Press

Real estate PR is inherently about storytelling.

Real estate impacts people’s lives, shapes their interactions and colors their experiences. For us it’s a penchant for emphasizing quality news and content. For clients, it’s knowing what will draw the audiences’ attention in the best way to showcase their corporate announcement, new development, model or property.

A development client, for example, might focus on local coverage during the initial entitlement process, and then pivot to telling a national story during leasing to attract residents or retailers.

Here’s what we do:

• Develop smart content that is useful to a clients’ key audiences.
• Identify the best news hooks for media pitching and content development.
• Understand how the media operates allows us to and get inside how a reporter thinks.
• Focus on a variety of audiences through both a business-to-consumer or business-to-business lens.
• Make social media an integral part of the PR program.

Social media has presented builders, developers and investors with a new platform to directly reach and interact with audiences in ways traditional media platforms can’t. Clients can receive real-time audience feedback, and push content directly to personal devices.

Word of mouth is still a very powerful tool, especially in real estate, but just as everything else, this too is now happening online. Real estate marketing needs to include a digital strategy that incorporates brand, web design, search marketing and online lead generation.

The use of video for PR and marketing, especially video in digital distribution channels, has grown rapidly in recent years. To be precise, 82 percent of B2C marketers and 79 percent of B2B marketers now include video in their content marketing programs, according to the Content Marketing Institute. Yet far fewer are pleased with marketing outcomes video produces. Only 59 percent of B2C marketers and 62 percent of B2C marketers rate videos as an effective content marketing tactic.

A website-centric view accounts for the shortfall in satisfaction, argues Greg Jarboe, president and co-founder of the content marketing agency SEO-PR. They typically obtain their metrics from Google Analytics or a few other similar web analytics services rather than YouTube Analytics. Those web analytics indicate that social media videos — even videos on YouTube, the grand-daddy of video sites — generate only small number of visitors and conversions.

That’s because Google Analytics only tracks people who’ve clicked on a link in a video’s description or an associated website card, Jarboe explains in a Tubular Insights blog post. It doesn’t track people who visit your YouTube channel then visit your website 30 to 90 days later.

“So, go ahead, try explaining that to your executives or clients,” he says. “And, then try to justify why they should give you a bigger share of the marketing budget to release video content frequently on a recurring schedule and maintain activity on their YouTube channel despite the fact that it will be hard to track the direct impact of these efforts on website traffic, leads, or sales. This is the elephant in the room.”

Moving Beyond Video Views
An over-reliance on view counts accounts for much of the uncertainty and inaccuracy about the effectiveness of video marketing. Views are probably the most popular video metric. However, counting views presents substantial disadvantages. The metric lacks a quantifiable value as well as a standard definition. View count doesn’t tell you about your audience demographics, and doesn’t indicate if viewers like your videos. Many view counts also don’t account for the length of viewing time.

These are some metrics video experts recommend to improve video marketing measurement.

Watch time is how long viewers watch the video. Studies show a consistent relationship between how long a PR, marketing or education video ad is viewed and increases in brand awareness and consideration, Jarboe says in the linkdex blog.

Viewers. If viewers provide email addresses, you can track what videos they watch, says Kristen Craft of Wistia in her article for Harvard Business Review. You can segment those viewers and invite them to view other content that matches their interests. Knowing what they watch provides information that sales can use to target pitches.

Average engagement measures the proportion of the video that viewers watch on average. Ideally, of course, viewers watch the entire video. Analytics can show sections of videos that viewers are rewatching, indicating the type of material viewers prefer. Points at which viewers often stop viewing can indicate weak points in the video that can be improved.

Play rate is the percentage of people who click on the video divided by the total number of the visitors to the web page where the video resides. A low play rate means you might need to re-evaluate the video’s title, description, thumbnail graphic, or the video’s position on the page. Play rates exceeding 50 percent are considered successful.

Action completions. By watching the number of visitors who complete calls to action, you can see what videos are succeeding. By A/B testing action completions for various website page locations or for promotional copy, you can test what page locations or copy work best. Caution: you can only A/B test one variable at a time.

Consumer attitudes. Website surveys can provide valuable information about consumers’ attitudes and behaviors. Google Consumer Surveys allow website managers to ask visitors four default questions for free and more for additional costs, Jarboe notes.

Subscribers. More subscribers to a YouTube channel naturally lead to more viewers and more total minutes watched, says Dan Nedelko, founder of HoneySpot Marketing, in a blog post for Vidyard. When a viewer subscribes to your channel, they receive automatic updates when you upload videos, and subscribers tend to watch videos longer.

Comments and social shares. Comments and social shares mean you’re creating the right content. The sharer’s credibility spreads to you, and extensive commenting can lead to an ad hoc community centered on your site.

Bottom Line: Although video can be a powerful marketing and public relation strategy, many marketers are unsatisfied or unsure of its effectiveness. Video views, the prevailing metric, are a vanity metric that doesn’t indicate if your videos are effectively promoting your company. Instead, marketers suggest tracking more telling metrics to improve video marketing strategies.

At a meeting of the Council of PR Firms, keynote speaker Marc Pritchard, P&G’s Chief Brand Officer and the man responsible for spending more marketing dollars than any human on earth, called public relations “the most authentic form of marketing.”

PR can be a potential difference maker in marketing.

There’s often a gap between controlled marketing messages and the reality of consumer or client experience. That’s precisely why going against the grain can differentiate.

But, Pritchard’s comment went to the heart of what a great PR campaign should be.

With PR and word-of-mouth, the authenticity gap is more unanticipated, and the results can be far more detrimental to brand reputation. Here, we’re dealing with editorial and social media, rather than paid and controlled messages.

We’re talking about depth of narrative, and we’re trading control for credibility.

The truth gap is always there. But when it’s too wide, and when it breaches a fundamental level of trust, the damage to credibility and reputation can be incalculable.

That is the best argument for a PR program to be based on a brand essence or a business’s fundamental truth. Only then can we live up to Pritchard’s billing as the most authentic form of marketing.

PR and marketing both share an important goal. They both aim to build awareness for a brand and improve that company’s reputation. Both PR and marketing are essential components in amplifying and relaying critical business messages. The difference is that while one is all about selling, the other is about creating and maintaining an image in a marketplace.

An integrated marketing and PR approach can make both practices far more efficient and effective. Here, we’ll be looking at just five reasons why companies may consider integrating their PR and marketing strategies to boost their online results.

1. Integration Leads to more Creativity
It’s the job of a PR professional to predict and understand the latest trends in a range of different industries. This means that when marketing experts work with PR professionals, they have a unique opportunity to get ahead of the curve with new and exciting campaigns. On the other side of the coin, marketing experts can also provide PR teams with insights into the results of marketing campaigns, and critical analytics.

2. Amplify Promotional Efforts
Marketing comes in many different shapes and sizes. It can involve emailing prospects with newsletters, writing content and publishing it on a blog, or even connecting with customers over social media. While all of these things come with their own promotional activities, PR can act as an additional vehicle to help companies reach their promotional goals. The right combination of content marketing and PR strategies can help to take content to the next level and ensure that marketing campaigns reach the broadest audience possible.

3. Improve Brand Consistency
Creating a successful brand in today’s cramped and cluttered marketplace is all about establishing a powerful identity for a company and maintaining that same consistent image across multiple platforms. Combining PR and marketing into one practice helps to ensure that all of the messages a company puts out into the digital and offline spheres share the same tone of voice and image. In fact, companies can even create a cohesive manifesto for their teams to use whenever they’re publishing a new press release or piece of content.

4. Better SEO and Rankings
In a world where coming first on the google search results is crucial to getting ahead of your competitors, it’s important to think about how you can optimize your SEO results. Many marketers embed keywords into their content and website creations to help boost SEO, but press releases are also distributed around the web, offering backlink opportunities that can also assist with SEO.

When PR activities and marketing efforts combine, it’s much easier to get better results from search campaigns. Press companies can even integrate keywords into their own reports and press releases with the help of a marketing team.

Finally, sometimes in marketing, it’s hard to get ahead of the competition when the business in question doesn’t already have a great deal of credibility in their chosen niche. For organisations that are just getting into the marketplace, it can be important to springboard off the popularity of another entity in their sector.

PR experts can work with media outlets and influencers to build relationships that support a company’s credibility as it builds its marketing prowess.

Rebrands are almost always tricky, but they can pay big PR dividends. (Just ask IHOB!) Seriously, that was a publicity stunt, but this week, no less than three companies officially unveiled new names. Despite heavy news competition, they all grabbed public attention. The undisputed champ, if you measure by quality and quantity of positive media coverage, is Dunkin’ Donuts. Yesterday the chain announced with great fanfare that it was officially dropping “Donuts” from its name. Media and social coverage even referred to a (barely existing) backlash, which only made the news more shareable.

The Dunkin’ move was a win because it’s not really a stretch, but the coverage was a nice visibility boost. There’s a legitimate business reason for the change; for starters, the company sells more beverages than anything else. But “Dunkin” has been used in DD marketing for years, and it’s already a nickname among regular customers. And as smart marketers know, an affectionate nickname is branding gold.

A brand nickname is like a viral video. You may want it badly, but it can’t be forced. It grows out of a personal relationship or iconic status, and that’s a rare gift. Coca-Cola has not been shy about using “Coke” in its marketing. Harley-Davidson even tried to trademark the classic “Hog” moniker, although it was ruled too generic to be done. A few years General Motors found out in a hurry that it shouldn’t mess with “Chevy” after its effort to legislate the use of the official “Chevrolet” name ran into a brick wall of customer resistance.

Consider those nicknames that have backfired. Pizza Hut tried to adopt just “the Hut” but consumers turned it down cold. It was reminiscent of the late RadioShack’s short-lived nom de cool, “the Shack,” which flopped badly. In both cases, the corporation was trying to dictate the change, rather than responding to something that happened organically.

Dunkin’ Donuts clearly knew what it had in the Dunkin’ sobriquet, but the brand did the smart thing in hyping the announcement and tying it to a menu expansion for the future.

For Weight Watchers, which also rebranded this week, the challenge is heftier. It unveiled a new identity as WW, supported by the tagline “Wellness That Works.” In a media tour by photogenic CEO Mindy Grossman, the company explained the move as a rejection of the short-term “diet” mentality and embrace of long-term wellness and healthy lifestyles.

The rebrand drew a harsh reaction from some dietitians and body-positive advocates. Critics accused WW of hiding behind the wellness movement to push the same old diet messages, of being “diet culture in disguise.” I don’t agree. WW has been trying to lose the “weight” since I worked with the brand two decades ago, and with good reason. The vocabulary of “dieting” is outdated, and WW is probably more geared to living and eating in the real world than its stunt diet competitors. The problem is that as a term and a product category, “wellness” carries its own baggage. But Weight Watchers needs to move well beyond its church basement origins and I think the change will be a healthy one.

The most awkward renaming of late was one that most people missed. At an advertising conference yesterday AT&T announced that its AppNexus ad-tech unit will be rebranded as … wait for it — Xandr. In my view, it’s an awkward name that violates two unwritten rules of branding. First, the pronunciation isn’t intuitive – it’s meant to be “Zander” but could be pronounced “X-ander” or even “Ten-and R.” It was explained as a nod to Alexander Graham Bell, but you wouldn’t know that without being told. Yet for a B2B brand the stakes are lower, and advertising people are accustomed to pretentious names, so they may not be bothered by the confusion.

There will always be those who throw stones at a new name, and the name still matters. But the most important thing about executing a rebrand is to maximize the PR value of the investment. A new name that’s not tied to forward-looking news is wasted. For these announcements, each communicated the rebranding decision by tying it to business growth or changes, customer needs, and innovations for the future. That’s how you add meaning to a name change and real depth to a brand story.

(By Dorothy Cresnshaw, Crenshaw Communications)