It’s fair to say that few, if any, companies—or their communication staff—were prepared to respond quickly and appropriately to the impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic. As millions of employees suddenly found themselves working remotely from their homes and millions of customers found themselves suddenly shut off from the companies and brands they typically engaged with, communication professionals began grappling with important questions, including the following: (more…)
Posts Tagged ‘content marketing’
Communication Lessons From COVID That Will Last Long Past the Pandemic
Saturday, December 19th, 2020Following the Trends in Influencer Marketing
Friday, November 27th, 2020
While it may seem like it’s a 21st-century thing, influencer marketing has been around since the early 20th century. One of the earliest influencers was Santa Claus, a character modernized and reinvented by Coca-Cola. Today’s influencers tend to be real people—PewDiePie, Logan Paul, Zoella, and others—many who leapt to fame thanks to the wide reach of social media channels, such as YouTube and Instagram. But influencers today come in a lot of forms depending on the target audience. Business-es, products, and services of all types leverage the audience, reach, and endorsement power of influencers to grow awareness and preference for what they have to offer. (more…)
Content IS King – Regardless of Who Said It!
Tuesday, November 24th, 2020
While there’s a debate about where the phrase “content is king” originally emerged, Bill Gates is widely given credit for the phrase and wrote what Fox Business calls a “remarkably prescient piece” back in 1996 in which he “accurately foresaw the content boom years before Google, WordPress, Facebook and YouTube even existed.” The rest, of course, is history.
Organizations of all kinds have jumped on the content bandwagon, recognizing that the trusted relationships they have with patients puts them in a prime position to share content on a wide range of topics of interest to, and representing value for, their audiences. (more…)
The Blurred Lines Between PR, Marketing and Advertising
Friday, November 13th, 2020
There’s a raging — and quite interesting — debate that I continue to see taking place in various online forums about the relationship between PR and marketing. I’ve found it especially interesting because I recently was engaged in the same debate while teaching PR courses at a local university. Surprisingly to me, there is a group that believes quite strongly that PR is not part of marketing: that it is a separate and distinctly different function within an organization.
Frankly, that’s just “crazy talk” to me. (more…)
Email Subject Lines: It’s Not Rocket Science, But It Is Important
Monday, October 26th, 2020
Like many things we see all of the time, email subject lines are easy to overlook, especially when drafting them. Too often, though, copywriters, content marketers, and others fail to give enough thought to their email subject lines. They’re an afterthought. Something quickly thrown together and easily overlooked, not only by those writing them but those seeing them in their email inboxes! And that’s the problem.
Fail to pay enough attention to your email subject lines and your audience will too. (more…)
Write to Your Audience and SEO Will Follow
Tuesday, October 6th, 2020
Despite ongoing changes to Google algorithms as well as the ways consumers are seeking information (increasingly via voice and through mobile devices), many organizations continue to fret over SEO to the point that the copy they ultimately publish is bland, peppered with overused catchphrases, and easy to overlook.Finding Multiple Uses for Your Content to Extend Its Longevity and Reach
Tuesday, May 12th, 2020
Content is always changing shapes, morphing into something new. Long before there was the written word, people gathered to tell stories around campfires. Before there was a printing press, there were handwritten books. Then, of course, came ebooks. Now, our content comes to us through a dizzying array of devices and platforms. Smart creators are using the growing number of delivery options to continue to reshape content into new—and sometimes improved—forms.
Opportunities for Content Creators to Leverage Virtual Assistants
Tuesday, May 5th, 2020
Humans have been working to automate tasks since the days of Henry Ford. Sometimes, this means coming up with faster, more cost-effective ways to develop automobiles and other products or streamlining operations and reducing the need for manual labor in various manufacturing settings. Other times, it’s spurred by the rampant development of increasingly complex technology to create and distribute content. Regardless, the quest for new ways of getting work done without human intervention is ongoing.
The use of technology for content creation and dissemination is just one more example. It’s an area that is seeing increasing interest from developers and users alike. (more…)
What Niche Publishers Know That Mass Media Overlooks
Tuesday, April 28th, 2020
While publishers continue to battle for audience, relevance, and engagement, some niche publishers are quietly making an impact—and money—from narrowcasting. Consider, for example, the following:
Emu Today & Tomorrow, a magazine for emu farmers
Twins, a magazine for parents of multiples, which launched in 1984
Spudman, a publication for potato farmers
The Chimney Sweep News, serving a decidedly niche market of chimney sweepers as the name suggests
These and other publications are finding success by casting a narrow net to appeal to smaller, more exclusive market segments. Publishers can draw inspiration and insight from the retail sector.
SEO and Me: A Love/Hate Relationship
Monday, March 16th, 2020
by Linda Pophal
I have a love/hate relationship with search engine optimization (SEO). I understand SEO. I very often use the concepts in my own writing—and often use the concepts in writing for clients. Sometimes, though, and probably because I was a writer long before SEO was even “a thing,” I balk at what can seem at times to be a misguided focus—a singular focus—on SEO to the exception of everything else. (more…)
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