Advanced Marketing Techniques

Below is a transcript of my most recent podcast which is a review of webinar and ebook "The New Rules of PR" by David Meerman Scott.

Hi this is Tony D. Baker with Xeal Precision Marketing.

First, I’d like to thank you for listening to this podcast. Today we’re going to discuss some of the items which David Meerman Scott revealed to us during his webinar with PRWEB and of course in his ebook, “The New Rules of PR.” You can get his ebook by clicking the link at the top of PRWEB dot com or by simply visiting David’s site at web ink now dot com.

With over 150,000 downloads in its first release, "The New Rules of PR" has become a must-have guide for those looking to embrace the new reality of PR and marketing. In this webinar, Scott discusses his new eBook and offers techniques and advice on developing a press release strategy to reach buyers, as well as the media, giving you more exposure for your news.

David Meerman Scott is an online thought leadership strategist. The programs he has developed have won numerous awards and are responsible for selling over one billion dollars in products and services worldwide. His current book "Cashing In With Content: How Innovative Marketers Use Digital Information to Turn Browsers Into Buyers" is a riff on using Web content to drive revenue and other action from Web site visitors and his new book "The New Rules of Marketing and PR: How to Use News Releases, Blogs, Viral Marketing and Online Media to Reach Buyers Directly" will be published by Wiley in June 2007. He has lived and worked in New York, Tokyo, Boston, and Hong Kong and has presented at industry conferences and events in over twenty countries on four continents. Check out his blog at www.WebInkNow.com

Let’s start with one of his first statements.

Press Releases are designed to reach everybody.
This is so true. At Xeal we started experimenting with Press Release Optimization back in early 2004. By the end of the year we had dozens of sites that captured the top 3 or 4 results for their primary keyword phrase, all leading to their press releases on PRWEB and EMEDIAWIRE. It was amazing. A lot of the time people would call our clients directly simply from the contact information available on the press release, without even visiting their web site.

Obviously today Google and Yahoo changed up their systems quite a bit. You can still get great results with press releases online, but it’s different. It takes more time, more consistency and more frequency. But the results have compounded.

And let’s not forget, now 2 or 3 times the number of people, to the tune of over 50 million people, now use news portals such as News.Google.com to get their daily news. Not to mention the fact that today most journalist and bloggers look to the Internet first for their story ideas.

So let’s take a look at what David talked about with his case study with “The Concrete Network.”

550,000 visitors per month in 2005
850,000 visitors per month in 2006 – Due to news releases

Let’s look at the value. Currently the keyword “concrete table” goes for somewhere between $1 and $2 per click. At just one dollar per visitor, the increased pay per click value of 300,000 new visitors per month is well over $300,000 a month! Annually that would be $3.6 million dollars.

Now let’s keep this in perspective… that’s the equivalent of paying Xeal to put out over 23 press releases per day. This is about 1 SmartPR every 20 minutes of the work day.

Here’s something else to keep in mind. The people that find your business through press releases, blogs, articles and editorials are already better qualified than a pay per click visitor.

You see, with pay per click marketing, the visitor has a question in their head, and they use a search engine to research it. At that point they are given up to 20 different opportunities on the first page alone. On Google, 50% are ads, and 50% are natural listings. That person now has a number of decisions to make as more than one ad may appeal to them.

If you know anything about marketing, then you know that the more decisions you give someone to make, they less likely they are to commit to any decision at all.

So here you have it, visitors to search results… currently considered one of the most valuable leads you can buy, are basically surfing between you pay per click ad and everybody elses, not to mention the free natural listings. Chances are, they are clicking through the ones that appeal to them, and then hitting the back button and go on to the next one.

Google is well aware that they might visit your site, back out, visit another site, back out, and click on your ad again. In fact, they’re counting on it. That’s why they tell you up front that you’re paying for any visit that they don’t deem to be click-fraud, and that folks is a whole other conversation. Just read their terms. They see multiple visits in one session as part of the process.

Okay, let’s get back to the case at hand. Here we have people who are genuinely interested in concrete tables, and they have all of these opportunities at their fingertips. If your site doesn’t appeal to them in 10 seconds or less, they’re gone. You have to answer “What’s In It For Me?” in 10 seconds or less folks. Chances are, if you don’t compel them to stay, they’re still thinking about the other ads they’re one click away from.

That’s why at Xeal Precision Marketing, we have a well defined strategy I call “The Four Aces.” - A.C.E.S. stands for Attract, Capture, Educate and Sell. You not only have to attract people to your site, but you have to capture their attention, their information if possible, and give them good quality educational materials so that they can become informed buyers, and then you have to use good old-fashioned selling techniques.

Look at me getting off topic again. Okay so how valuable are pay per click leads now? Hold this in comparison to someone who has clicked on a headline for an article, press release, editorial, etc… Not only have they read that article, looked at the pictures, and so forth, but now they’re clicking on to your website.

For someone to actually click through to your site, rather than just reading the next article means something. They’re interested. You’ve developed a high quality lead! Now you just have to capture their information, feed them more and more information until they develop a connection with you, and then they’re asking you to do business with them!

That’s something that a lot of marketers forget about. The 300,000 extra “visitors” you’re getting a month are humans too. They have questions, desires, needs, and they respond better when humanity is in play.

Give them your audio testimonials, video instructions, and even some inspirational information. Don’t be afraid to show that you’re human too. I have clients who call me up like I’m their best friend in the world. Clients who I’ve never once met in my entire life! But that’s because when they see the website for Xeal Precision Marketing, they see me, my staff, and my humanity.

But with that said, you can also use human psychology to help you close those deals. Remember, I said desires. You can feed those desires with the information they need to make a well informed and even well inspired decision, and that my friends will create the income that will help feed your desires. Don’t be afraid to have limited time offers, close out sales, wholesale to the public, and all that jazz. It’s human nature to respond to good deals.

With that said, the 300,000 additional visitors per month that are visiting “The Concrete Network” are better leads because they are more informed and more inspired than any pay per click lead generating network out there. Plus you’re not competing with 20 other decisions they have to make. They’re here on your site. If they click back, they’re still reading about you!

Be sure to keep this in mind. There’s also a good chance that they have developed an affinity for the people that are publishing a story about you. Humans create comfort zones and in those zones they have their favorite TV commentators, newspaper editors, magazines writers, ezine contributors, bloggers, and all of that. Many times they’re reading that blog, listening to that podcast, radio show or television broadcast religiously.

They’ve developed an affinity for the person who constantly delivers the materials that they enjoy, profit from, or are inspired from, and now that this person has written about you, or published your press release on their site, they have now assigned some of that affinity to you. In a manner of speaking, you’re receiving a type of endorsement and credibility value when they’re reading about you.

The more personalized the endorsement, the more powerful it will have an impact on their ability to identify with, and create a relationship with you. And if you have good quality content that can help them answer the questions that they may have, then many times that can mean buying your services, your books, attending your seminars, or simply adding your site to their top 10 most frequented sites.

And that brings me to something else that David talked about.

In David’s case study for “The Concrete Network,” David mentions an offer on the LANDING PAGE… and not just a home page… which, for some reason, is what most people tend to link to. (ConcreteNetwork.com)

My friends, this is an essential difference than what 99% of all press releases on PRWEB are currently doing! I know… I looked just to be sure. By the way, this is the difference between hiring an expert and doing it yourself. The experts at Xeal know this stuff. But I’ll get back to that later.

What’s a Landing Page? A landing page is a page specifically designed to answer the question to a conversation that it going on in the head of the reader when they click on that link! It’s not all about search engines folks. It took me a long time to overcome that fact, but today it’s all about the quality of the lead, and the fact that it gives you link value is great, but keep in mind that if people click on that link you want to answer the question to the conversation that’s going on in their head. They’re asking questions, the click-through is simply part of the process to see if you can answer it.

The LANDING PAGE is the “answer page.” If it doesn’t answer their question, which I simplify down to “What’s in it for me?” in 10 seconds or less, then you’re just asking them to make more decisions, and more decisions means that they’re less likely to commit to any decisions at all. Whoops… baby girl walks in, on well, let’s go watch TV, I’ll get back to this later. CLOSE … Poof Gone.

3 days later you have a guy asking himself, “Where’d I find that one story about concrete tables? Hmmm, I’ll just search Google.”

The whole landing page concept came up to me about 3 years ago when we were sending pay per click traffic to hundreds of sites at a time when we could do it for just ten cents a click. I noticed that most of our clients using our pay per click advertising simply sent the traffic to their home page. If someone is reading a little 10 to 15 word headline ad about your business and they click through, chances are they want to continue on from that ad… not start over at a home page where they have to search or dig through layers of information.

The same is to be said for the subject line in email marketing messages. If the first paragraph of the message has nothing to do with the subject of the message. I and most people are immediately put off, and they simply hit the delete button.

It’s important to consider the entire campaign from moment you attract someone, to the up sell and resell opportunities you are going to present to them once they are a fulfilled customer.

It can be a huge task to consider all of the elements required, especially when you take into account, the pay per click ad copy, the press release ad copy, the landing page, any auto-responder, potentially an entire series of auto-responders, as well as the ad copy on each and every page of your site, from the introduction, inspiration, and all the way through the sale.

It can be mind boggling to say the least. That is why it is so important to play it through with trial runs as if you are the customer. Get your friends, neighbors and interested parties to test it out completely, even if that means giving away something in return.

The last thing you want is to run a press release that has anchor text links to a page that has nothing to do with what you are trying to convey to them.

I recall a time when a client of ours had a press release about a gorgeous gold plated cell phone that sold for hundreds of dollars. It was simply amazing. It was an obvious status symbol for the well-to-do, and yet when you went to his site, you couldn’t find anything about it. All you found was the same tired old cell phones that you see everyday.

We told him what to do and what to expect, but in this situation, the client just expected something for nothing. He had heard about the successes of Xeal’s SmartPR service and wanted the dream, instead of helping us work with him toward what could have been an awesome reality. Sometimes clients tie our hands are we are forced to simply let them fail and of course blame it on us, and the Internet in general… but that’s a whole other story.

Okay let’s get back to some of David’s “New Rules of PR”

1: Send press releases regularly – not just when “big news” is happening.

Here again, this is your opportunity to create relationships in a matter of speaking. You create familiarity between people who frequent the blogs, the keywords, the stories that you are putting out.

I’ve had journalist tell our clients that they’d do a story for them, and then never put it out. But when they see that name go across their screen time and time again, they actually end up writing about them.

At the same time, you are creating multiple anchor-text links from any site that picks up your story and runs it with links intact, and of course you are creating buzz in general about your business.

2: Appeal directly to your buyers
Use this rule with caution. We believe it should still appear to be a release. Do not submit a sales letter or come across with offers too good to be true, or it will simply be dismissed. It should come across as a compelling story, an insightful industry related article, or something of genuine stand-alone value.

At Xeal Precision Marketing, we still like to include at least two quotes with your SmartPR. One of which should be from someone other than you, and believe it or not, we make a special effort to create bullet points to help those who casually scan the press release to stop and get the highlights of what you have to offer.

3: Use keyword-rich copy.
Again, this is great for search engine optimization. If you’ve heard my radio show, then you have probably have heard me talk about Google and Yahoo being the Kings of Context. No, I didn’t say, “Content is King” or something like that, I’m saying that Google and Yahoo know that if a link is surrounded by related words and phrases, and is on a page that is linked to from pages that used the some of the same types of words and phrases, that your site is more likely to be in context to what the user is searching for.

You see, it’s not all about the number links anymore or even just a page rank of the page linking to you. The content that surrounds each and every one of those anchor-text links, as well as the content that links to that page that features your links are all very important to the search engine rankings. It’s all so complicated. Just remember, “Context is King” and Google and Yahoo are the Kings of Context.

4: Create Links to landing pages on your site.
We’ve covered this already in detail.

5: Optimize press release delivery for searching and browsing
Here again… we create bullet points because they’re natural stopping points for people who scan pages… they’ll read the bullet points.

And 6: Drive people into the sales process with press releases.

Note: It doesn’t say use press releases as sales materials. No. On the contrary, it’s the press release that drives the leads to your site. Once they are on your site it is your responsibility to inspire that lead to contact you, leave their contact information, or take some type of action.

David also goes into detail on the following.

Use words and phrases that buyers understand
Don’t use… Press release speak… and techno-jargon.

Such as:
realtime
next generation
flexible
robust
world class
scalable
easy to use
cutting edge

David has some of these words which he covered in the webinar and several others in an interesting usage graph that you can find available on his blog at world-class cutting-edge world-wide website at at WebInkNow.com

Reaching the media …

David says that:

1. Non-targeted broadcast media pitches are spam.

2. Unsolicited press releases sent to reporters via email in subject areas they do not cover is spam. 99% of releases received are spam

These statements are very true. Make sure you have a well-defined strategy and purpose to whatever you do. Don’t just put something out for the sake of it. Know what you are trying to accomplish and then create an action plan to accomplish it. On that plan you should have a list of key players that are required to make that happen. If you don’t have the key players, then do the best you can, but whatever you do, don’t just spam the world. Whether it is search engine spam, mass emailing, or broadcast fax. Chances are, your efforts will do nothing but create landfill if you don’t know what you’re doing.

David asks… Is your organization busy? When was the last press release you sent? Reporters love an online media room.

Keep in mind that your initial campaign can be part of a broader and wider campaign.
Each press release can build upon each other, and when read together in context, the journalist, blogger, and consumer should have a good idea of who you are and what you are about. Credibility, Implied endorsements, etc… all of that is important. What was said, who was quoted, and I’d even go as far as to who wrote about your press releases. I’ve noticed that some companies actually go as far as to link to the people that wrote about them as way of showing that they’re in the in crowd. You know what I’m talking about… “as featured on Oprah, CNN, Time, and Joe’s blog.” But hey, it works.

David says… Tell how you solve problems… not what your products do.
This isn’t just good advice in regards to press releases, but in regards to good ad copy for your website. Most people are more interested in the results of buying your product than they are in the technicalities of your product.

Interestingly enough, when Xeal started promoting our “Power Package - Six Month Marketing System” we quickly discovered that most of our clients bought it because of its track record and capabilities. They were much less concerned with what was included with it. Many still have no idea. They just know that we’re doing our job and they’re enjoying the results.

Reporter blog? Trackback and comment on it.
Read the publication, study what the reporter writes before you submit targeted pitch.

In a manner of speaking, this is what we’re doing right now at this very moment. I’ll let you know how it turns out.

Final thoughts…David had a great deal to say. It was very inspirational to me to find someone who I can identify with and understand. He’s done a great job of conveying to the public what targeted online press release distribution can do and after taking a look at his calendar, blog, and upcoming book, it does nothing but inspire me.

I’ve been working on a few ideas, including our proprietary marketing strategy which I alluded to earlier, as well as the creation of a comprehensive guide to some advanced marketing techniques and recommended services.

If you’re the kind of person that really digs this stuff and wants to do everything yourself, then I highly recommend that you become very familiar with prweb.com and likewise become a regular reader of David’s blog at webinknow.com. I know I’m going to be paying attention from now on.

On the other hand, if you are like most of our clients and you’re too busy running your business to create a new job title for yourself and become chief public relations officer, then I want to encourage you to take a look at the six month marketing system that I was talking about earlier. SmartPR is an essential part of our “power package,” as well as the writing, development and deployment of landing pages, off-site editorials on related web sites and blogs, and of course good quality content, non-reciprocal links and all the proprietary tools and techniques that we use to help you Attract, Capture, Educate and Sell to your clients.

For the last six months or so we’ve been testing our system and we continue to experience great results. I’m in the process of formally launching this system over the next few months as a service available to the public. We don’t even link to it from our home page. So take note, that if you are interested in having Xeal Precision Marketing take charge of marketing your web site, then you will want to pay attention to this very special link. It is http://www.xeal.com/topsecret.htm

Once again, I would like to thank everybody for listening today, and of course if you have any questions, feel free to email at http://www.xeal.com/contact.htm or call my office at 1-866-XEAL-WEB. That’s 1-866-932-5932 and of course visit us at XEAL.com, that’s Xeal with an X at X E A L dot com.