Marketing Tips and News

You may be noticing some subtle additions to our home page. In an effort to promote one of our growing specialties, we’re adding links so our visitors can join our e-newsletter list, visit our archives or link quickly to Constant Contact.

We’ve chosen Email Marketing by Constant Contact® and have been working with this industry-leading program for more than a year now. It’s an easy, effective, and highly affordable way to get your message out to your customers, clients or members.

We have created high-impact, professional-quality emails for ourselves and our clients. These have helped all of us to build strong connections with our audiences, leading to referrals, repeat business and loyalty. We offer our clients every conceivable level of assistance with their email marketing program. So far, our full-service approach, in which we design, write, edit and distribute your e-news while you tend to your core operations, has proven most popular. This plan includes maintaining your e-mail list and reporting on opens, click-throughs and other statistics.

Discover how the power of Email Marketing by Constant Contact can help you better connect with your customers, strengthen your relationships with them, and grow your organization.

Join Our Email List Email:

Thursday, April 22 marks the 40^th Earth Day Celebration. According to the Earth Day Action Center, Earth Day is the largest secular holiday around the world, now celebrated by more than one billion people.

Earth Day History

In 1970, Senator Gaylord Nelson created Earth Day as a way to force the issue of clean air, water and land on the national agenda.  20 million Americans demonstrated and it worked. President Richard Nixon and Congress established the Environmental Protection Agency. The EPA was tasked with the goal of repairing damage already done to the environment and establishing guidelines to help Americans make a cleaner, safer environment a reality.

Recycle, reuse, reduce.  Doing your part to protect the environment is easier than ever before: turning off the lights, turning off the tap, using a refillable water bottle.  There are many ways people are going green in their personal lives. But how can you make your marketing efforts green? Write Result has a few “great green” suggestions.

• Stop printing and mailing that newsletter! Use an e-newsletter instead and save paper, time and money.

• Don’t print and pass out fliers for your special events and promotions. Post your event information and special offers on your business or organization’s Facebook Fan Page or Twitter account. Reward your “followers” with special online-only offers.

• If you do have to print a brochure, annual report or shopping bag, talk to your local printer about using recycled paper, soy or vegetable based inks and reduce your paper footprint!

As a resident of this area since 1995, I’ve come to really appreciate all that Volusia County has to offer.

In working with non-profits, we’ve made a commitment to:

• Keep our overhead low so that we can provide high-quality services to budget-challenged organizations
• Leverage our experience and relationships with advertisers, printers and designers to get the best rates for our clients
• Only work with clients whose mission or product we believe in and support those organizations with our personal purchasing power and philanthropy

After all, isn’t that what living your passion is all about?

A public complaint can be useful, even though it seems embarrassing.

Social media. It seems like that’s all anyone is talking about lately, and for good reason. Social media is the new word of mouth. We all know how important word of mouth or person-to-person marketing is to businesses and organizations. If you’re not using social media to engage your clients, customers, donors and constituents, it’s like not picking up the phone when they call.

At Write Result, we know which conversations you should be listening for through social media and how and when to engage your audience.  We’ll identify some of the top 10 conversations to listen for on our blog in the coming weeks. Let’s start with conversation #10 – The Complaint.

Complaining about a company, product or service was one of the most common initial experiences of social media.  But why should someone’s complaint on a blog post, a twitter feed or their Facebook page about your organization be looked at any differently than a complaint letter sent to your customer service center? The public nature of social media makes it different.

Receiving a complaint from a client or customer is not a new experience for businesses and organizations. But responding to a complaint in social media requires a much more immediate action.

The culture of social media is one that values transparency, immediacy and validation. While you may not be able to solve the problem right away, just letting the complainer know that you are listening and that you want to do something about it right away can make a significant difference.  You might be surprised at the positive reaction you will get just by letting people know that you’re listening, that you took the time to notice and reach out. Timeliness is key in social media. And timeliness is also one of the benefits of engaging your audiences through social media.

So don’t be afraid of complaints delivered through social media. Realize the opportunity you have to quickly and efficiently turn a negative into a positive and showcase your organization’s customer relations skills in a public way. This type of engagement will engender trust and loyalty, the ultimate return on investment!

Sure, it would be nice to have a service like Vocus or Cision.

It would take care of or automate a lot of the drudge work of PR, such as tracking down media contacts for your campaigns and keeping track of results. But it’s not cheap!

The least expensive option a company like Vocus can offer — without many of the bells and whistles that make it so attractive in the first place — is about $4,000 a year. Since we deal mostly in locally oriented companies and our clients are deeply rooted in the communities of Volusia and Flagler counties, it’s easy to see that the national media contacts one of these big services can provide  would not be a good value for them.

We are always looking for ways to give our clients a lot of bang for their buck, and that includes doing as much as we can for free. Of course, it takes some digital elbow grease on our part. But, if we need to, we can use traditional methods, plus social media and other means to pitch for attention on a national level. Here are two free services that can be useful:

• pr.com: Experts say this is one of the few free news release sites worth the bother, but it can be tricky to keep from racking up a bill here. The “free” news release distribution is bare bones — no google or Yahoo news, no links, no embedded images or videos — but it does do pretty well in straight-up search engines and will be seen by a good number of people. I recommend the video above to see how it works. (If you can’t see it, it’s at http://www.youtube.com/v/w9DW2vbCiXE)
• pitchengine.com: I just learned about this from a Vocus Webinar — many are free and I recommend you check out the Vocus link that opened this post for a list — and it offers a lot for zero investment. In your pitch, you can include videos, audio, images and social links. Pitchengine shares your release with “your media contacts via link or email or with thousands of consumers via social sites like Facebook, Twitter and others.”

In Time for Capitol Steps Show

Hannah Gonzalez and her family, from DeLand.

DAYTONA BEACH, FL (Jan. 28, 2010) – The first of several encores for the “Faces of Ability” photography exhibition, which opened earlier this month on the main campus of Daytona State College, begins today at the college’s News-Journal Center.

“Faces of Ability” features the everyday lives and triumphs of 13 young Easter Seals clients and their families as photographed by Daytona State College and University of Central Florida students. Easter Seals Volusia and Flagler Counties and the Daytona State College Foundation are the show’s presenters and will be mounting the exhibit at various locations throughout the two counties.

This stop at the News-Journal Center, 221 N. Beach St. in Daytona Beach, is just in time for the audience of tonight’s Capitol Steps performance at the facility. Other visitors can see the photographs for free during the center’s lobby hours throughout February.  Details of  “Faces of Ability” will be updated periodically at www.facesofability.org.

Media Contact:

Catherine Klasne,

(386) 212-7376

Write Result for Easter Seals

klasne@write-result.com

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In Time for Capitol Steps Show

DAYTONA BEACH, FL (Jan. 25, 2010) – The first of several encores for the “Faces of Ability” photography exhibition, which opened earlier this month on the main campus of Daytona State College, begins on Thursday at the college’s News-Journal Center.

Photo by Jean-Marie Appleby, Daytona State College. “Faces of Ability” subject Auburn Smith, center, and her mother, Linda, left, both of Port Orange, look at additional photographs by Tara Koenke.

“Faces of Ability” features the everyday lives and triumphs of 13 young Easter Seals clients and their families as photographed by Daytona State College and University of Central Florida students. Easter Seals Volusia and Flagler Counties and the Daytona State College Foundation are the show’s presenters and will be mounting the exhibit at various locations throughout the two counties.

This stop at the News-Journal Center, 221 N. Beach St. in Daytona Beach, is just in time for the audience of Thursday’s Capitol Steps performance at the facility. Other visitors can see the photographs for free during the center’s lobby hours throughout the month of February.

Updated information about the “Faces of Ability” collection will be posted periodically at www.facesofability.org.

Media Contact:

Catherine Klasne,

(386) 212-7376

Write Result for Easter Seals

klasne@write-result.com

# # #

It’s New Year’s Eve, and that prompts a few more backward glances before we get too deeply into 2010. For me, this year has been one of profound professional development, thanks to my new association with Write Result and Kathy, its president and founder. In late summer, we attended the Florida Public Relations Association’s conference in Boca Raton, and I’ve already written several entries about lessons from that gathering. But there was so much more.

I’m going to take a mid-afternoon break with a glass of eggnog and jot down just a bit.

One thing that challenged my beliefs was the assertion that volunteering your expertise to a good cause can have a monetary as well as a karmic payoff. I had firmly believed, as a writer and editor, that one should never offer to do that work for free, that it only softens your position as a professional and makes even more people think of your career as a hobby. Not wanting to devalue my skills even further, I never did volunteer that sort of work, although I did walk in charity walks, conduct silent auctions and contribute money to charitable causes.

However, Caron Sjoberg, president of IdeaWorks (both her name and the company name have an umlaut over the “o”), firmly believes in the good pro bono work can do for a marketing communications firm. Her Pensacola company has donated $900,000 worth of work to nonprofits and has been repaid for it in positive notice and good will.

That was a surprise to me but probably not to Kathy, who has parlayed several volunteering situations into actual paying clients. And for those who don’t convert, oh, well, there’s the karmic payoff.  At least someone gets something from the effort.

And now, a toast: To all your good efforts in 2010!