What Do You Write and Promote that Works?

Does Your Content Strategy and PR Provide Results?

Have you seen all of the stories about the death of traditional, public relations (PR) lately? The fact is that most people can get the news they need by simply going to their favorite, online news site, watching television or conducting an online search.

Because of this, the days of pitching stories to media-members is slowly coming to a close. But, this is good news because now…

Content Strategy Takes Center Stage.

PR has always been a way to boost a company’s awareness and help maintain a positive reputation for people, products, organizations, and more. And with traditional PR, you carefully craft and share specific messaging with a particular media-member at a certain time. Then, if the story goes live, you have third-party credibility you can’t get anywhere else.

The challenge with this process is that it doesn’t always lead to concrete results. In the past, I wrote an article for one of my clients and got it published at no cost in a trade journal. After that, customers walked into my client’s door, specifically mentioned the article and proceeded to purchase $94,000 worth of new orders.

This is great, but you usually don’t see these kind of tangible results directly related to PR efforts. And if you look closer at this particular instance, it was actually the content that made the sale… so this brings me to my next point…

What Are You Writing and Promoting?

When you have a content-strategy in place, you can set goals, create content relevant to those goals, prepare tracking mechanisms, and see exactly what copy achieves results.

Have you ever wondered why you don’t see a spike in sales when you send out press releases, pitch media-members, post on social media, and write blogs and other content just to get your messages out?

If so, you need to stop everything and check out these…

5 Quick Steps to Actually Have PR and Content that Works

1. Decide what your target market wants.
2. Figure out what kind of content will meet those needs.
3. Develop an editorial calendar of all your content (where it will be posted, when, who is responsible, tracking mechanisms, etc.).
4. Write, post and track the content.
5. Review the results and tweak your content accordingly for the best results.

With new technology, valuable and specific content is easy to find and read in various mediums. Because of this, you need to change with the times. Stop wasting money on media-pitching, general press-releases and vague copy that doesn’t provide specific results. Instead, focus on a content strategy, and give your target market the information they want, when and how they want it.

You’ll save a lot of time, money and aggravation. But more important, you’ll know what works best and see a big boost in sales!

What are you going to do today to make your content start working?

For more tips on creating a content strategy and PR copy that works, please see more of Melanie’s articles here.

Author Melanie Rembrandt is one of the country’s top, small business public relations’ experts. She helps boost sales, awareness and credibility fast with a unique combination of targeted, SEO content-marketing strategy and PR. If you want to get results and save time and money, check out her “Simplify Your Business” podcast here, and contact her and her team at Rembrandt Communications, www.rembrandtwrites.com.