No long ramblings from me today. Just to say, hope everyone is enjoying the holidays and see you back at your desks in the New Year.
It’s Olympics year!
Now, I know there was a lot of disappointment about the way that ticket allocations were handled and I was one of the many thousands who were left empty-handed. However, I am sure they will be a great success and will be a big boost to the UK and help the economy.
So as industrial and technical businesses, can we do anything to take advantage of all the publicity the Olympics will generate? Well, obviously if any of your products are being used in any aspect of the Games then get writing and talking to editors about it now! There could be a very tenuous link, but hey, us creative writers will be able to work it up for you 
So, get your thinking caps on and grab the opportunity.
Actually, something to bear in mind when you are planning your publicity schedule is to try and make your releases topical. I know it’s not always easy in the trade and technical world but it can be done. Ask me and I’ll tell you!
thanks to Salvatore Vuono at FreeDigitalPhotos
So, 2011 was the year all you engineering and technical companies set up your Twitter accounts right? If not, do so NOW please. You may not actively use it to start with, but like getting your company’s URL in the late 80s and early 90s, if you have a common name then the chances are you may have already missed the boat. If you are unsure of what to do, give me a call and I can help you get it sorted – even give you some ideas of how to get going.
Your next step is to get some followers. Simply search Twitter with your keywords (just like you would do with Google) and follow those who are tweeting about products or services you are interested in. Also remember that on Twitter people use hashtags # to highlight keywords so they will be more easily found. So, you will often find #loadcells or #windenergy, as examples. It’s also worth looking as the followers of the people you are following and see if they will be of interest. Don’t forget the trade magazines too, they often have interesting tweets and will retweet you to their followers. Oh, and you can start off by following me @InPressPR
Once you have followers, start tweeting! Product information, general company information, links to your website – all in 140 characters. That’s the challenge.
Don’t do all your tweeting at once. Maximum 3 per day and maybe a couple of retweets. Also, if you sell around the world, don’t forget to schedule your tweets so they won’t appear in their Twitter feeds in the middle of the night.
I could write a book on this, but I won’t. Let’s leave it at that and promise me you will all have a Twitter presence by the end of the year.
I talked a few weeks ago about our new database that gives us access to thousands of editorial contacts throughout the UK and Europe. Well, it’s funny how these things happen, but just after the blog was posted, I was contacted by a technical company who were looking for a PR agency that would be able to help them with their PR strategy, press liaison and distribute press releases and case studies. They had a technical writer who had been writing case studies and testimonials for their website, but they realised they really weren’t making the most of these. the writer wasn’t interested in a PR role, so they set about the task of finding an agency who could fulfill this role, but weren’t too precious about not doing the writing themselves.
Ha! the last thing we are at In Press is precious and this brief was right up our street, although it is something we don’t often get asked as most clients wants us to do the writing as well.
So, it’s worth bearing in mind, if you are producing material yourselves that could be used by the print and online press, then make the most of it! The more places you are seen in, the more likely it is a prospective customer will find you. Talk to an agency (In Press puts its hand up ) and see if they they can help.
We all need resources to help us do our jobs. One of most vital is out media database. We need to make sure that we have it up to date with the latest editorial contacts and forward features. However, if we relied just on our own contacts and searches, it is probably all we would ever do to keep it updated and then where would be time for writing all those great press releases and application stories?
So, we subscribe to a commercial database that gives us information on editorial contacts throughout the UK and Europe. As a responsible organisation and never wanting to miss out on an opportunity that will help us and our clients, we regularly review our suppliers. In the Summer, Denis and I spent a lot of time looking at the surprisingly large number of media database facilities out there.
In the end we chose to change and now have access to the wonderful facilities at MEDIAgility, part of the global PR Newswire empire. It means that we now have access to real-time information on thousands of journals, both online and offline, as well as websites and blogs. Our “space” on the database also enables us to customise contacts and save much-used distribution lists. It is also intuitive and so saves us time when distributing releases, giving us more time for writing and strategic development for clients.
We have been really pleased with our choice and know it will benefit all our clients. Could it benefit you?
We were recently approached by a company we carried out a PR campaign for a few years ago. They stopped while they were having a re-organisation and “never got round to starting again”. This time they had, for us, an unusual request.
Rather than using an outside agency to carry out their marketing, they had identified someone in-house that they would like to train up to eventually be Marketing Manager. As they manufacture highly-technical products that warranted some academic papers, as well as the usual product press releases and application stories, it was a sensible move. But the question was: “How do we train him?”
Of course, there are many training associations and companies out there, but there’s the age old problem we find in the engineering and technical markets (and I don’t include pharma and the computer industry in this!)and that is that the majority of courses are just too general. They don’t cover liaising with the trade and technical press, writing for a technical audience and many of the other day to day skills people need as a marketeer for industrial customers. And this is just what our client found. So, they asked us if we would get involved. Could we devise a mentoring programme that would result in their employee being able to handle the company’s marketing activity?
Of course we could and we did! We worked with the company, once a week for 3 months on specific projects and a general mentoring programme. Slowly but surely we could see our client progress and he had the great advantage that you don’t see with general training is the fact that he always had an expert on the other end of the phone to help him if he ever had any problems.
The initial phase of the programme is now over and we are confident our client now has a good grounding in marketing for his company’s target audience.
Could this be the way you would like to see your marketing carried out? Talk to us for more information.
One-to-one mentoring
Here at In Press, we are always keen to try new things. We like to think that we are guinea pigs, attempting to incorporate new ideas into our marketing before we introduce them to our clients. That way, we can ensure that we know exactly how they work, whether they are any use or not and of course, save our clients time and money by not having to go through a learning curve.
It started back in the early 90s when we started introducing our clients to the wonderful world of the internet (almost unbelievable now how hard we had to try to persuade some clients if they didn’t get on the web now, they would be left behind ). We’ve done it with Social Media, finding our way around Twitter, Facebook for Business, LinkedIn etc. and it’s proved to be a great success.
Our latest discovery is Prezi, a new way of presenting. It’s a great way to avoid Death by Powerpoint and every time we’ve used it people have been wowed.
Go and have a look at the In Press presentation by clicking here. Let us know what you think and we can always come in and help you with yours. Because we know all about it.
Receive an Ovation for your Prezi Presentation
So here is my first live blog and sad as it may seem, I am really quite excited! I am up at the NEC attending a number of industrial exhibitions.
As visitor numbers to trade shows are in decline, organisers, quite rightly, have started to amalgamate shows,so visitors are able to seem a much larger range of products applicable to their business. This week at the NEC Interplas sits alongside MM Live, TCT Live, Nano Live and MEMS Live and PPMA is in the Hall right next door and there is seamless access (well okay, they scan your badge as you move through the Halls). In Press has three clients up here and so far they seem reasonably pleased with the attendance and number of enquiries.
It’s now 1.00pm and the floors a still reasonably full. But if my previous experiences of trade exhibitions are anything to go by, then it will be a ghost town by 2.30pm. But, in a move to encourage people to stay later, the organisers (Rapid News Communications Group – Events Division)will pay your parking fee (and it’s an astronomical £8), all you have to do is pick up a voucher as you leave after 3. Will it work?, I am not sure but it’s a good move from Rapid News and well worth a try – I know I will be staying!
They are also offering free WiFi courtesy of Siemens PLM Software. Okay, you have to sign in, so they have my name and email address but it’s good marketing and it enables me to write the blog and post it live, without having to use my precious BT Openzone minutes.
As for the Shows, well it’s always been true – if you engage with your customers and potential customers, look interested and welcoming, come to the front of the stand and don’t hide at the back behind your laptop, then you will get more leads from the show. You get out of a show what you put in.
I’ll be interested to see how these new initiatives work and will let you know.
and I don’t mean your training for the Olympics!(but if you are training for the Olympics and reading this, then I would love to know!)
With the children back at school and summer officially over this week, in the industrial business world companies that have their financial years from January to December are starting to think and plan their budgets for the new year.
But before you start, it’s probably worth looking back at what marketing activities you undertook this year and assess their success. How you measure that success depends on the objectives that you set at the beginning of the year. You did set objectives, didn’t you? You did make them SMART?
S Specific
M Measurable
A Achievable
R Realistic
T Time-related
One of the most common problems we come across when talking to industrial marketing managers is that they are unsure about how to measure the effectiveness of their marketing. There are plenty of ways and it starts with setting SMART objectives.
If you would like help analysing your marketing effectiveness in 2011 and setting SMART marketing objectives for 2012 then give us a call at In Press on 01488 674200.
It goes without saying that sending out a photo with your press release will grab an editor’s attention. If it’s a technical release then it really should be accompanied by a photo of the product, with an interesting background. My advice on this is to book a photo session with your local photographer and get some well taken shots that can be used in lots of different formats. Often, by talking to a photographer and giving hom a good brief, it can be cheaper to leave the products with him and if he can take the photos at his leisure, maybe in between other jobs, you will be able to get a better deal cost-wise.
For other shots for literature, websites, blogs, e-newsletters etc. there are a number of ways you can get free photos. Try some of the sites I mentioned in the blog before last FreeDigitalPhotos or take advantage of iStockPhoto‘s free photo of the week.
But there are other ways. Try talking to your to your collaborators and suppliers. For an acknowledgment, you could get a host of photos to enhance all your marketing activities.
