Marketing

Taking a strategic approach to developing new business through marketing benefits your business. Our consultation provides your firm with insights and an actionable plan to deploy tactics to attract new customers to your firm. Our consultation is provided to clients in Charleston, SC and surrounding areas. We counsel the following segments: professionals, entrepreneurs, small businesses, real estate, legal, and non profits.

Spec Website for New Realtors

Posted by Cheryl Smithem

Pandemic Pivot

When things are more different than they have ever been in one’s lifetime, we all have to adapt.

Screen Capture of Life in Mt. Pleasant, SC

To that end, we launched a new website, Life in Mount Pleasant, built with BoldGrid’s Diced theme. This spec site has been built to sell as a turnkey presence for a real estate professional who is focused on Mount Pleasant. The is a WordPress site and has all the bells and whistles one expects in a contemporary site built with the world’s most popular content management system. We’ve used images that illustrate the waterfront town, its history, and uniqueness. All we need to do at this point is find the right person and add their real estate feeds and presence specifically for them. 

The site comes with the highly desirable domain, a custom logo, all content, content and site customization for the new owner, premium plugin licenses for BoldGrid and Notification Bar Pro and a low monthly expense for complete WordPress managed hosting by Charleston PR & Design, LLC.

We invite you to help promote this site’s availability. Please share this post on social media, visit the site and talk it up with your friends.

Featured Photo Credit: Shem Creek Shrimp Trawlers by Terry Ott on Ficker.

Top Ten Blog Posts Cover PR, Social Media, Innovation, Ecommerce, Marketing

Posted by Cheryl Smithem

Marketing and PR Tactics and Helps for Small Business Owners

We’ve been blogging for a long time. We’ve focused on creating content that resonates, answers questions and helps you with your public relations. It’s our sincere goal to give back to the very types of businesses who help support us.

What do we write about?

We share tips, strategies and how-to articles that help owners of small businesses compete with large businesses. Through our content, we help you achieve your goals and become a more informed business manager.

If you want to up your game and improve your skills, master the tactics and strategies in each of these articles.

Our top ten most frequently read blog posts are:

  1. When to Send a Media Alert Rather Than a Press Release: A media alert or advisory is a critical component of your public relations strategy. Learn more about when to send one and what they contain.
  2. A Rant: Why I May Ignore Your Social Media Invitation: Don’t ignore a basic rule of social media etiquette. How often have you invited someone to Link, Follow or Friend without reminding the person how you are connected?
  3. New Hire Announcements and Press Releases: Your public relations strategy should include regular new hire press releases for media outlets in your industry, community and association. Learn how to write one.
  4. Blue Sky Thinking and Innovation: Blue sky thinking is more than just pie in the sky. It’s critical to innovation. Read our insights about how to cultivate it in your firm.
  5. Pros and Cons of Using a PayPal Button: What are the pros and cons of using a PayPal button rather than a full e-commerce solution? Our post helps you comprehend when a simple button works better.
  6. Ten low cost marketing and PR tactics that work: What low cost marketing tactics have small business owners used to gain new business? Here is a list of 10 tested tactics.
  7. Marketing and Public Relations Recommendations for Every Business: Learn which six marketing and public relations activities will be critical to your business success. Master the 6 tactics that will make a difference.
  8. Cognitive and gender bias in advertising: images are powerful, to be used with care: Images in advertising can sustain a bias or confirm a stereotype. Using images to tell a story, and avoid bias can forge new ways of acting and thinking.
  9. What Does it Mean to Take Your Business to the Next Level?: Want to take your biz to the next level? Use these insights to identify what the next level is, and what it is going to take to get there. Strategy matters.
  10. PR Important Dates and Holidays: Planning your PR and marketing around national holidays, wacky holidays and observances gives you an opportunity use creativity in your promotions and events.

 
Photo by Annie Spratt on Unsplash

PR is individual

Posted by Cheryl Smithem

What does a PR consultant do?

In the many years that I’ve worked with companies to develop public relations plans, the number one misperception regarding PR is that it is a simple set of activities that can be done quickly, like creating one widget after another from the same die.

Just as each owner of a company, entrepreneur or executive in a corporation is an individual, so is each firm’s public relations plan. Many clients perceive that PR is fast, simple, cheap and easy. Not true. There is no cookie cutter way to implement public relations. However, there are common activities for all clients. PR done correctly these tasks are time-intensive and require one-to-one approaches.

So, just what exactly is Public Relations? Is it sending press releases to media contacts? Staging attention grabbing activities at major public gathering points? Sending product samples to celebrities?

What is Public Relations?

Public relations is the on-going, continuous building of a wave of conversation and information in the public realm or segment. Public relations, as the name says, is the development of relationships with the many audiences of an enterprise. Public relations is cumulative, long-term and carries different perceptions as opposed to advertising, which I believe PR must support. Public relations creates an environment which makes sales and marketing activities successful. In many respects, public relations is the fertilizer for the seeds sown by advertising, sales and marketing activities.

I counsel and support my clients as they seek to:

  • Be authoritative (speak about issues, teach, present, comment)
  • Be alert to opportunity; Make the news
  • Look for trends and comment on them; Be visible in the news
  • Have a blog and post weekly
  • Seek out and communicate with bloggers, forums and others talking about subjects of interest to your consumers
  • Have whitepapers on the company website so the company is positioned with authority.
  • Conduct webinars
  • Take polls and announce the results
  • Post all news releases on the company website
  • Post all news releases on searchable sites and make sure your news is in a syndicated feed
  • Post information about the company in contributed articles on sites that accept contributed articles

Specifically, public relations activities can be organized into 5 discrete sets of activities:

  1. Media relations activity
    1. Media releases
      1. Creation of media materials (formerly called press kit)
    2. Creation of storylines and pitches to gain publicity
    3. Contributed articles
    4. Creation of white papers
    5. Responding to media / journalist’s queries for experts
    6. Coaching regarding on how to be interviewed
  2. Conversation origination, participation and relationship building
    1. Customers
    2. Bloggers
    3. Forums
    4. Bulletin Boards
  3. Special events
    1. Media events (such as photo opps or interesting attention getting activities)
    2. Customer focused events
    3. Product Launches
    4. Grand openings
    5. Expos/Trade shows
    6. Conferences development, planning and organization
    7. Development of Speaking engagements/Speaker’s Bureau
  4. Reputation management
    1. Being ready with talking points on potential issues with regard to a company
    2. Keeping management apprised of issues that might effect their company
    3. Coaching management on how to conduct interviews
  5. Crisis communications

In addition, your PR consultant should assist you and your firm by creating messages, to communication touch points. A PR pro helps you learn to stay on message and keep all messages aligned to support long-term goals.

Many entrepreneurs and companies conduct their own public relations activities, however, as an entrepreneur, it is hard to develop a company and stay focused on the specifics of your PR plan.

For those who need support, we recommend you consult a communications professional to develop plans, as well as coach and guide the firm to the plan’s implementation. It’s worth your time, money and energy to plan wisely and work with a professional.