Social media influencer marketing has become an increasingly popular tactic, with influencer campaigns on Instagram increasing nearly 200 percent last year. If your organization is new to the world of influencer marketing, you might be wondering what kind of results you can expect, especially if you work for a B2C company. Influencer marketing is a vague term that can mean different things to different people, but for the purpose of this blog post, influencer marketing is the practice of sharing your product with influential individuals on social media (sometimes they have blogs as well) with the intent of having those …
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If you’re not including video in your content marketing and social media strategy in 2019, do yourself a favor and stop reading this and start planning. Video content is becoming critically important in today’s social media landscape, and we’re not just saying this as marketers. There is data to prove it: Animoto found that 64 percent of consumers made a purchase after watching a branded video on Facebook. Aberdeen discovered that brands who utilize video see their revenue increase 49 percent faster than companies that don’t. Cisco predicts that video will account for 82 percent of global internet traffic. While …
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We’re rolling out a new series on the Gong Blog, and we couldn’t think of a better way to kick off the series than with an introduction to our newest Hodger, Evans Mandes. He joined the team at the end of 2018 and has hit the ground running. Chances are you haven’t met Evans yet, so to give you a head start, here’s a chance to get to know a little more about him. Tell us a little bit about yourself. I was born and raised in Northern Virginia, and I grew up playing baseball and golf. Still to this …
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Over the years, my Hodges colleagues have written quite a bit about Twitter on this blog. From explaining how Twitter works in 2009 and “Twitter is Dead” back in 2011 to building brand loyalty for your CEO on Twitter in 2016 and tips for increasing organic engagement last year, we’ve covered a lot of ground. Personally, I’m at a Twitter crossroads, and not just because Twitter may be making some changes to the like button and The Atlantic says it should kill the retweet. What started for me nearly 10 years ago in January 2009 as an enjoyable place to …
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A public relations strategy is like the stretch of I-95 between Richmond and Washington, D.C. No, really, stay with me on this one. It’s never really finished. It’s a work in progress. You’ll always work from Point A to Point B, but occasionally, you’ll take some detours, try new things, evaluate what works and what doesn’t and apply your learnings the next time you travel. A public relations strategy is similar in that you often know your starting point and ending point. And while you have in your mind what you need to do to get there, sometimes you have …
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Earlier this week, LinkedIn announced a few significant changes to Company Pages on its platform — which caused our ears to perk up a little bit. We’ve been using LinkedIn as a communications channel to tell our clients’ stories since Company Pages launched in 2010. Now, with big changes afoot, here’s the 30,000-foot view of the features that will be rolling out over the next few months and the impact they might have on your organization’s social strategy. User-friendly mobile experience for admins Admins can now post updates and respond to comments from the LinkedIn mobile app. Impact: This will …
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Many times, when companies have news to share, the instinctive thinking is ”we need a news release.” But nowadays in particular, defaulting automatically to a release is not always the right approach. (See my post here with alternatives to a traditional press release.) To start, let’s acknowledge that news releases can be an effective communications tool, just as you know when and how to use one. The first two questions that you should always be asking: what about this is relevant and interesting to the media, and what are our goals with this particular communication? If you and your team …
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There are a lot of great reasons for companies to pursue content marking. For one, according to Demand Metric, content marketing costs 62% less than traditional marketing and generates three times as many leads, per dollar. Meanwhile, Hubspot says that 61% of marketers say generating traffic and leads is their top challenge. Another reason that might prompt you to ramp up your content marketing efforts is seeing a competitor make a splash with theirs. But when you look at what another company is doing, it’s important to challenge your team to not just duplicate the end product of another company’s …
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Content marketing, even if you’re not the one executing the work, is a major investment of your time, energy and resources. A company can’t just hire an agency and say, “Hey, go ahead and launch this thing and report back on it in a month.” It doesn’t work that way. There are so many things to consider when it comes down to planning and executing a content marketing strategy, but here are three considerations to whet your whistle. Money Let’s go ahead and start with the topic no one likes to talk about. Money. The Content Marketing Institute found that …
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Anyone who has received an email from me may have noticed a rather abstruse quote as part of my email signature. It’s an observation by T.S. Eliot in which he asserts that “Being is intelligible only in terms of becoming.” I like it for two reasons. First, it’s derivative enough to demand that you ponder it a bit, like good poets are wont to do. But perhaps more importantly, I agree wholeheartedly with the sentiment, which if you were to reduce it to a bumper sticker basically means “you are what you do.” That’s really the essence of public relations. …
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