Press

All Hotels Need a PR Plan

Whether a hotel is small, inexpensive, luxury, a resort, near a national park, or something else, PR should be a primary concern for any destination. For all types of hotels and whether or not a PR professional is in their budget, it’s still important to get the word out and keep getting it out.

In small communities near a significant tourist attraction, there are built-in approaches that can be shared on websites and social media. But the truth is, for all hotels one of the most important things to know is what about your hotel is special, unique, outstanding, or better than others in a similar price range in the area.

FIND WHAT’S UNIQUE
A honeymoon specialty resort in the Poconos might have a heart-shaped or champagne glass tub, a fireplace, and a round bed, and pictures of those should be on the website, but many other hotels in the area will also have those. Either look for or create something unique to your hotel, maybe horse riding lessons or putting that tub with sauna jets out on a private balcony overlooking particularly scenic views. It could also be a four-star Michelin rated restaurant on the premises. Whatever is special about your place should be key to all your advertisements and PR, setting you apart from the rest.

If you aren’t certain, then speak to your visitors, ask them what they loved about their stay, what they think would make it better, and ultimately, ask them to write a quick paragraph about your place. Offer them something special for doing so – maybe five free postcards or two-for-one coupons to a local bakery.

Do something special after they leave. Send a thank you or if they came celebrating an anniversary or birthday, make note of it in your calendar to send a card the next year to commemorate and offer something in celebration of that event. It might be an all-day lift ticket if you operate a ski resort, or send a picture of how beautiful nature is there during your off-season.

PR BENEFITS
PR is usually less expensive than ad campaigns, but they can also work together to amplify your efforts. For small hotels, using social media platforms is a good way to do some targeted advertising without spending a lot of money. Just make sure you get professional-grade photos for your efforts. If you don’t want to spend a lot, offer your guests the opportunity for a free night added to a paid two-night stay if they win a monthly photo contest of the area or something about the hotel they loved.

Talk to employees about extracurricular activities and share their stories with the local newspaper, then share those articles on social media right after it comes out as well as about a month later, and then maybe again six months later. People don’t see all the things listed on social media since only so many things appear on a news feed on the sites.

Small hotels may take advantage of opportunities to list travel-related sites to share their unique and special traits such as extreme customer service or maybe a breakfast buffet for all guests that features fresh blueberry items if the hotel is in blueberry country. Have free drop-off and pick-up service to a nearby amusement park or other activity.

IDEAS FOR A HOTEL PR CAMPAIGN

• Look at sites for other hotels near and far to see what works for them and get ideas, then make them applicable to your place.
• Share stories on social media about events in the community, local places to visit, annual festivals, even who the best local teachers are for skiing, swimming, snorkeling, and surfing. Tell about where the best place to find arrowheads, seashells, souvenirs trinkets, etc.
• Mention special services like a spa, driving range for golf, tennis lessons from a pro, or family style eating for guests.
• Always ask for them to write a brief review or to share what they liked best on their social media accounts.
• Word of mouth PR is one of the most effective ways to promote your business.

The Importance of PR: Give Them Something to Talk About

Public relations, or PR, is all about your restaurant’s image.

When it works, it is basically free advertising, and can provide exponential word-of-mouth impact. Its ultimate goal, media exposure, is especially powerful because it is seen as unbiased. The general public trusts the media or public figures to filter through restaurants and give honest feedback. If someone has heard about your restaurant through the media, and in a positive light, then you have won half of the battle for customers.

But how exactly do you get press coverage for your restaurant when you haven’t really got a lot to talk about? Sure, when you are opening your doors it’s relatively easy to get press, but for existing restaurants sometimes it’s hard to have the valuable ongoing press coverage, especially just when you need it—when times are slow.

Just as you should target ideal customers to be most effective, so you should target restaurant journalists and other members of the media. As with staff, customers and anyone else within the restaurant’s circle of contacts, you need to think “win-win.”

To do this, start small and work on building a relationship. Keep in mind that journalists are always on the lookout for new information and stories. Make it your job to keep them abreast of what is happening in the industry or community. Be consistent and regular in contacting them. Don’t send one communication about your restaurant and be done. And don’t just send press releases. Become a source for them, freely giving information, even when there isn’t a story in it for your restaurant. Your goodwill will be returned.

Restaurant journalists may be always looking for stories, but the fact that Aunt Ida thinks your seafood chowder is wonderful isn’t really going to pique their interest. You need an angle if you want to get media attention. What can you do?

• Become an expert. Once established as an expert, the media will come to you regularly for input on various topics. One of the best ways to acquire “expert” status is to write a cookbook, or a book about your experiences. This can also count for your staff, so if your chef is really outstanding or uses special techniques then leverage this in an article.

• Share real news. Whether it’s an expansion, an important new employee, or a new/special menu, journalists like real news. Make sure to send out a press release every time something truly new is happening with the restaurant.

• Be first or be unique. A new menu or dish, using a local supplier or a new cooking technique… anything that is likely to change the terrain is good fodder for news.

• Look for local angles. News that has a community hook will help you get valuable local exposure. Maybe your restaurant is catering an important event, or has helped the neighborhood Boy Scout troop start a new fundraising campaign. If it’s local news then talk about it to local and regional media.

• Show you are up on the latest trends. A new menu that taps into the hottest food craze could create interest. If it’s linked to something already in the news and getting exposure then ride on the wave of that news.

• Share human interest stories. Everybody loves inspirational stories. If you have helped someone overcome their problems, have a program for hard-to-employ staffers, meals, have an all-woman team or woman chef, or are helping tackle a community problem, talk about it.

It’s a good idea to prepare an electronic media kit for your restaurant. It contains a letter explaining why you are approaching the journalist, a press release about the restaurant and the following:
• Backgrounder with historical information on the restaurant and owner or chef;
• A fact sheet listing specific features, information, and details;
• Restaurant marketing messages such as the restaurant’s values;
• Service descriptions;
• Case studies and testimonials;
• Biographies and photos of the management team and key people in the organization, including quotes;
• Good-quality, high-resolution photos of the restaurant, food, drinks and more;
• Links to past press coverage;
• Sample menus; and
• Marketing collateral such as brochures and postcards about your restaurant.

Just as with you would with your customer base, target a “hit list” of journalists and communicate with them regularly. Review their coverage and audience and create a story that would interest their readers. Prepare a turnkey story, even producing photos, videos and quotes. Anything that will make their life easier will get you invaluable media coverage.

Keep a database of restaurant critics and journalists similar to your customer database. Note when they have been contacted and when they have spoken or written about your restaurant. The active ones often will become your “go to” people, journalists you should contact with exclusives or important information.

PR is an essential part of marketing. If you don’t have a restaurant PR agency or freelancer helping you, then someone in-house should be responsible for coordinating media contacts.

What Business People Should Know About PR

Public relations is hot. Businesses from tech startups to nonprofits have come to recognize the value of a strategic PR campaign executed by a talented team. But PR’s popularity has given rise to some misconceptions. Here’s what every business person, from marketers to CEOs, should know about public relations.

It can’t replace marketing

Occasionally a tech startup or small brand will tell us that the company has committed most or all of its marketing budget to public relations. That vote of confidence is great, but in most cases a PR campaign is a poor substitute for a marketing plan, and it’s not typically designed to drive demand. With some exceptions, public relations is best used to build visibility and shape reputation over time. It doesn’t compare to paid advertising when it comes to frequency of message, and it will never offer the type of control that paid content will. But a good PR program will support a brand marketing campaign in a variety of ways, like educating prospective customers and boosting a brand message.

But it’s a lot closer to marketing than it used to be

The social media explosion has greatly expanded the toolbox of tactics comprised in a PR campaign. Whereas PR used to be considered “below the line” within a marketing budget and was loosely (and inaccurately) defined as “coverage you don’t pay for” in contrast to paid advertising, there’s now a significant gray area between PR and marketing. What we call PR can include paid influencer marketing, content or inbound marketing, social content, and other varieties of paid creative services.

Today’s PR is specialized

Like other disciplines, public relations and grown and changed over the years. Most consultants or agencies operate individual profit centers that may be organized by sector, from food to fashion to financial services. There are also deep specialist expertise by PR function. Some individuals and agencies concentrate strictly on reputation management, litigation PR, or crisis management. Others are more publicity oriented, and still others are focused in that gray area between earned and paid media. Any business seeking PR services for the first time should be aware of both vertical and horizontal specialist models and the ways in which they may fit their needs.

It’s not a quick fix

Good PR takes time. For many companies the most visible manifestation of the work is the earned media placement — an article, interview, or segment that features their brand. But like any kind of marketing content, the brand stories are the culmination of weeks or even months of work. They’re typically preceded by category and brand research and a differentiated positioning to set up the story. Media messages and various materials are needed for an all-out media outreach. Most importantly, each contact is part of a plant to develop and spur momentum. They all work together.

It’s a two-way street

At its essence, PR is about telling a brand story, but a good team should also serve as a source of feedback, intelligence, and insight on what target audiences are thinking and saying. Business people who aren’t using PR tools and tactics to better understand customer, influencers, employees, or partners are probably not maximizing their investment. A top PR program should improve relationships with key audiences, but not by merely broadcasting through media. It can and should work in both directions.

Earned media is the beginning, not the end

Most companies still think of publicity, or earned media, as a successful outcome of a PR campaign, but the coverage is often the beginning. The way we consumer news and other content has changed drastically, so successful promotion of earned media is essential to success. A good PR team will urge clients to promote their coverage on social media, include it in sales presentations and proposals, share it with stakeholders in company communications, add it to the website press center, and merchandise it to get more media coverage, of course.

But PR is still about the story

The tools and platforms have changed and grown more sophisticated (and in some cases, data-driven), but the heart of a good PR program is the story. We have a wealth of ways to shape a brand narrative, from influencer videos to high-level opinion content. But what hasn’t changed is the importance of story and its power to grab someone’s attention, engage them, and influence their attitude or behavior.

Public Relations is an Integral Factor in Search Engine Optimization

As more businesses focus their dollars and energy on their SEO and online presence, the value of public relations for business has started to shift.

It used to be that PR was synonymous with stories in the newspapers or appearances on television or radio. Only those who read the paper, or saw the story on live television were influenced by the coverage.

Today, all of these PR activities have a nearly eternal, second life online, and these stories will be some of the first things potential customers see when they search for you on Google. News websites typically have a higher credibility level and ranking with search engines due to their status as a news organization and because of the number of views they attract. If businesses understand that referral traffic to their website can be influenced heavily by earned media, then investing time and energy in public relations is a no-brainer. Its the gift that keeps on giving!

If you don’t currently have a public relations strategy for your business and are spending money on Pay Per Click (PPC) campaigns and search engine optimization (SEO), you are probably spending too much money. By implementing a strong PR effort, your SEO efforts can become twice as effective and also have the interesting result of both increasing your ranking and decreasing how much you are spending on keywords.

Here are a few white hat strategies for SEO:

• Write relevant content for your business
• Caption images with full descriptions
• Use complete sentences in your writing
• Check your spelling and grammar
• Link to relevant content and references
• Use standards-compliant HTML
• Develop relevant page titles

We work for clients on SEO to maximize the impact of search and public relations.

Here are a few strategies we use to align efforts:

• Write and publish keyword optimized byline articles on industry related websites
• Support link building by securing guest blog posts on related sites
• Press release distribution through a wire service
• Create high-quality content and blog posts for our client’s websites

The bottom line is that if you have a digital agency working in one corner and a PR agency in another, you are missing out on huge opportunities to maximize your marketing spend. The SEO guru and the PR expert need to be able to communicate to align efforts and amplify the work that is being done for your business.

The potential that PR has on positively impacting a business’s search engine optimization can be threefold. First, it increases brand awareness. Second, PR placements can boost the number of website views you receive. Third, leads generated by earned media website referrals tend to be higher quality.

Public Relations and SEO are hand in glove strategies that work for both large and small businesses.

Public Relations Helps Drive Sales

A major goal for any business is to create profit by selling its product or service. A source of frustration for many business executives is the sheer amount of time and effort it can take to convert a potential sales lead into a buying customer. While sales and marketing teams are the ones usually in charge of creating conversions and thus driving sales, neglecting the role of PR activities in the sales process can be a missed opportunity for many businesses.

PR can be a powerful tool to jump start sales. It can be helpful in improving response times from potential leads as well as increasing the probability of a sale.

HERE ARE A FEW WAYS PR CAN DRIVE SALES FOR YOUR BUSINESS:

NETWORKING
It’s no surprise that marketing and PR are diving further and further into the digital world. Spending on digital ads are taking over more and more of the ad budget and sales tactics based on digital platforms are more popular than ever. That said, there is still room for the non-digital space and that’s where PR can swoop in.

PR can be a gateway to new opportunities as networking provides an avenue to show off our expertise and insights, thus building trust and credibility. With a flood of contacts and spectacular networking prowess, PR can open up doors for industry events, trade organizations, marketing partnerships, speaking opportunities and so on. These events and opportunities are an excellent way to generate leads that are more likely to be interested in your product or service.

CONTENT MARKETING ADVICE
‘Content’ has become a major buzzword in marketing. Content marketing is an indispensable and highly effective marketing tool that creates results. The whole idea of content marketing to generate leads, or more important drive sales, by creating unique, relevant and interesting content that makes the audience connect to your product or service.

A PR professionals everyday job to to create content by using their expertise to draft key messages to either the general public or a targeted audience. A PR agency is perfectly placed to provide advice and counsel on the types of content that are more likely to resonate with a specific audience, while at the same time creating a media buzz. Having the right message to the right audience can go a long way in increasing your sales and PR can help you get there.

ENHANCE CREDIBILITY
Most companies use PR as a way to build a positive reputation with the public by creating a relationship based on trust and credibility. PR is also a great tool for sustaining trust even when times get rough. Credibility and trust are very powerful and without it, it is unlikely sales continue growing. While enhancing credibility is a long-term and continuous function of PR, it is vital to the long-term growth of a company.

Over 200 Attend North Florida Green Chamber Launch

Local chapter of U.S. Green Chamber of Commerce officially in business

JACKSONVILLE, Fla.  – The North Florida Chapter of the U.S. Green Chamber of Commerce celebrated a very successful launch Thursday night at MOSH.

Over 200 attended the event officially heralding the North Florida Green Chamber of Commerce (NFGCC), a regional networking organization for all sizes of businesses and community organizations including non-profits that emphasize green and sustainable business practices.

“The night actually surpassed our expectations. The level of excitement and local commitment to sustainability was very gratifying. I think we have a great start and look forward to what’s ahead,” said NFGCC Executive Director Christina W. Kelcourse, Esq, CFP, CRPC. “And I want to thank MOSH for providing a perfect venue.”

After a stirring video on how protecting the environment and supporting sustainability is vital to the region, Michelle Thatcher, CEO and Co-Founder of the US Green Chamber of Commerce, gave the keynote address to a packed Planetarium.

“It was a remarkable turnout for a first event. It’s a testament to Christina’s (Kelcourse) vision for the local green chamber and the signals the community’s passion and willingness to protect the earth, its occupants, the economy, and future generations through education, networking and advocacy,” Thatcher said.

Speakers included Aaron Gottlieb, CEO and owner of Native Sun Natural Foods Market and Ryan Murphy, Director of Cultural Events, St. Johns County Board of County Commissioners, St. Augustine Amphitheatre and Ponte Vedra Concert Hall.

In addition to promoting the economic success of NFGCC members using environmental, socially responsible and sustainable practices, the North Florida chapter plans ongoing networking and educational events, job fairs and a mentoring program.

Member only benefits include a newsletter, access to the chapter’s Web page to promote company events and news, being listed in the local Green Market Place and on the chapter’s engaging consumer app. as well as sponsorship opportunities and discounts.

To learn more email contact@northfloridagreenchamber.org, call (904) 878-3474 or visit www.NorthFloridaGreenChamber.org.

The Media is Changing – Are You Changing, Too?

Anyone who interacts with the media knows that newsrooms are smaller than ever today, and reporters and editors are spread thin. Long gone are the days when reporters could turn in a story a day, or a few a week. Today, most are being asked for multiple stories each day and to produce content to feed their publications’ and personal social media channels.

Couple these pressures with the rise of “fake news” and the public’s questioning of the objectivity of media outlets, and it has never been harder to be in the media, or to be a media consumer.

With all of this in mind, Cision published its 2018 Global State of the Media Report, which provides some interesting insights into how reporters feel about changes facing the media. Let’s explore four of the most interesting takeaways.

Being accurate is more important than being first. Of the journalists who participated in Cision’s research, 75% said that it is more important to be 100% accurate in their reporting than it is to be first on a story. In the U.S., this number was slightly higher: 78%.

The speed of “news” appearing online is a challenge for traditional journalists and media outlets. The citizen journalist can produce content quickly due to limited or no review and vetting process — but the other side of the coin is that their information receives limited to no review and vetting. No one is checking these stories for balance, fairness or accuracy. For traditional journalists, this is an important differentiator. Traditional journalists pride themselves on their ability to be objective when presenting information.

Traditional media outlets are focused on maintaining high journalistic standards to foster and grow public trust and reliance on their outlets. Trust is the key element here. In a time when the public is becoming more skeptical about “news” reporting, having a focus on accuracy is paramount. In fact, of those surveyed, 71% said they felt the public has lost trust in media outlets.

Reporters are concerned about fake news, too. We are hearing a lot about fake news right now, but what is it really? It can be any information from a real or perceived media outlet that is presented as true — when it is, in fact, false.

According to Cision’s report, 56% of journalists said that “fake news is making readers more skeptical than ever about what they read and see.” This skepticism is hard for journalists, who pride themselves on their high standards and integrity. Having the public’s trust in media eroded by incorrect information is damaging.

For this reason, and to have fair-and-balanced reporting, you should expect and welcome scrutiny of your reporters’ information. A reporter who questions your information is doing his or her job. Should your organization balk, go back to the basics.

If you want to control what is written, buy an ad. But remember: Information that is presented by a trusted reporter or news outlet is trusted 3–12 times more than an advertisement.

Reporters still trust PR sources and the media release is king.

It is not time to give up on the media release. Despite the number of ways reporters can develop story ideas and secure sources nowadays, those surveyed by Cision say that trusted PR pros and their media releases are still considered the gold standard. Of the reporters interviewed by Cision, 44% said media releases were their most “trustworthy source of brand-related information.” Spread the word — the media release is not dead; far from it.

Of the reporters surveyed, 63% said that they want announcements and media releases from their PR contacts.

How PR sources can help
Many of the basic tenets of working with the media still hold true:

• Reporters need to be able to trust you.
• Make sure your information is correct.
• Know the reporter and what they cover, and customize your pitch accordingly.
• Know your hook and make sure you are clear — don’t make the reporter fish for it!
• Make sure your sources are credible, and easily available.
• Remember, in these times of fewer resources and higher demands on reporters, you can be a big help and welcome resource. But if you are not giving reporters what they need, when they need it, these reporters will find another way and you will have lost your status as a trusted resource.

In addition to these tips, reporters are looking to PR pros for these specific things, according to those surveyed by Cision.

• Media releases
• Original research reports
• Follow-up media releases
• Content marketing/advocacy releases
• Video clips/B-roll/Livestream
• Blog posts

Change is happening in the media, and we, as PR pros, can help you keep up.

Using PR to Successfully Promote Your Next Event

Good events don’t just happen. They require intensive planning and a successful public relations promotion to get the word out, create interest, and compel action. PR will help increase the awareness of the event and, when properly targeted, will get that message to the people best positioned to help you generate the buzz you need to fill the venue.

COMMUNITY BREEDS COMMUNITY
One of the best ways to build buzz for an upcoming event, is to create and nurture an online community. This community could be connected by interest in you, your brand, or a common activity related to your brand.

This won’t just happen anywhere, though. You need to evaluate the various social media and web-based platforms to determine which platform is most likely to be frequented and enjoyed by your target market. If your fans won’t use Facebook or Instagram, for example, you are not doing yourself any favors by trying to build a community on those platforms.

CREATE AND DISTRIBUTE STICKY CONTENT
Once your community is up and running, you need to make it very easy for them to share information. Your community can be a huge source of developing event buzz if you give them the tools they need to help you. That means simple messages, images, and videos that connect with the viewer and compel them to share. This could also include a hashtag for social media, as well as a powerful, connective image or video.

FUNNEL REQUESTS FOR MORE INFORMATION
Whether it’s a blogger, media member, or prospective guest, there will be people interested in getting more information. You need to have one person and one place to send them. Maintaining a single media contact and single information hub for the event streamlines the information process, keeps the narrative focused, and makes it simple for busy people and deadline-limited media sources to acquire and distribute promotional information about your event.

PROMOTE VARIETY
Your event may fit snugly under a single topic or idea, but you need to offer subsets of interest and topics beneath that umbrella. That could mean a variety of speakers or a plethora of related events or attractions. The fundamental idea here is to keep people moving, which helps them stay engaged and also tends to attract a larger group of event attendees.

GIVE THEM A TASTE
Whether it’s clips of your keynote speakers or of people enjoying your event attractions, let people see and hear what they could experience – and what they will miss if they fail to attend. Give them a way to see themselves there, enjoying the event, rather than just a list of features and benefits.

ENGAGE EVERY LEVEL OF MEDIA
Once you have all your promotional content in place, invest the time in engaging with every level of media, from traditional print and TV journalists, to radio, web, and social media opinion makers. This should include influential bloggers and YouTube personalities as well. Look at who your target audience gets their information from and go after all of those sources.

Successful PR Is About Telling The Right Story In The Best Way

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.

 

 

Metrics to Better Measure Video for PR & Marketing

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.

Why PR Can be a Difference Maker in Marketing Campaigns

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.

Reasons to Integrate Your Marketing and PR Strategies

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.