Hidden Targets

New England Wire Products (NEWP), a third generation family-owned display rack manufacturing company, was interested in ramping up their marketing to help with sales efforts. The company creates and manufacturers high quality display rack solutions for leading retail brands and works around the clock to meet tight deadlines and fast turnaround times. 

This post was originally published on our partner's blog -  3 Media Web, a custom website design and development company.

In today’s socially connected world, brand awareness driven by public relations, content marketing, and social media is more important to businesses than ever before. According to Hubspot, Improving SEO/organic presence is a priority with 66% of marketers noting SEO growth as their top goal for 2017. With its unique ability to generate high-quality, earned content and obtain valuable backlinks from authoritative outlets, PR is playing an increasingly critical role in influencing SEO and demonstrating value with metrics to drive a company’s communications strategy. Earned media, or media coverage that we as PR professionals secure every day, continues to be the most powerful element of today’s data-driven SEO marketing strategies.

I’ve been involved in helping dozens of small start-up companies ramp up their PR and marketing. Many times it’s to establish a new category of product. Sometimes it’s a new innovation that is disrupting a mature industry. But what I love about what I do is that with startup marketing, there is a formula to success and best practices I’ve learned over the years to help turn small start-ups into industry leaders.

This month I attended the 2017 PRSA International Conference in Boston and was pleasantly surprised by the excitement around the public relations profession and the still significant role earned media plays in the overall integrated marketing mix.

Over seven thousand members of the region’s tech community descended on Boston’s City Hall Plaza this month to come together and celebrate at Boston/TechJam, New England’s largest tech festival, organized by MassTLC.

I had the wonderful fortune of participating in a panel at New England Direct Marketing Association’s (NEDMA) Annual Marketing Conference at Bentley University this week.  The conference’s focus was What’s New! What’s Now! What’s Next!  bringing participants the latest and greatest direct marketing strategies, tactics and technologies. During my session on Social Media Marketing, I gave advice on leveraging the new LinkedIn for B2B marketers and wanted to share:

I attended Hubspot’s Inbound 2016 Conference in Boston this year and was blown away by how jazzed over 19,000 people were about everything digital marketing.  It was a blast and I got a chance to hear about best practices from leaders in the field, get some on-on-one time with our consultants (Red Javelin is a Hubspot Agency partner) and hear about the company’s vision on the future of inbound marketing. Inbound is definitely a movement and felt the excitement all around me from marketing professionals of all specialties - content, web design, graphics design, PR, sales, and SEO.

B2B selling is becoming more complex than ever as the digital revolution continues to transform a once predictable, linear purchasing path to a more circular pattern of touch points. Customers are more self directed as they research, evaluate, select, and share experiences about products and trust experts more than brands.  So what should B2B marketers do?

With Cision’s recent acquisition of PR Newswire, many are wondering whether industry consolidation will change the practice of PR.  Is the press release now dead?  We don’t think so. Press releases are still a very valuable tool in a company’s integrated marketing to drive awareness and leads. We have some clients where we receive at least one inbound call per month from seeing a press release online, asking for a sales rep to call them.