One Critical Webpage All Small Business Marketers Need to Bookmark
Posted by 
M. Sharon Baker
M. Sharon Baker
Hubspot’s Internet Marketing Whitepapers & ebooks page is simply indispensable for content marketers. Here’s Why.
Creating Content for Three New Customers
Posted by M. Sharon Baker
M. Sharon Baker
Writing and creating content for customers keeps me busy and steals time from keeping this blog updated.
I’ve added three new clients in the past month or two and want to share them with you.
I’m the perfect target audience for the largest of the three, the Gail Harker Creative Studies Center.
If you’ve read my Longer bio and contact web page, you know I once thought of pursuing an art career and that I like to draw.
I first learned about Gail when I wrote about a fiber art exhibit at the La Conner Quilt and Textile Museum for the La Conner Weekly News.
Copyright Lisa Harkins
The Gail Harker Creative Studies Center moved to La Conner and now occupies the town’s architecturally significant barn, which was remodeled in the late 1990s.
If you’ve visited La Conner, you’ve seen it as you’ve come into town.
The center offers color, design, stitch and fiber art courses, taught by internationally known artist, author and educator Gail Harker.
Gail basically has a master’s degree in texture and fiber art as well as contemporary embroidery, also known as stitch.
More than 1,500 students have studied at the Center, which offers professional and diploma programs in design and stitch. Several of her students have gone on to win national and international acclaim.
Gail has a wonderful blog; its well written, has fabulous photos, showcases students and their art and contains lively guest posts by her students.
Copyright Jarina Moss
But only her students seem to know about the blog, and the school, so I’m helping her turn up the volume and get noticed.
First, I created a press room page for the website, and then I wrote a press release about her move to La Conner.
We leveraged the press release to pitch the media about the Center’s graduation exhibition, which helped 350 people learn more about the colorful art that takes place at the studio.
copyright Gail Harker
Now, we’re telling the world about the center’s first online course, Level 1 Color Studies.
In addition to generating interest in local newspapers and magazines, I will be looking for blogs Gail can guest post on, associations she can join or learn from.
I will also add the center to the worldwide radar screen by getting listed on education sites.
We’ll also be leveraging her base of students, and have created an email campaign that highlights content pertaining to the onlince color studies course.
And I will be pitching Gail’s story and the Center to national trade and women’s publications.
I’ll be writing about my other two new clients, Intuit’s Small Business Blog, and BB Ranch, a new Seattle butcher shop, later this week.
In the meantime, check out Gail’s blog and send me any PR ideas or suggestions you may have, or simply tell me what you like about Gail’s blog.
Bookmark it or sign up for the RSS feed – you’ll enjoy looking at the amazing art these women create.
Case Study: DKA Architecture – Contributed Articles Boost Awareness For Architect Firm
Posted by M. Sharon Baker
M. Sharon BakerSituation
Increase Awareness of Green, Sustainable Practices; Responsible ReUse Practices
As the world began building green, Seattle’s DKA Architecture decided to launch a major branding and positioning campaign.
The 25-year old architecture firm, known largely for the work of its founder Donald King, wanted to establish its name as a leading green player but also distinguish itself from the green hype.
Marketing director and managing partner Rico Quirindongo wanted the campaign to demonstrate DKA’s “commitment to building community through responsive design – design based upon the awareness that one does not build in a vacuum, but within a set of resources, cultures, practices, and values that radiate beyond the individual project.”
Quirindongo also wanted to keep DKA’s name prominent in what was becoming a very competitive marketplace as the recession and credit crunch hit.
Overnight projects were shelved, scrapped or canceled sending the commercial construction industry into a tailspin. DKA Architecture didn’t suffer much of a dent in its business because it operates in a different sector of the marketplace: working on nonprofit, government and school projects.
But competition for those projects increased greatly as those operating in the commercial sector started bidding on government projects. The increased competition made it even harder to stand out.
Approach
Establish Expertise in Local Publications with Bylined Contributed Articles
Part of Quirindongo’s branding and positioning plan included showcasing DKA’s good works in the community with contributed articles.
Writing articles about green practices and DKA projects on a regular basis increased DKA’s visibility and established the firm as a green expert. The articles showcased the firm’s green design skills, detailrf cost savings, and showed how much care and thought around culture, values and core functions DKA considers when tackling a renovation, remodel or new construction.
As a licensed architect who also juggles several projects as well as DKA’s marketing and new business development efforts, Quirindongo was extremely busy. While he enjoys contributing articles to industry publications, he knew tackling additional writing chores as part of the branding campaign would be way down on his weekly to-do list.
Asking DKA project managers to take on the task wasn’t a viable option due to their busy schedules.
So he turned to M. Sharon Baker, a freelance writer who was helping DKA write articles for a client newsletter.
“After doing a great job on Seattle Public Schools BEX III capital projects articles, it was easy to see that Sharon was the logical choice to work with us for articles on our rebranding,” said Quirindongo.
“Sharon has an excellent writing style that communicates easily,” he said. “As a journalist, she has relationships with local and regional editors and understands what is needed to create a good story while at the same time advancing our messaging.”
Baker also know where and when to place the articles that best fit DKA’s target audience.
Quirindongo liked that he could convey information in brief phone interviews, and that Baker didn’t need a lot of hand holding and was good at guiding the process from beginning – brainstorming ideas to writing the article with minimal revisions, to gathering photos – to end, which involved working with a publication’s editors and alerting company executives when articles ran.
The resulting articles ran in Seattle’s Daily Journal of Commerce, The Puget Sound Business Journal and Northwest Construction, among other publications. The articles included:
- A Welcoming Home for ACRS
- South Shore Campus Creates A Hub for the Community
- African Americans and sustainability: It’s all about ‘making do’
- Social Sustainability column for the PSBJ
- Nathan Hale School for NW Construction
- Mental health clinic breaking ground in Burien
Results
“Sharon’s contributions were a key part of our achieving our goals for our branding and positing campaign,” Quirindongo said. “In addition, we had Sharon write two press releases as part of our 25th Anniversary campaign and pitch that news to several local newspapers and trade publications.”
DKA received many calls from past clients, partners and potential new customers every time an article or press release ran. And DKA earned ongoing recognition that Quirindongo knows further established DKA as a major player in designing, building and managing sustainable green projects.
Learn More about M. Sharon Baker’s Contributed Article and Case Study Services
ACRS, NAAM Photos © DKA Architecture
Great Content Idea: Case Studies Help Customers See Your (& My) Success
Posted by M. Sharon Baker
M. Sharon Baker
Telling a story about how you solved someone’s problem is a powerful way to show potential customers what it is like to do business with you.
Telling a story is a much better way to capture someone’s attention than a product sheet, a features list or short testimonial.
These stories, often called case studies or customer success stories, allow prospects to imagine that they would enjoy similar results should they decide to be your customer.
Actual results and direct quotes demonstrate just how much the customer benefited by working with you.
I love writing case studies, and have written many for RainToday.com and other clients this year.
But creating them to highlight my own work is a bit problematic because many of my customers can’t share actual results due to confidentiality reasons.
How MicroVentures Landed 1,000 Investors in Just 4 Months
That’s why I enjoyed writing the case study on MicroVentures for RainToday.
Not only did Bill Clark enjoy some great success, but I helped create some of it by helping with his press releases, tips on writing a successful HARO pitch, and writing some of his guest blog posts.
The case study followed the conventional four-part formula:
- Describe the customer and provide some background about them to set the scene.
- Show the problems or challenges they faced.
- Discuss the solution you provided.
- Summarize the results your customer achieved with your help.
In MicroVenture’s case, Clark needed to prove the concept, and to do that, he needed a critical mass of investors.
He couldn’t advertise and was hamstrung by securities regulations that restricted his promotional activities for the first year in business.
His plan was four-fold:
- Create a Blog to help potential investors why his crowdfunding plan was different
- Use Press Releases to Gain Media Attention and thus, third party endorsements
- Pitch ideas to the Media and follow HARO
- Write sponsored guest posts
The Results?
A single Venture Beat sponsored post drove 700 to 1,000 unique visitors to the MicroVentures website the day it posted, Clark says. He typically gained between 50 to 100 investors from the sponsored post traffic.
The combination of press releases, sponsored guest posts, and pitching the media helped Clark land nearly 600 investors in just four months, bringing MicroVentures’ total investors to 1,000 in less than one year.
That critical mass of investors validated MicroVentures’ two-fold concept, which is to help companies raise money quickly by pooling the resources of many investors, and to give new investors access to opportunities they may not otherwise see and allow them to invest smaller sums.
You can read the full case – just email me or sign up through RainToday’s free trial on the MicroVentures case study here.
I am always looking for new case study subjects for RainToday. Email me and I’ll send you a list of what the requirements are. Or better yet, I’ll create a post about it.
Have you used case studies on your website? What response have you seen by using case studies to help nurture prospects?
Photo: ©M. Sharon Baker
The Power of a Press Release: Forget the Obit
Posted by M. Sharon Baker
M. Sharon Baker
There’s been much talk in the past year about press releases being dead and ineffective.
No one reads them, and journalists don’t care. That’s what some publicists and social media experts have said.
I’m not in that camp – as a journalist and as a publicist. Here’s why: Press Releases still work to get the media’s attention and to reach customers.
I helped a new client send out a press release on July 26. The client is a new charity with a heady task: get the nation to pay down the national debt by sending in donations.
The $14.6 Trillion national debt has been the news, and a looming Aug. 2 deadline was generating a lot of attention.
Because hitching your news to a national trend is a great way to get attention, we decided to ride the wave of news surrounding the debt ceiling limit deadline.
We wrote the release playing on the crisis, and sent it out via PR Web. The intention was to send the release out into the world, letting PR Web’s vast network carry the release to all points because the issue is national, and the intended audience is all Americans.
The only media pitching we did was to the local weekly newspaper and the county’s daily newspaper. Neither responded in the first week.
The release was picked up in many places. According to PR Web stats, the release:
- Appeared in 22, 475 news feeds in the first five days
- 2,426 media outlets received the press release in the first five days
- 461 people clicked on a link and read the release from a PRWeb site
- 101 people printed, forwarded or clicked on the charity’s website link
- 37 online media and news sites reported running the release.
No one from the media called the first week asking about the release.
But many people did what the charity wanted: to send in a donation to pay off the national debt.
Not pleased with the lack of media coverage, we decided to see what else we could generate.
First, we sent a direct message on Twitter to The News Chick asking her whether she’d be interested in a follow up angle to the debt story, one with a local Seattle and Washington state angle.
Great, she said, asking for a guest post. We dashed off a post, which Thomas added to, and it was posted on Sunday, August 7.
The NewsChick – Linda Thomas’ Blog: “Local effort to pay off the national debt”
We’re not sure whether Thomas’ blog touched off the ensuing media onslaught or whether Monday was a slow news day, but either way, Monday was flooded with calls and emails from reporters.
The following is a list of the coverage the charity received:
August 8
KOMO Radio AM 1000/97.7 FM – short, taped radio segment
KOMO 4 TV – 4 p.m. and 6 p.m. segments on Seattle TV station
August 9
KIRO Radio FM 97.3 – Top and the bottom of the News short segment
Skagit Valley Herald – front page news story above the fold
August 10th
La Conner Weekly News: front page news story
Joe Teehan Show – radio interview KBIA AM930 in Bellingham Noon
Dori Monson show – radio interview 97.3 KIRO FM in Seattle at 12:35
Victoria Taft Show – radio interview KPAM AM860 in Portland at 1:45 p.m.
An Associated Press (AP) story runs in many newspapers and online news sites including: MSNBC, Seattle PI, Seattle Times, Tri-Cities Herald, Bellingham Herald, The Wenatchee World, Northwest Cable News, Tacoma News Tribune, and The Olympian, among others.
Outside Washington state, the AP item ran online on sites including The Dallas News, The Daily Journal in Indiana, Boise Idaho’s KTVB, The Citizen-Times in Ashville, California, and also out of the country in the Victoria Advocate in Victoria, BC
August 11th
The Bob Rivers Show – KJR 95.7 FM at 8:30 am
A week later, we had generated more than 752 Facebook likes or recommendations – without a Facebook page – but on media sites; established a Twitter handle and generated 15 followers – with no effort – and learned of several people who have decided to tackle the national debt too.
The news sites also generated more than 16 Tweets, more than 300 comments, and more than 1,500 visits to the charity’s web site.
All from a single press release, two email pitches to local papers, and one direct message on Twitter.
What results have you seen recently with your press releases? Do you think they are ineffective in reaching the media or your customers?