Tag: Marketing

language-equality-marketing-pr

How We Can Use Language to Promote Equality

Posted on | by Kirsty Goodlett

A few years ago, I made a conscious decision to stop saying, “you guys.” For someone who spent an equal amount of their childhood in both the north and the south, this decision carried some weight. Moving to Connecticut in middle school is an easy way to remove “y’all” from your vocabulary. In an effort to conform, “you guys” became my norm.

Lucky for all of us, with age comes confidence. As I found my place as a woman in the workplace, I became dedicated to gender equality, working to promote inclusion. “You guys” didn’t stand a chance.

The reason is simple: the phase is exclusionary.

In our society, we use language to emphasize pre-established situations. And we can use language to change them. Ultimately, this is the power in marketing and PR, which allows us to use language to impact people’s perception of the world. It’s no surprise that, as a marketer, I became hung up on just a couple of words.

Changing my vocabulary wasn’t easy. But after a few years, the phrase is (mostly) gone. The next step is to help others change their language too. Why? Because the state of women in the workforce is not changing, and we can use language to change that.

The State of Women in the Workforce Is Unchanging

The Women in the Workplace 2018 report by LeanIn.org and McKinsey found that “Companies report that they are highly committed to gender diversity. But that commitment has not translated into meaningful progress…Progress isn’t just slow. It’s stalled.” This is despite the fact that women are doing their part, obtaining bachelor’s degrees at a rate higher than men and asking for promotions and negotiating salaries at the same rate as men.

(If you need to be convinced that diversity in the workplace is important, there are plenty of reports that can help prove “gender-diverse business units have better financial outcomes than those dominated by one gender.”)

To Improve Diversity, Change Your Language

LeanIn.org and McKinsey seek to make improving diversity easy by providing six actions companies can take to find success. One of these is particularly relevant for our industry: foster an inclusive and respectful culture.

Language is a simple way to promote an inclusive culture. If you’re looking to change your own actions at work, be considerate about the language you use. Select words and phrases that are more inclusive. Because language is so ingrained in us, making an effort to be more inclusive will take some work, but if you take a collaborative attitude and give yourself the grace to make a slip up, your language will begin to improve.

How to Ask Others to Change Their Language

Once you’ve begun the process of changing your own language (it will be a process), you can begin to help others change theirs. Through trial and error, I have developed some personal best practices when it comes to asking others to change their language. (Interestingly, the strategy I use is similar to one I use at work to advocate for a project or cause I believe in.)

  1. Share a personal story. Sharing personal stories at work requires a balance—we don’t want to get too personal—but by sharing how we view the world, we can help others see situations through our eyes.
  2. Share the research. Do your research to understand why what your advocating for is important.
  3. Suggest a next step. Once your audience is bought in to your idea, they’re ready to take the next step. Share a suggestion for how to move forward.
  4. Be supportive. Changing ingrained habits is hard! Give people the benefit of the doubt and be there to help them with a supportive, cheerful attitude when (not if) they slip up.

I found success with this approach at a previous job. One of my colleagues came to work anxious after reading an article arguing against the use of “you guys” and feeling concerned about how his use of that phrase may have impacted those around them. I was glad he felt comfortable talking about this with me, and I used the opportunity to share my story of changing my language, provided research into why it was important to do so, suggested some alternative phrases he could use and cheered him on as he practiced shifting his language.

Steps You Can Take to Promote an Inclusive Workplace

If you’re ready to take it even further, some great resources exist!

She+ Geeks Out’s blog post on covering and passing in the workplace provides some great tips for supporting our colleagues so they feel comfortable being themselves at work.

A couple of my favorites (that helped inspire this blog post)…

  • “Be explicit in your language. If someone says something discriminatory, say something to make it clear that that language isn’t tolerated.
  • Share your own story of difference.”

In addition to making our workplaces more inclusive, it is also important to set up practices that promote inclusive hiring. Another post by She+ Geeks Out has some great tips for mitigating bias in hiring. Writers like me will be interested in this tip, “If you’re struggling to get candidates to respond to your job posting, you may want to start with your job description.” Inclusive descriptions that remove adjectives typically associated with one gender (example: ‘driven’ = masculine, ‘dependable’ = feminine), go a long way to encourage a variety of candidates.

Take Your Changes in Stride as You Promote Language Equality

As you make an effort to change your actions and support women’s equality this month, give yourself grace. Changing habits is hard. But remember, I’m here to cheer you on as you make strides. Just get in touch.

7 Steps to Successful LinkedIn Marketing

Posted on | by Aidan Griffin

In recent weeks, we’ve explored how to develop a content strategy, how to set up a social media program from scratch, and how to use thought leadership bylines to earn media coverage. All of these content approaches complement each other and help reinforce a brand’s identity. But the power of the written, or recorded, word can only get as far as the audience you’ve built to consume it. Luckily, there’s a way to amplify the reach and impact of this owned and earned content that we find quite valuable and our clients are consistently curious about: LinkedIn Sponsored Content.

 Adding a paid element to your PR program helps bridge the gap between traditional PR and traditional marketing, which shouldn’t operate in silos anyway. We like to take a strategic view of LinkedIn promotion, using a step-by-step practice to develop and continually optimize a highly-targeted LinkedIn ads campaign that complements existing content development and organic social media initiatives. The approach outlined below helps identify hyper-relevant prospects, target them with the right content, understand what content to create in the future and serve your company’s ultimate marketing goals.

 Step 1: Identify Ideal Audience

As with any marketing process, you can’t succeed if you don’t know who you’re talking to or trying to reach. But if you know who the decision makers, influencers or buyers are that you want to influence with your content, you can target them at a granular level on LinkedIn. By combing criteria, you can hit a hyper-targeted user set and ensure you’re not spending money promoting content to users who will never make a difference for your bottom line.  You can target audiences in three ways:

  • Demographics – Job function, seniority, company name, geographic region, industry, etc.
  • Interest-based targeting – Group membership, skills, fields of study
  • Company audience data – Target account lists your sales team is using (Note, you’ll need a lot of names for this to be effective, but it guarantees a precise audience.)

Step 2: Define Campaign Goal and Associated Content Formats

Once you know who you want to read your content and ultimately to engage with your brand as a potential customer, you’ll need to define the goal of your campaign. This will determine the kind of content you promote. For content you don’t already have, you’ll need to focus on developing it as part of a comprehensive owned, earned and paid media program. For the following goals, you’ll want to emphasize the associated content:

 Brand awareness

  • Company blog posts on LinkedIn
  • Press releases
  • Long-form posts
  • Visuals/videos
  • Product announcements
  • Promotion of tradeshow attendance

Thought leadership

  • eBook, whitepaper, video, research
  • Industry commentary
  • Long-form posts
  • Guest blogs on other blogs
  • Industry trends or data

 Lead generation

  • eBooks­
  • Webinars
  • How-to guides
  • Blog posts with calls-to-action (CTA)
  • “Freemium” downloads/gated content
  • Industry-related reports

Step 3: Develop an Editorial Calendar

Once you know which content to share, set up an editorial calendar – this will help you to visualize the rhythm of content being published and ensure that you’re addressing different aspects of your brand’s value proposition. Having everything written out will also help make sure you share different forms of content to keep things fresh and engaging for all members of your target audience, depending on their interest, challenge, or stage in the buying process:

  • Awareness: Have realized and expressed symptoms of potential problems or an opportunity.
  • Consideration: Have clearly defined and given a name to their problem or opportunity, actively looking for ways to address the issue.
  • Decision: Have defined their solution strategy, method or approach and ready to take the next step.

Step 4: Identify Assets and Messaging to Promote Content

Identify and/or develop compelling ad copy (150 words or less) and visual content that make readers want to click on or download the content you’re promoting. If you can’t sell your content, no one will read it no matter how informative or well-written it is.

Hint: Include calls to action, statistics, quotes, actionable text.

Step 5: Determine Ad Method

Sponsored Content

Sponsored content campaigns are promoted through paid channels based on posts you have also made directly on your Company Page. They are best used to attract new followers to the company website or landing page and drive engagement with company-specific content.

Company Page posts (status updates) can be promoted in the newsfeeds of both followers and non-followers whose demographics have been specifically targeted. This is a good option for posting blog content, articles about your company or to showcase commentary, award wins, customer or product announcements, and more.

Direct Sponsored Content

The direct sponsored content option allows you to post content directly in the LinkedIn feed without the content originating on your LinkedIn Company Page. This is useful if you don’t want the post to clutter your company’s LinkedIn profile page, but otherwise operates the same as sponsored content.

Website Ads

LinkedIn also offers more traditional website ads, which lead readers to the company website and often start at $2.00 per click and up. These are best leveraged for sending interested parties to your website to download gated content – whitepapers, e-books, case studies, webinars – for lead generation, or to product pages for direct sales promotion. If you choose this option, you should set up goal tracking in Google Analytics to count how many contact form submissions are received as a result of a given ad. Then judge what your cost per lead is and determine if it is delivering appropriate ROI.

Step 6: Set a Budget

Finally, you’ll need to decide what your total monthly budget for LinkedIn ads will be, and how you’ll allocate your spend – either emphasizing CPM (cost per 1000 impressions) if your goal is brand visibility, or CPC (cost per click) if your goal is lead generation or website traffic conversion.

LinkedIn Ads work on a bidding process, so depending on the audience you compete for, the price will change to show an ad. Bids are only processed at $.01 more than second-highest bid, so you can set your bids at the top limit of what you consider a fair value for the click or impression.

Step 7: Reporting/Continuous Improvement

It’s essential to monitor and analyze the key metrics of your campaigns on an ongoing basis. This review process is critical for finding opportunities for improvement to your campaigns, whether it’s improving reach, accuracy of targeting, CPC or CPM, website conversions, engagement and much more.

You should use the LinkedIn campaign manager to review all the metrics available on the platform itself, but also refer to your Google Analytics reports to see how successful you’ve been at driving increased traffic to your website as a whole or to specific landing pages on the site. There are also tools like LinkedIn Insight Tag to your website that will help you evaluate deeper insights about your campaign and users to continue improve your LinkedIn, content marketing, and overall marketing goals.

To learn more about how LinkedIn can help drive brand awareness and lead generation as part of your PR or marketing program, feel free to reach out to me directly – [email protected] – and don’t forget to follow Ketner Group Communications on LinkedIn and Twitter for more valuable tips like these.

 

A Marketers Christmas

Posted on | by Ketner Group

Moving Beyond The 30 Second Super Bowl Ad Spot

This blog was provided by our intern, Daniela Ramirez.

The biggest sports event of the year, the Super Bowl, is one of America’s most highly celebrated events. Millions tune in every year to watch two teams go up against one another, competing for the NFL’s biggest title. But this year I tuned in for a different reason, the ads.

We all know how expensive these advertising spots for the Super Bowl are and generally only major brands can afford to make the investment. However, I often find myself thinking, “Why would you spend all of that money? How do these high profile brands measure their ROI for a spot that can cost businesses over $5 million? Is it even worth it to have your name out there for 30 seconds when it has the opportunity to be skipped over, muted or even fast-forwarded in today’s DVR world?”

Companies often use the Super Bowl as an opportunity to move a brand or product forward in the marketplace, pioneer forward thinking and engage with their consumers. With this in mind, many brands are moving beyond the traditional TV platform to share their message and create a bigger strategy out of their 30-second ad spot. This is where public relations and marketing come in.

Since brand’s now have more opportunities and channels at their disposal, they can create and drive an entire campaign around one ad, such as Lumber 84 did this year. The televised “The Full Journey” spot prompted users to head to their website to discover the uncut film and find out what happens at the end of the journey. What you found was not a simple advertising campaign, but a powerful statement that has made this brand that was previously only well-known in the building supply industry, a household name. Shortly after the spot aired, Lumber 84’s website crashed as a result of social media conversation and publicity around the advertisement’s message.

Airbnb’s Super Bowl spot was part of larger campaign launch. Shortly after their “We Accept” spot aired, I received an email to my inbox as a call to action to learn more about their brand and #weaccept campaign.

Photo taken from Airbnb’s email

 

After clicking the “Learn More” button, I was led to a blog post that provided me with more information about the campaign and Airbnb’s corporate social responsibility initiatives.

 

Photo taken from Airbnb’s website

 

These cross-channel marketing strategies are one of the many tactics communications professionals are using to make their advertising dollars go further. And, we saw this not just after the ads aired but before kickoff. Many brands teased their spots before the Super Bowl event to generate buzz, create curiosity and engage with their audience.

Whether it’s before, during or after the big game, ultimately, brands need to implement a strategy that will resonate with their audience. But the challenge is figuring out how to do that. In the age of digital, brands are always looking for new ways to break through the noise and be top of mind. No matter the medium, it’s now more important than ever for advertising, marketing and public relations professionals to join forces and communicate one cohesive message while keeping the consumer in the middle of the conversation.

 

 

 

 

The Inescapability of the Word ‘Millennial’

Posted on | by Ketner Group

millennialsThis blog was written by our intern, Kamilla Rahman.

If you’ve ever surfed the web for more than 10 minutes, you’ve definitely come across the word millennial at least five times. People are constantly talking about millennials, what they’re doing, what they want, what they will be doing, how they react and how to resonate with them. Even the KG team has been known to write about millennials on behalf of our clients from time to time – here is a recent example.

According to Investopedia, “a millennial is the given name to the generation born between 1982 and 2004…this generation is often associated with technology and social media.” In the last couple of years, there has been a more specific consensus. A millennial is basically someone in their 20’s or 30’s.

The world is infatuated with millennials, and as a millennial, I honestly don’t get it. I was flipping through a few articles the other day and almost every article referenced the millennial generation. I do understand millennials are important, especially when regarding technology and retail. We’re a different generation, we’re nontraditional, we’re viewed as more independent, we have different expectations and we are more technologically advanced than our parents and grandparents with a tremendous amount of buying power.

But why the obsession?

Some of the headlines read:

Though all of these articles are extremely insightful, as a millennial, I don’t understand why all of these brands and companies are constantly trying to appeal to us. The word is everywhere. It’s basically inescapable and everyone seems to think that appealing to a millennial is the magic key to all things holy and great.

My brother and I are both millennials. He was born in 1985 and I was born in 1995. Throughout most of our lives, our purchasing habits, interests and even technological awareness have been different. Though they are closer today than they have ever been, they’re still completely different.

He’s 31, he goes to work, has meetings all day, buys suits and dress pants, goes to CrossFit, has nice dinners with his beloved girlfriend, just bought a house, gets a beer with his buds, checks his iPad for emails, pretty much knows what he’s doing with his life and occasionally has a late night out. I, on the other hand, am 21. I’m about to start my senior year of college, I intern, I’m an avid online shopper, I go out with my friends almost every weekend, I study, am always on the move and suffer withdrawal symptoms when I don’t have my phone for more than 45 minutes.

The only things we really have in common are that we stay busy and know technology. I may be wrong here, but that just doesn’t seem like the proper way to target consumers, especially in retail. The word millennial is too broad. It encompasses people that are in completely different stages of their lives. To me, focusing efforts around millennials is just an over-followed trend.

Don’t get me wrong; appealing to millennials has definitely shifted the way marketers appeal to consumers. It has become intuitive, personal and brands have figured out how to market in a way that is additive to peoples’ lives. But if you think about it, don’t generations older and younger want that as well?

In retail and technology, a new goal is personalization; so my question is why do these industries continue to obsess over a market that appears to be so diverse and vague?

What to do on the first day of your summer internship

Posted on | by Ketner Group

You’re probably feeling some nerves. Finals are finally over and summer is finally here but the first day of a summer internship is likely making you feel a little anxious.

16719524657_06f8bd29de_b
courtesy of Creative Commons

Lucky for you, I’m here to share some good news. Having both experienced the first day as an intern (four times!) and a boss (twice!), everyone feels excited and a little nervous about the first day.

Plus, an internship is a great opportunity to uncover your strengths and try out a variety of projects. It will help you get the job you want and it will also help you understand who you are and what you can offer.

In order to help you prepare for that first day, and the days to come, I’ve come up with three Do’s to ensure you make a great first impression and create a lasting positive impression. Say hello to a guaranteed recommendation!

Do: Ask Questions

Curiosity shows engagement and interest. The first day is all about getting the lay of the land. Questions will help you figure out how the company is run and how you can best support the goals your employer is hoping you can help achieve. Your questions should be aimed at understanding first and achieving second. Questions will help you to understand how the company works and what you’ll do. But they’ll also help you figure out how you can best succeed on a project you’ve been assigned. Remember, you’re interning to support the company but you’re also interning in order to learn! Questions ensure you impact the company the best way you can and prepare you for your next job.

Do: Dress the Part

Ah, the blessing and the curse of clothing. No matter whether you love it or hate it, our clothes represent who we are and reflect our opinion of any situation. For the first day of your summer internship, you’ll want to dress to reflect your respect of your new organization and fit in with the company culture. Did everyone wear jeans and a t-shirt when you interviewed? Go for a tailored but relaxed look: black slacks, a knee length dress or a sweater and blouse. Consider wearing your new suit as separates and save the jeans for your second month on the job. Did everyone wear suits and tie when you interviewed? Match their clothes and find yourself something equally buttoned up. Nordstrom Rack and Neiman Marcus Last Call are great resources for a college budget.

Do: Your Homework

Help make your first day less stressful and ensure you make a great first impression by spending an hour or so preparing for your job. First, you’ll want to get familiar with your company: check out the website, make sure you know the name of your new employer and figure out the route you’ll travel to get to the office. Second, set some expectations and goals for your work. How do you want this job to help you get your next job? How do you want this job to set you up for your dream career? What do you want to learn? Who do you want to meet? By understanding these answers before you even set foot in the office, you’ll ensure you achieve what you want. That makes for a better future and a more fun, relaxing present.

Now, you have the tools you need to start your new internship. By encouraging yourself to ask questions, dressing for success and doing you’re homework, you’re guaranteed to have a great first day. And remember, you already completed the hardest part of getting ready for your first day: you were hired. You’re already well on your way.

How to Find a PR Internship

Posted on | by Ketner Group

This blog was written by our intern, Cambria Sawyer.

That whole “chicken or the egg” question may be archaic, but it’s more relevant than you think.

Walking into your freshman year at a university and landing that first internship is not particularly high in the priorities list – but it should be. When it’s all you can do to find time to feed yourself in between classes, class projects and research papers, how can something that seems so far away be so immediately important?

The thing is, when it comes to internship interviews, you need some experience to prove you’re up for the job, which is kind of hard to do, considering you’ve never worked anywhere before. Classic chicken or the egg.

But the puzzle can be solved, and here’s how:

Experience
Get involved early. This is how to get over the “lack of experience” hump.

First things first, join a club. This is why starting early is such a big deal, because it takes a while to absorb enough information from that membership to be worthwhile. For public relations students, joining the Public Relations Student Society of America (PRSSA) is an excellent starting point. As a member, you will have the opportunity to participate in third-party mentorship programs, volunteer activities, networking events and PR agency tours. In other words, the good stuff.

The organization doesn’t have to revolve around PR either to be meaningful, but PR is always relevant to any group wanting to stay afloat. Run for an officer position that handles communications, PR or social media for a club. Any way you can get your hands on some real-life application of the things you’re learning in class will make you a stronger candidate.

Resume
You can be the most qualified person they interview and still not get the job. How? The way you present yourself can make or break you, and it starts with the first impression you make, your resume.

First, make sure it’s one page. It shows that you can pinpoint what is important and convey it concisely, and in reality, it’s just easier to read.

Image courtesy of Flikr
Image courtesy of Flikr

Second, make it your own. No need to glue sequins on it or anything, but find a way to personalize it in a way that reflects who you are and helps you stand out, but is still professional.

Third, do not send it off as a Word doc. While converting it to a PDF shows a heightened level of professionalism, it also safeguards the formatting of your resume. It may look fabulous to you on your Mac computer, but your interviewer is seeing awkward spacing and weird margins on their PC.

Interview
There is a reason people interview candidates instead of just look at a resume; they want to see what you’re like.

Here are three steps to ace the interview:

  1. Research. Make sure you become familiar with the company and the interviewer, if you know who it is. If they specialize in something, look into that industry a bit. Read up on the clients they work for and what kind of work they do for them. Check out the interviewer’s LinkedIn page to understand their background and what they do at the company. Your choice to research correlates with the amount of investment and ingenuity you will bring to the job – something an employer definitely wants to see.

    Photo courtesy of Pixabay
    Photo courtesy of Pixabay
  1. Ask Questions. This one is pretty straightforward. Actually have some questions in mind when they ask the standard, “do you have any questions for me?” This shows that you’re engaged, inquisitive and are there to learn more – which is the whole point of the internship in the first place, right?

 

  1. Be Yourself. Sorry for the cliché, but it’s important. Be professional and unique, but not in a way that misrepresents who you are as a person. If you get a job pretending to be someone you’re not, it won’t be a good fit. When you get a job offer from your future employer to whom you were completely genuine with, both you and the company will grow – because that office is exactly where you should be.

 

Happy interviewing!

Gifs: Redefining Interpersonal Communication

Posted on | by Ketner Group

A “gif” is defined as “a computer file format for the compression and storage of digital video images.” (Thanks, Merriam-Webster.) But most recently the term has come to define the looped video used in reaction to a situation or to add “color commentary” to an ongoing conversation between groups of people or to one’s social media post.

Suffice it to say, I am a BIG fan of them.

Since Slack announced its integration with GIPHY two years ago, Ketner Group’s inter-office /giphy tags have provided comedic relief to pretty much any situation we find ourselves in or in one-off conversations we may be having with other team members. I even find myself having entire conversations via /giphy. (Personally I’m partial to Game of Thrones and Beyoncé gifs. Given the recent release of the new season of GoT and LEMONADE, I’m pleased I’ll have a lot more content to work with.)

via GIPHY


via GIPHY

Gifs really are the new expression of emotion or reactions through a two-dimensional medium, be it in interoffice messages or texts with friends. Some might argue that emojis are the current “it” thing, and while I appreciate a good emoji conversation, nothing really says “I-just-secured-awesome-coverage-for-my-client-and-didn’t-break-a-sweat” like Michelle Pfeiffer in Grease 2.


via GIPHY

Or when receiving an unexpected complement, I look to a children’s classic.


via GIPHY

Many brands and companies have introduced their own branded gif keyboards, including Kik with their partnership program, Starbucks with their Frappuccino featured keyboard and Mississippi State’s athletics focused keyboard, to increase their reach with consumers.

With these brands creating their own keyboards and countless others in development, it’s generating a whole new vehicle for us to engage with those brands and use those brands as a means of self-expression, much like we would clothes or accessories. This integrates brands further into our everyday lives, blurring the distinction between marketing and organic content, including GIPHY’s head of business development.

As my parting gift, I’ll leave you with the hilarious fail gifs and let you see if you can figure out which ones are branded.


via GIPHY
via GIPHY

via GIPHY
via GIPHY

via GIPHY
via GIPHY

Scoring a Perfect 10 on Earth Day

Posted on | by Ketner Group

This blog was written by our intern, Cambria Sawyer.

Cause marketing is a lot like college.

I first started to see this connection in my journey as a Ketner Group intern back and forth from the office to the jungle (a.k.a. campus). You see, college is a balancing act.

Professors assign you more hours of homework than you have in a day. Somehow I’ve managed to survive off of cheese sticks and grapes for the past week, but the grocery store is in my imminent future. I need to go to the gym, steel drums practice, a club officer meeting and still go out with friends tonight– and all I want to do is take a nap.

Figuring out how to fit all the pieces together so they make sense and reach a goal is a delicate art; the same type of challenge comes with devising an effective cause marketing campaign.

If you break it down, it has two, equally important parts: the cause and the marketing, but putting the two together is easier said than done. Brands have to be careful when they choose a campaign. It must be simple, interesting and brand-relevant, while not appearing insincere. Digiday explains the stakes well in an article warning brands of “cause fatigue,” where poorly balanced campaigns cause consumers to stop taking corporate social responsibility seriously.

This Earth Day, I want to take a few brands from the apparel and fashion industry and rate them on a 1-10 scale for their Earth Day cause marketing balance skills.

 

Photo courtesy of Amour Vert
Photo courtesy of Amour Vert

Amour Vert
Rating: 4
The sustainable fashion brand’s “Buy a Tee Plant a T(r)ee” campaign is fine, but that’s kind of the point– it’s just fine. While the rhyme is catchy and the cause is admirable, the connection between the fashion brand and planting trees is not particularly strong. Not to mention this is definitely not the first time a campaign identical to this has been launched, so it also looses points on originality. It’s clear to a consumer that this campaign is more about the marketing.

 

Burton
Rating: 8
A brand for the earth-conscious adrenaline junky, Burton takes environmental campaigns to the next level.

Photo courtesy of Burton
Photo courtesy of Burton

Their most creative plan to save the world (yes, they have many) is, in my opinion, the Burton x Mountain Dew campaign, where recycled plastic bottles are converted into the thread Burton uses to make some of its equipment and athletic wear. It’s unique, but still hyper-relevant to what they do as a brand. Where the brand falls short is its lack of focus on a specific campaign. While it undoubtedly earns a perfect 10 conservation-wise for facilitating a whopping 11 separate eco-campaigns, the marketing aspect suffers. As the Harvard Business Review advises, keep it simple. There’s a fine line between impressing and overwhelming your customers.

KEEN
Rating: 10
The footwear brand’s motto is “Follow Your Feet,” so that’s what it’s doing– and it’s awesome. KEEN’s Live Monumental Film Tour campaign began as a cross-country road trip 10 months ago in a yellow RV. As the brand ambassadors travelled 7,500 miles from Oregon to Washington, D.C., a film crew captured their efforts as they received more than 40,000 petition signatures to protect 3 million acres of public land, according to Cause Marketing Forum.

Photo courtesy of KEEN
Photo courtesy of KEEN

The grand finale? A yellow-carpet movie premier of the film on Earth Day and film tour to follow. The campaign directly correlates with the hiking- and travel-oriented merchandise the brand offers. Even if it wasn’t relevant, the idea itself is so intriguing you forget it’s a marketing move in the first place. What’s even better? Two of the five natural areas the KEEN campaign focuses on have been declared as “protected” since the outset of the movement, a tangible achievement consumers can really take to heart when evaluating the brand.

A perfect 10. Nailed it.

To Press Release or Not Press Release, That is the Question

Posted on | by Catherine Seeds
Little Mermaid
Image courtesy of Creative Commons

As PR professionals, our main goal is to drive and secure coverage for our clients. As Ursula the sea witch from Disney’s “The Little Mermaid” says, “It’s what we do. It’s what we live for!”

In our last blog, we talked about the value of the modern press release and the benefits releases generate for PR campaigns. But according to our friends at NonProfitPR.org and as PR folks worldwide know, press releases are not always the best course of action and can often be just a big waste of time and money. See below for examples of when to not go down the press release path:

  • Announcing an event
    Many companies, private and public, often use a press release to announce an event such as attendance at a conference or the launch of a propriety event. Even though you’ve taken the time to craft a release and send it to local media, rarely will you see these releases published among general media. Instead, consider listing on a community page or industry calendar. You can also utilize social networking sites such as LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter to highlight the news of your event and motivate your network into action.
  • Announcing a great story
    When you have a great story to tell, look beyond a press release. Whether it’s to highlight a successful implementation with a customer or a longer feature story on a specific topic or trend, writing a release may give you some coverage, but there could be a better way to highlight this news. This is the perfect opportunity to give the scoop to a journalist to write a more in-depth story and publish your news. Not only do you begin to develop great media contacts, you end up with a great story about your organization.
Image courtesy of Creative Commons
Image courtesy of Creative Commons
  • Sometimes it’s just not newsworthy
    Some companies assume they have to send a particular number of press releases each month or year in order to engage in strategic public relations. It’s never a good strategy to send releases simply to fill a quota. Sending the media lots of non-newsworthy releases (awards, speaking opportunities, small product updates, etc.) could cause journalists to stop reading your news altogether. When this happens, even when you have something truly newsworthy, it’s possible you still end up with no news coverage through no fault of your own. It’s much better to objectively analyze the worthiness of your announcement from a reporter’s perspective and then decide if a release is really the way to go.

There are many ways to have your news heard beyond the press release. From utilizing social networking, industry calendar listings and even pitching directly to journalists, picking the right strategy can provide better coverage and more public awareness, all at a more efficient cost.

New Year, New Site, New Baby!

Posted on | by Ketner Group

This has been an exciting couple of months at Ketner Group. As we covered in our last few blogs we had a very successful NRF with 11 of our 18 clients attending, making announcements and holding over 80 meetings with analysts and media.

Jeff Meets Jack!Behind the scenes, our team has been furiously working on building this brand new site that you see today. Countless hours went in on our end cultivating the content and working with Creative Pickle to create this beautiful site! We thank them for their patience and creative leadership.

Thirdly, and most exciting, we are happy to announce that our fearless leader, Jeff, and his wife, Molly, are
now grandparents! Their daughter and son-in-law welcomed Jack Andrew Winterroth in to the world at 9:30pm on Wednesday, February 3. He is a healthy 6 pounds and 12 ounces. We are thrilled to welcome this newest addition into the Ketner Group family. Congratulations Jeff, Molly and the entire Ketner clan!