaged with our clients’ audiences on a day-to-day basis, and are ready to respond as soon as they post or tweet a comment or question.

You get a marketing partner: We brainstorm and strategize with our clients frequently to ensure that all key components to their campaigns are addressed consistently and creatively. We help to keep our clients ahead of the curve.

If you want to know how to grow your company and grab more opportunities to invite online customers into your business, contact us at 612-798-7269.

A polished, professional social media writer should:

1. Have an above-average knowledge of spelling, grammar and punctuation. Here’s a classic example of how a single comma can change the meaning of a phrase:

Let’s eat grandma!

Let’s eat, grandma!

2. Have the ability to communicate linearly. A good writer’s thought pattern should flow logically from A to B to C, without taking a lot of confusing, head-scratching twists and turns. At no point should you feel as if the writer relied heavily on a thesaurus. Here’s a tongue-twisting before/after example:

Before: If you require details or further information, we would be happy to provide any additional facts you require by telephone.

After: Please call us if you have any questions.

3. Be accurate and keep your readers interested. Social media is global. There’s a lot of competition for your target audience’s time. Every word posted should add measurable value to your marketing campaign.

No value: This product may do wonders for your body.

Valuable: This product may increase your stamina.

Whoever writes your content should also have a strong marketing perspective. Using social media to stay current with friends is entirely different than using it to market your business. Your social media writer should understand how to strategically position your product within content that is relevant to your target audience.

Our experienced writers are available to help you. We offer a simple pay-per-post process plus social media tools such as editorial calendars to organize your social media presence and align it with the rest of your marketing efforts. We love what we do, and we’re very good at it. Get us started on your social media campaign by calling 612-798-7269.

If you could listen in on our phone conversations, you’d hear publicists co-producing news stories with writers and producers all over the US and Canada on the following:

• Father’s Day gift and activity ideas

• Wedding trends

• Summer vacation essentials and destination ideas

• Skin cancer awareness

It’s not too early for us to start pitching the media about products related to allergy awareness month.

Just as we know the media will do these stories each year, we also know how to get our clients included in their news stories. If your product is a fit for one of these story lines, we need to start working with you now. We must also account for the media’s lead times, which can range anywhere from two or three weeks to several months. We’re quickly running out of time to include you in the conversations with the media and co-producing of news stories.

The sooner we can get started, the more media coverage that’s available.

Call me at 612-798-7269 or send me an email at Heather@MediaRelations.com to get started. I’ll guide you through our processes so that you too can have your product mentioned in the news!

That’s what our MARKETSMART Academy is all about. We help sharpen participants’ thinking as it relates to marketing. Apply the concepts that you will learn when you prepare your ads, update your website, train your sales staff, or to improve any other marketing promotions you are planning.

We offer these classes at our Burnsville location but we can also bring them to your offices.

The following free seminars will be offered in April. Please click on the links below to register for a class.

Wednesday, April 17 from 8:00 – 10:00 a.m.

Writing Mediagenic Marketing Content, led by Heather Champine, VP of Media Production for Media Relations, Inc.

Forget what you may have learned in English or journalism class! Discover proven strategies for writing persuasive marketing content that will support your product promotions.

Thursday, April 25 from 8:00 – 10:00 a.m.

Crafting a Standout Social Media Strategy, presented by Jason Kocina, President of Checkerboard Strategic Web Development.

Social media plays a large role in content syndication, and it is growing faster than any promotional channel ever has. The social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and YouTube are becoming benchmarks in marketing efforts much like websites and email have in the past.

Tuesday, May 14 from 8:00 – 9:30 a.m.

If You Don’t Take Care of Your Customers, Someone Else Will, conducted by Jeri Meola, founder and President of SMS Research Advisors.

Jeri will work with the audience to see how empathy can drive change and growth. She dives deep into helping organizations understand their customers–a critical element in decision making, learning, and judgment to support their vision.

These seminars are offered FREE of charge.

Join us for our next free MARKETSMART seminar. Click here to register today as space is limited. Or call Cynde at 612-798-7218 to schedule training for your marketing team.

Spoiler alert. Don’t read further until you watch the video. If you don’t watch it, you won’t get the full effect of my message.

Almost every CEO in my group got the number of passes right, but only one out of the 12 saw the gorilla. We were dumbfounded. It seemed impossible.

Focusing too intently on getting your product mentioned by major media, such as The Dr. Oz Show or the Wall Street Journal, can obscure other media opportunities. Opportunities that collectively have even more impact. Yes, even more than Dr. Oz.

Let’s keep picking on Dr. Oz. Imagine him as an orange growing on a tree within a large orange grove. Now consider what would happen if that orange grew to be 200 pounds. Imagine the attention it would get. Tourists would flock to the grove to see such a monstrosity. A cottage industry would likely sprout up around the tree. Can’t you just see it? Booths surrounding the tree with vendors hawking t-shirts, postcards and big giant stuffed oranges.

Meanwhile, all but unnoticed by the gawking tourists, pickers are carting away tons of regularly sized oranges.

For some reason, marketers get all googly-eyed over the notion of getting national media coverage, media they will likely never enjoy. At the same time they ignore hundreds, even thousands, of easily obtained media stories whose combined audience size would dwarf shows like The Dr. Oz Show. It’s like staring at a 200 lb orange you will never taste while the rest of the orchard rots. Not too bright.

Dr. Oz’s 3.5 million audience size is paltry in the scope of the number of media impressions our company delivers. It’s common for our publicists to arrange more than 3.5 million impressions in a single day. We’d go belly up if we only pinned our hopes on nationals.

Does that mean we don’t try for major media? Nope. And we get our share. What it means is we try for ALL media coverage. Our goal is to help companies tell their stories, not risk making them a best-kept secret. We’re here to spread the word.

Admittedly, Dr. Oz has cachet. But so do local media personalities. Everyone remembers Walter Cronkite, but they can also rattle off a list of past hometown media celebrities. Being from Minnesota, mine were Dave Moore on TV, Boone and Erickson on the radio, and Dick Youngblood in print. Who were yours? Who are they today? Should they be talking about your company and your products? Of course they should.

Here’s the gem that gets overshadowed: collectively, local media stories appearing all over the country are national media coverage. That means even if your product was never mentioned by the “national media,” it could absolutely achieve media coverage nationally.

Straight and to the point: your chances of getting covered by the national media are slim, but your chances of getting local media nationally are excellent.

Now, get on the phone and call us. Put our publicists to work arranging media coverage nationally for your company and its products – city by city, region by region – until you have covered the nation. Your story needs to be told.

By arranging local media interviews, we can get your story in front of 3.5 million people (the same size audience as The Dr. Oz Show) for about $15,000. No kidding. Call Heather Champine, our VP of media production, and she will explain how. Her number is 612-798-7269.

P.S.

I run my letters by our publicists to get their feedback before I send them out. They liked the letter but said I missed a point. They called it the “ripple effect.” That’s when we get a local story, the nation media notices it, and they pick it up and run with it. Peggy Davies, a senior publicist here, pointed out that it happened for her last week. She arranged a local market story in Minneapolis for one of our clients, Shot Beer. The story was picked up nationally by Yahoo.com, Sports Yahoo.com and several national blogs. Here’s a link to the story if you would like to see it.

Think about it: There are an estimated 721 million active Facebook users, with 69 billion friendships among them. Assuming that most Facebook users have 100-200 friends on the site, if just one of those people makes a positive comment about your product on their Facebook page, that can be huge!

To get started using social media, ask yourself these key questions.

• Why do you need social media marketing? This is something that deserves more than just a few minutes of attention. Today people find information either by using a search engine such as Google or Bing, or from their friends. If you are not involved with word-of-mouth on the Internet, you may be missing out on a huge chunk of sales. Your customers and prospects will be able to tell if you’re not 100 percent committed. Active, vibrant social media communication requires thoughtful planning and follow-through.

• How does social media fit into your business model? While it’s unique in that it is a platform for engaging and interacting with your target audience, it’s also an extension of your other marketing channels. Social media can be an ideal way to get in front of your audience at a time they are open to listening to you. It works best for companies when they include it in as many of their promotional activities as possible.

• How will you handle engagement? Social media gives a personal face to your business. When you create a Facebook fan page, or maintain a blog that allows comments, you’ve got to be ready to answer questions, start meaningful discussions and make use of the feedback. Who will do that? Will you have rules of engagement guidelines in place? When a question or comment goes unanswered for days at a time, it makes a company seem unresponsive to its customers. Your social media presence should showcase your customer service excellence.

Our writing staff creates blogs, tweets and Facebook posts for many different types of businesses. We know that our clients’ audiences – their customers and prospects – love to share useful or interesting tidbits of information. So we strive to create a blend of content topics that makes people want to come back. We also listen and engage with our clients’ readers. We direct them to the websites where they can learn more about the product or service. We become an integral part of our clients’ marketing team.

Let’s talk about how we can help you maintain a robust content chain that keeps your audience engaged and involved with your company.