contact
Sign up for our Email Newsletter.
Get useful tips on marketing on an occasional basis.
Newsletter Archive

 

MDC Resources

MDC Newsletters

Melanie's Marketing Tips

Articles By Title

Melanie's Marketing Tips

Welcome to Melanie's marketing tips. You'll find articles on a variety of topics along with an archive of MDC newsletters.

Although most of the focus in marketing today is on Internet marketing, traditional marketing principles still apply and the most effective marketing programs combine both disciplines.

An effective website defines your company's positioning and branding strategies and should be results and benefits-oriented. The medium has changed, but the message is the same — how can your products or services help your customers and what makes you different from the competition?

MDC Newsletter Archive

Here is an archive of MDC newsletters. MDC newsletters offer useful marketing tips and articles.  Sign up for our Email Newsletter to get occassional emails from MDC.

2/22/2011 - Choosing Domain names that increase website traffic

1/19/2011 - Tips for Turning Browsers into Buyers

11/10/10 - Websites for small companies at any budget

9/22/2010 - PR on a shoestring

3/24/2010 - Creating Effective Testimonials/Mission Statements

10/22/2009 - Keeping in Touch with Your Customers

8/5/2009 - Social Networking and Managing an Online Presence

5/6/2009 - Building Website Traffic and Search Engine Optimization

1/28/2009 - Developing Website Content

11/20/08 - Search-Engine-Friendly Websites

MDC Articles

5/25/11 - Do you need a content management system (CMS)?

11/10/10 - Websites for small companies at any budget

9/22/10 - PR on a Shoestring

10/22/09 - The benefits of snail mail

10/22/09 - Getting the most from your email marketing program

8/5/09 - Making Sense of Social Networking

5/6/09 - Building website traffic

5/6/09 - The basics of search engine optimization

1/28/09 - When it comes to websites, content is king

1/28/09 - Branding strategies for small and medium-sized companies

11/20/08 - Positioning your company for growth

11/20/08 - Is your website search-engine friendly?

Getting the Most from Your Email Marketing Program

There are many factors to consider in the development of an email marketing program. The goal is to create a dialog with your customers and prospects that builds trust and keeps you top of mind so that when they are ready to buy, you are there.

Here are some tips in creating an email newsletter for your company:

Create a simple design that works with your website graphics
Companies like Constant Contact offer lots of options for designs, but it can be difficult to find one that matches your logo and the look you have established for your company. It's fairly easy to create a design to match your website if you have a little html expertise. If not, hire a professional to create a template for your email. Once you have template with the right look and feel, you can easily add copy and messaging yourself.

Offer useful information that your customers can use
Although your primary goal is to sell your company's products and services, your customers are more interested in how you can solve their problems. If you provide them with useful tips and information, they will be more likely to open your emails.

Create landing pages to track results
If are having a specific promotion, you may want to create a special page on your website with the details of the promotion to lead your customers through the buying process. In addition to tailoring the page to the email promotion, you can easily track results of your email campaign.

Use social networking to distribute your email
With the popularity of social networking, it's easy to distribute your email through Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. Most email marketing companies offer a "share" button you can include on your email to allow people to post your email on these sites. You can also Tweet a link to your email or email it to social networking groups.

Drive Traffic to Your Website
Give your readers plenty of opportunities to click through to your website for more information. Embed lots of links throughout your email and entice readers in different ways. If you distribute your newsletter through social networking sites, you'll get website traffic and improve your search engine optimization.

Don't Forget Your Call to Action
Make it easy for people to respond to your mail in as many ways as possible. At the end of every section, ask them to call or email for more information. As with websites, you never know where they are going to end up and when they will be ready to take the next step.

For a free consultation, call Melanie at 978.921.2650 or send her an email.

Back to top

Making Sense of Social Networking

Is social networking right for your company?
It's hard to ignore the power of this growing medium as outlined in this slide show entitled "What the F**k is Social Networking?"

Getting Started
Here are some tools that I've found very helpful in understanding the basics of social networking.

To Tweet or not to Tweet
Everyone's talking about Twitter, but I have found it confusing to figure out how Twitter actually works. This video on Facebook called "How to Use Twitter" makes it easy to understand the basics. You will have to sign into Facebook to access the video, but it's free and easy to sign up if you don't already have an account.

Here is another helpful article on Twitter:
"Marketing Small Businesses on Twitter"

Using Facebook to promote your business
Creating a Facebook page for your business can help you connect with your customers and keep them up-to-date. Here is an blog post that I found very helpful on this topic:
Using Facebook Pages to Promote Your Brand

Here is a guide to using Facebook to market your company:
The Facebook Marketing Bible

Although it takes a little time to get the hang of it, social networking can have a big impact on your business if you use it properly. And it won't cost you a dime. So what are you waiting for?

For a free consultation, call Melanie at 978.921.2650 or send her an email.

Back to top

Is your website search-engine-friendly?

Search engine optimization (SEO) is no easy task. With every company clamoring to come to the top of Google searches for their product category, SEO is unaffordable for most smaller companies. However, there are some things small companies can do to maximize search results for their company.

First and foremost, your website should have a search-engine-friendly design. The web is changing constantly and Google spiders are crawling the Web everyday to look for new content. If your website hasn't been updated in a few years, than most likely, Google has forgotten about you. The more you update your website, the more your site will be crawled and indexed by Google and the better your search results will be.

Here are some simple guidelines for creating search-engine-friendly sites:

If you follow these simple guidelines for your website design, your search engine results will improve. It takes a while for Google to index your site, so don't expect immediate results, but if you start with a properly designed site, you'll be well on your way to attracting more customers and prospects to your site.

For a free consultation, call Melanie at 978.921.2650 or send her an email.

Back to top

When it Comes to Websites, Content is King

How many websites have you gone to that look nice and seem to have lots of information, but where do you find what you want? Does the website speak to you and your needs, leading you through the buying process to the information you need to make an informed decision? Do you know where to click next or do you just push the back button and move to the next site out of frustration?

Website design is important, but only part of the website development process. How do you create a site that keeps your prospective clients on your site, leading them through the buying process and convincing them to buy from you?

Your website is your company’s primary marketing tool. If you want your website to work, the right content is the key to your website’s success. You have a few seconds to grab someone’s attention and engage them in the buying process or risk losing them forever.

Content development is a complicated process with many different factors to consider. The overall challenge is to take all the information you can gather about your company and its products and/or services and organize it into logical segments of tiered information that can be accessed quickly and easily.

Since different visitors have different information needs, the goal is to make it easy to skim quickly for some, while offering more information for others. In addition to being well organized, your website content should be well written and persuasive, making it easy for readers to move to the next step when they are ready.

Optimizing your content for search engines
Fancy Flash pages are no longer the focus of today’s websites. Google ranks your site by crawling the pages and searching for relevant words. Google spiders don’t see Flash movies and photographs. In fact, a Flash home page blocks Google from crawling and indexing your site’s content.

When someone initiates a search in Google, the search begins with the searcher entering the words they think best describe the information they are seeking. These words are considered “keywords”. Google’s spiders crawl the Web to find the websites with the most keywords in each search and ranks them according to how many of these keywords are included on a given website. There are many factors that go into this process, but this is the basic premise behind search engine optimization.

For search engine optimization purposes, your home page should have lots of relevant keywords so that people will find your site. When they get to your site, they’ll scan the page and quickly decide where to click next. Perhaps your home page will pull them in and they will read it if they find it engaging. Or, maybe they will go directly to the about page to learn more about your company. Another person may go directly to the products or services page.

Once people get to your site, how do you know where they will click next? You don’t. Everyone is different and you have no way of knowing where your website will lead them. This is not a brochure. You can’t assume because you said something on your home page they have read it. They could go anywhere. Once you determine the primary benefits of your company’s products or services, how do you ensure visitors get your marketing message?

Developing Your Website Content
Since you don’t know where people will go when they get to your site, you should write each page as its own entity. This means you may have to repeat the same message on several pages, but since you don’t know which pages a visitor has read already, you’ll want to say it a different way so it doesn’t sound repetitive. (For example, your home page may give some information about the company which you’ll need to repeat on the about page.)

The advantage of this strategy is that it reinforces your marketing message throughout your site. For engaged visitors who are the right prospects for your company’s products and/or services, everything they read will lead them towards buying your product or service. If your message is compelling, you’ll pull them in wherever they land and they will drill into your site for more and more information until they are ready to buy.

Encourage your visitors to take the next step by including calls to action throughout your site. Since you have no idea when your visitors will be ready to take the next step, make it easy for them to respond. End each page with a sentence like, “Call xxx.xxx.xxxx today or email for more information”.

There are many other aspects to consider when developing content for your site including:

In summary, if you want your website to work for you, develop well-written, informative and organized content. If you are not a skilled writer, work with a professional writer to develop content for you. Your company’s website is your most important marketing tool, so don’t underestimate the value of carefully crafted content. The success of your website depends on it.

For a free consultation, call Melanie at 978.921.2650 or send her an email.

Back to top

The basics of search engine optimization

Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of improving website visibility to search engines. SEO is a complicated process with many different factors to consider. Basically, there are two types of SEO:

Organic SEO
Organic SEO involves optimizing your website for search engines so that when people do searches for your product, your website comes up on the left side of the page under search results. Ideally, your website should come up on the first page of searches for your product or service, preferably in the top three listings.

This was fairly easy to accomplish a few years ago, but now this is where everyone wants to be, making organic SEO more difficult to achieve. Depending on the type of product or service you are marketing and how competitive your industry is, organic SEO can run from a few hundred dollars a month to thousands of dollars a month.

If you have the budget and your product/service is conducive to selling on the Web, you should seriously consider an organic search engine optimization program. The first step is making sure your website is optimized for search engines and has a search-engine-friendly design. If not, you may want to consider revamping your site first to make it easier to accomplish organic SEO and improve your search results or implementing a paid SEO program.

Paid SEO
If you don’t have the budget for organic SEO and your website is not search-engine-friendly, you can still drive traffic to your site for a relatively small investment with Google Adwords. Google Adwords are links that come up on the right side of the page when you do a search. The process involves choosing the right keywords for your product and bidding for placement. The advantage of Google Adwords is you only pay if someone clicks through to your site. You can set a limit as to how much you are willing to spend per day, and Google only sends you that many clicks. This can cost as little as a few dollars a day and is a very affordable way to bring traffic to your site.

Read more about implementing a SEO strategy for your company’s website.

For a free consultation, call Melanie at 978.921.2650 or send her an email.

Back to top

Building website traffic

If you build it they will come….
When it comes to websites, this is true, but only to a certain extent. The results you get from your website depend on many factors and building a website is only the first step, and not a panacea to bring buyers to your door.

A website is just another marketing tool, and although it’s the primary marketing tool for most companies today, every business is different. Your website marketing strategy should depend on many factors and one-size-fits-all doesn’t apply to websites.

Developing a website marketing strategy for your product or service
Here are some of the questions to answer before developing a website marketing strategy:
1. Is your business local or national?
2. Are your products or services inexpensive and simple to buy or expensive and complicated?
3. Is your product or service something that people would search for on the Web or something they would most likely get a referral for?
4. What is the competition like for your product or service? Are there many other companies in your space or is your product or service specialized and unique, filling a certain niche?

Local or National
If your product or service is generally sold locally, search engine optimization (SEO) is easier to accomplish. People will tend to search for your business using the name of your town or state, which narrows the field significantly. Be sure to register your site with Google Local Business. It's free to register and searches for your company the include your city will bring up your site and contact information.

For national products, bringing traffic to your site can be more challenging, and depending on the nature of your product, a search engine optimization program may be required to boost traffic.

Simple and inexpensive or complicated and costly?
For products and services that are simple to understand and easy to buy on the web with no human interaction, search engine optimization is very important. If you can drive people to your site and give them the right information when they get there, you will most likely garner sales from your website. In this case, a comprehensive search engine optimization program could be very beneficial.

If your products or services are more complicated, search engine optimization is also important, but in a different way. If your product/service is specific and your market is relatively small, search engine optimization will be easier to accomplish. A well-designed, search engine-friendly website may be all you need to drive traffic to your site.

Web sales or referrals?
Even if your product/service is inexpensive and simple to buy, it might not be something that people tend to search for on the Web. Some things people just feel more comfortable getting a referral for. Things like massages, local restaurants, or more expensive products/services like contractors and lawyers, people like to ask for referrals first, and then they may go to the website to learn more about the company they were referred to. In this situation, make sure your website has all the information they need to sell them when they get there and that it’s easy to find. Search engine optimization is still important, but not the focus of your website marketing program.

Competitive market or niche product?
If the marketplace you compete in is extremely competitive and people tend to buy your product or service on the web, search engine optimization should be the focus of your website marketing strategy. However, if you have a niche product that is very specialized, a search engine-friendly website may be sufficient in conjunction with a few simple traffic-building tactics.

Developing a website marketing strategy you can afford
These are some general guidelines in developing a website marketing strategy for your company. Although search engine optimization is important to all types of websites, in some cases, it’s more important than others.

Once you’ve determined what the focus of your website marketing strategy should be, the next step is implementing a program you can afford. Search engine optimization programs can cost thousands of dollars and if your product or service warrants it, it’s well worth the investment. However if this isn’t in your budget, there are inexpensive ways to drive traffic to your site. It’s always best to start with a well-designed, search-engine-friendly website, but if your website is a few years old and you don’t have the budget to revamp it, you can still drive traffic to your site with a paid search engine optimization program like Google Adwords. Learn more about the basics types of search engine optimization.

For a free consultation, call Melanie at 978.921.2650 or send her an email.

Back to top


Positioning your company for growth

Let's start with the basics of any marketing communications program — positioning. Many companies overlook this crucial first step, but positioning is the key to creating a successful marketing communications program.

The goal is to define your company's unique position in each market you compete in. A clear-cut positioning strategy sets the stage for all marketing communications, and gives you a foundation for your company’s branding strategy.

What is a positioning statement?
A positioning statement is a one or two-sentence statement that clearly and succinctly explains how your product (or company) differs from your competition.

A positioning statement should:

How to position your company and products
Here are some questions to consider when developing a positioning statement:

To quickly develop your own positioning statement, fill in the blanks in this statement:

“For people who [describe the target users], [insert your company or brand name] is the company/brand of [describe your competitive set] that provides [tell the benefit that makes you different and better].”

Target users are those customers who share common needs, and demographic characteristics. The competitive set may be as simple as a product category, but should always be worded in the same way customers describe that category. The benefit that makes you better is the one point of difference you want most closely associated with your product or brand.

Your positioning statement should tell your audience the following about your company:

A positioning statement is a good first step, but to do it properly you should do a thorough evaluation of all the players in your industry, the products they offer and their benefits. Once you have a positioning statement you feel is on target, sit down with the relevant people in your company and get their input. Your company's position is something all the key players of your company should agree on to ensure the success of your marketing communications program.

For a free consultation, call Melanie at 978.921.2650 or send her an email.

Back to top

Branding Strategies for Small and Medium-Sized Companies

What is branding?
Branding creates an identity for your company and products. It’s a marketing process that you can use to establish a brand name for your products and services, giving customers confidence in your company, and strong reasons to purchase from you. Once you’ve established a strong brand identity for your products, you’ll increase the value of your products by gaining your customer’s trust, and as a result, you’ll increase profit margins.

Often, companies that don’t have a strong market position and brand identity resort to cutting prices to increase sales. Price-cutting leads to increased sales volume, but lowers profit margins, leading the company down a descending spiral of profits. However, if you can create value for your products and services, you can command a higher price and increase profit margins.

Branding for small and medium-sized companies

Big companies like Intel, Gillette, Nike and Proctor & Gamble spend millions of dollars on branding by hiring large sophisticated advertising agencies to help them build their brands. But even if your company is small and you have a limited marketing budget, you can still incorporate basic branding strategies into your marketing program.

In all reality, branding is just a sophisticated term for good marketing practices. Here’s how to create a branding strategy for your company:

  1. The first step is to do a thorough positioning of your company and it products.
  2. Then, use your positioning strategy to differentiate your products or services from the competition by identifying the one big bottom line benefit that your company offers. Pick ONE THING that you do better than anyone else in your industry. Of course, there will be many benefits to using your company’s products or services and you will want to mention those benefits as well, but to build an effective marketing campaign, focus on the one big benefit.
  3. Once you’ve identified your one big benefit, develop a tagline to support that benefit and display it prominently in all your marketing materials. In addition to your tagline, reinforce the one big benefit in your copy by saying it different ways throughout your marketing materials to keep supporting your message.

The Three C’s of Marketing

Now that you have a handle on the elements of your marketing campaign, simply follow the three C’s of marketing: consistency, consistency, consistency. Look at all your marketing materials and ask yourself these questions:

    • Do all these materials look like they came from the same company?
    • Is my company’s logo consistently and prominently displayed?
    • Do I have a meaningful tagline that supports my company’s position in the marketplace?
    • Is my messaging consistently supporting the same key benefit throughout all my marketing materials?

With the focus on Internet marketing and cost-cutting, many small to medium-sized companies skip these important steps. Most business owners are not marketers and don’t see the value of hiring marketing professionals to help them with their messaging. The result is often a website with no personality that doesn’t speak to customers about their problems and how to solve them. Or email newsletters that focus on what the company wants to say and not what the customer wants to hear.

Think Like a Marketer

If you incorporate the right messaging into your marketing materials, every dollar you spend will work harder to grow your business. Think about your marketing materials from your customers’ point of view. How can you help them? What problems can you solve? It’s not enough to have a website. Make your website work harder with a little thought and effort up front. If you do your homework, your marketing program will get better results and your company will grow quicker. If your business is slow, now is a good time to rethink your marketing materials and your website. Be ready to take advantage of the upturn when it comes, and it will.

For a free consultation, call Melanie at 978.921.2650 or send her an email.

Back to top

The Benefits of "Snail" Mail

Although most companies have abandoned direct mail for more cost-effective email
programs, you shouldn't discount this valuable tool. The majority of the people that get your emails don't even open them and others have spam filters that are filtering out your email before it even gets to them.

Direct mail is more expensive than email, but it still works. Here are some of the advantages of direct mail:

Snail Mail Marketing Tips

Direct mail is complicated. Many factors contribute to its success or failure, which makes it difficult to do effectively in-house. However, if you plan carefully, and use some of the following suggestions, you should be able to achieve success, even with a limited budget.

Fine-tune your list
A major component of any direct mail program is a qualified mailing list that’s segmented, breaking your customers and prospects into at least two different groups. With a well-defined list, you can target the needs of individual markets, and tailor your message to address the needs of each segment. If you plan to buy lists from magazines or other sources, make sure all the names you buy have been updated within the last year, and make your selections are as specific as possible.

Tailor your message
Once you’ve segmented your list, approach each segment individually, thinking about the needs of each group. Develop your messages accordingly. The more specific your message, the better your results. For example, different industries may use the same product, but you should look for different benefits for each of them. Also, mailings to customers will have a different emphasis and tone, than mailings to prospects. You can target your messages cost-effectively by printing one mailer in several different versions, or by using different cover letters.

DIFFERENT TYPES OF MAILINGS
There are many different formats your mailings can take, and which one you choose depends on many factors, such as your budget, product, message, audience, etc. The only way to know what works for your company is by trying different things, and comparing responses. If you’re going to use direct mail, you should think of it as a long-term program; something you plan to do on a regular basis.

Letter Packages
Letter packages can be developed in a variety of ways. A typical letter package includes a letter, some type of insert or brochure, and a reply card. Often, there’s also a teaser on the envelope to entice the recipient to open the package and read further. Letter packages are particularly effective for new product and service introductions. They generally out-pull self-mailers, but of course, it depends on the package.

Self-Mailers
Self-mailers are fun, offering you a variety of design formats to communicate your message. They can be black and white, two, four, or six-color, and as simple as a postcard, or have several panels, one of which should always include a business reply card(brc). Self-mailers are particularly helpful for promoting seminars because people tend to save them, and pass them around. They are also good for simple messages, offers, and announcements.

Invite Your Customers to Respond to You
Make it clear you want your customers to respond to you, and then give them different response options. The more options, the easier you make it for them to contact you. Remember, that’s your goal. So make sure to include your phone number, e-mail, website, business reply card (brc) or coupon, anything that will help you communicate with your customers.

Do you want them to request a catalog? Call to place an order? Have a sales rep call them? Give you specifications for a quote? Then let them know.

For a free consultation, call Melanie at 978.921.2650 or send her an email.

Back to top

Creating Effective Testimonials

Customer testimonials are an excellent marketing tool that can help substantiate the claims you make on your website about your products or services.

If you are offering a product, it's easier for prospects to compare your products with competitive products. They can easily check features and prices of your competitors and compare different products and find proof of your claims. For service companies, it's a bit more difficult. Testimonials can help you support your claims about the benefits of your service.

Creating Meaningful Testimonials
Everyone knows testimonials are useful, but the challenge is getting your customers to give you meaningful, believable testimonials that ring true to your site visitors. In reality, anyone can make up testimonials and put them on their website. The goal is to make your testimonials believable.
A testimonial is only as good as the person who gives it. If your customer won't allow you to put their name on their testimonial, then there's really no point in accepting a testimonial from them. The more specific you can be about the source of the testimonial the better. If your customers are businesses, include their name, title and company and offer to include their logo with a link to their website. If they are individuals, include their full name and town.

The first step is to get the testimonials in the first place. If you've tried to do this yourself, you know it can be like pulling teeth to get your customers to write something about you. It's not that they don't want to help, it's just that they are busy and it's not a priority for them. They also don't know what to say, so they put it off until they have time and it doesn't get done.

Often times, when you do get a testimonial, it's often not the endorsement you would have hoped for. You know that your customer could have made a stronger testimonial, but they just gave you something quickly and didn't think much about it.

Most likely, your customers will welcome your help in crafting their testimonial. They don't have time to think about it and they want to sound intelligent. This gives you the opportunity to develop a strong testimonial that contains their opinion and more. All they have to do is approve it.

Shaping your Customer's Testimonials
To get quality testimonials from your customers, take control of the process. First, ask your customers if they would be willing to give you a testimonial. You may get lucky and get a great testimonial this way that needs little editing. If they agree but don't have the time to write the testimonial themselves, offer to write the testimonial for them. Ask them what they like about doing business with you. Then offer to write the testimonial for them based on what they said, assuring them they will have the opportunity to approve the testimonial before it's posted.

Examples of Effective Testimonials
Here are some good examples of strong testimonials from companies:

Both of these companies got these testimonials from their clients based on their relationships with their customers. All they needed was a light edit and they were ready to go. These are particularly strong because they include companies that prospects will recognize with real names and titles.

In this testimonial for a construction company, a happy customer created an entire website to describe his experience with the company. This is the ultimate testimonial!

Here are some testimonials for a painting contractor. In this case, the customers are homeowners and we put their name and town to give them credibility.

Using Testimonials
Once you have your testimonials, of course you'll want to put them on your website on a special page. You can also take your strongest testimonial and put it on your home page, in your email newsletter or direct mail piece as an attention-getter and lead-in. Be creative!

Should you create a mission statement for your company?
I'm not a big fan of mission statements. Most mission statements are poorly written and too vague to be useful.

Although mission statements can be useful as an internal credo to help define your company, I much prefer to create something more meaningful, like a positioning statement, so I have something to base my branding and marketing strategy on. Learn more about creating a positioning statement for your company.

Another option is to create a mantra. A mantra is a three or four word statement that says why your product, service or company should exist. Watch this short video to learn more about mantras.

For a free consultation, call Melanie at 978.921.2650 or send her an email.

Back to top


Creating Mission Statements

If you would like to create a mission statement, Here is an excellent video from Fast Company on how to do it right:

Creating a mission statement that doesn't suck

The bottom line is, there are many different ways to define your company. Whichever direction you choose, avoid long convoluted statements that mean nothing to your employees and customers. The goal is to create a useful definition that everyone can relate to.

For a free consultation, call Melanie at 978.921.2650 or send her an email.

Back to top

Public Relations on a Shoestring

A small investment can garner excellent results from a professional PR program, but if you don't have the budget for that, you can do most of the work yourself and still get good results.

Most people are under the mistaken impression that the news will come looking for you, but things have never been further from the truth. In today's economic climate, newspapers are struggling to survive. And although there's more news on the Web, it's difficult for most media outlets to make money with so much free information around. People have gotten used to free information and are reluctant to pay for it.

Add to this, a bad ecomony and shrinking advertising revenue, and the result is a cut-back on editorial expenditures. In an effort to provide news for less, the media is looking to it's audience to develop content and stories for them.

Have you noticed the news stations are asking people to send videos and photos? That's because it saves them money. They don't have the budget to send editors on the prowl for news. They wait for it to come to them.

Take advantage of this opportunity by offering news items that are well written and appeal to thier audiences. Here are the basic steps involved in starting a PR campaign for your company.

Step 1 - Think of opportunities for press releases
What's new at your company? New products? Are you moving or expanding? How can your product or service help readers?

Step 2 - Develop a list of media outlets to distribute your release to
Research magazines, newspapers and websites that your customers and prospects frequent. This is fairly easy to do these days with most of this information readily available on the Web. Find out which editor is the appropriate one to receive your news. Sometimes it best to call and ask if this isn't apparent from the website. Develop a database of editors with contact information incuding phone number and email address.

Step 3 - Write a press release
This is probably the most difficult part of this process, and if you can afford it, you should try to hire a professional writer to do this for you. However, if you'd like to do it yourself, here are some tips on how to write a press release.

 Step 4 - Distribute your release
If your news warrants it and you have the budget, you can distribute your press release for a few hundred dollars on the web via one the newswire services. Editors check these websites everyday for news and subscribe to RSS feeds on topics of interest to them. Whether or not you distribute through one of these sites, you should email your release to the editors on your PR list. Include photos, your web address and contact infomation in your email and use a compelling subject line to get their attention. Attach your release as a Word document and give a short description of the release and why it's relevant to their readers in you email.

Step 4 - Follow-up
This part is kind of tricky. Editors are busy and they don't like to be bothered. If you write a compelling press release that is relevant to their publication or website, they will generally respond right away, but often times, they will file it away for an upcoming story.

Your follow-up strategy depends on the nature of the release, but in general, it doesn't hurt to follow up with an email or voicemail. You may get lucky and get them on the phone, and if you do be brief and to the point. If they say they will use your release, ask them when you can expect to see it and offer them more information. Otherwise, just leave a short voicemail to remind them you sent them something and how it's relevant.

In some cases you may want to be more assertive, but if you've done your job right and they have all the information, that's all you can do. You don't want to waste their time or bug them. Remember, your job is to make their life easier by offering information that's well-written, of interest to their readers, and ready for publication. If you do, they'll appreciate it.

How to Write a Press Release

A well-written press release is often the key to whether your release gets picked up. Editors are busy and if you send them a press release that's ready to print, they're much more likely to print it. After all, they are pressed for time and the less work they have to do the better.

Press releases should be clearly and concisely written. If you re a good writer and follow a few simple rules, you can write your own press release:

Learn about MDC PR servcies

For a free consultation, call Melanie at 978.921.2650 or send her an email.

Back to top

Do you need a content management system (CMS)?

Should you use a content management system for your website?

1. Do you need to update your content more than once a month?
2. Are you planning on running a blog on your site?
3. Will non-technical people be updating/maintaining the site?
4. Do you require the ability to manage your site’s content from remote locations (w/o using special software)?

If the answer is yes to any of the above questions, you could benefit from a content management system. If you answered no to the above questions, you don’t really need CMS. It may not be worth the extra expense and time it takes to manage it. CMS can also affect your search engine results with complicated coding.

Sometimes its better to hire someone to manage your site for you, or teach someone in your company to update it with web editing software. Every company has different needs and you should weigh all the options before deciding.

Choosing a CMS Platform for Your Website

If you are thinking of incorporating CMS into your next website, be sure to do your homework. Content management systems add complex code to your site that can affect the searchability of your site.

There are many different approaches to CMS from free systems like WordPress, Drupal and Joomla to custom developed systems. To help evaluate the options for your company, here are some questions to ask your web developer.

1. Is this system standards-compliant? You don’t want a lot of complicated code added to your site. Remember, simpler is better. Ask to see an example of a site built to current W3 standards.

2. Can you edit page title and description tags? This is an important component to search engine optimization that many CMS platforms don’t include.

3. Can you move stuff around? You should be able to move pages and sections around without a lot of fuss. Beware of rigid templates and expensive fees for moving a simple box.

4. Is it Easy to Make Changes? The point of CMS is to be able to make lots of little changes. It shouldn’t take more than 2 minutes for most people to make a simple change. Sometimes it can take up to a half hour or more.

5. Does it support Google Analytics? Beware of “integrated analytics”. Google is the standard.

If this sound complicated to you, that’s because it is. These questions are a good start. The goal is to find someone who can answer then honestly and explain what they mean.

Learn about MDC content management services.

For a free consultation, call Melanie at 978.921.2650 or send her an email.

Back to top