How To

Is your content marketing hitting the mark? Our author offers a how-to guide that includes research, problem-solving and blogging. She also suggests that knowing your audience better will help you decide how much to rely on influencers and industry analysts’ reports. Though she uses the example of targeting Chief Information Security Officers (CISOs), the tips provided apply to nearly all industries.

PR pros know one of the top traits requested in a quality communicator is crisp, clean, error-free writing. Employees represent their companies through not only press releases and composed content, but also in social media posts and email. A grammatical error can send a campaign into a spiral. We’ve published many articles on becoming a better writer. We gathered some of the most popular tips so you could enjoy them today on National Grammar Day.  

Go big or go home does’t necessarily apply to innovation, says Scott Steinberg, author and business consultant. Armed with knowledge about their customers, communicators can advocate for brands to make small, tactical changes to products and services that can yield significant results. Steinberg discussed his ideas about thinking small to go big during PRNEWS’ Measurement Conference in Washington, DC.

Each month we’ll be asking communicators to unload their toolkits and tell us what falls out. In other words, What do you use to do your job? There’s no better duo to begin this feature than Manu Muraro, founder of Your Social Team, and Danielle Brigida, national social media manager, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. We asked them what tools they use to bolster their Instagram feeds.

It’s far from a secret that Instagram is a visual channel. Still, some communicators use color palettes, grid layouts and themes to boost engagement on their Instagram feeds. For apartments.com AVP of social media Erica Campbell Byrum, color choice and layout are critical to crafting an Instagram personality that consumers will recognize and engage with at high rates.

Leave it to Cisco’s charismatic Carmen Collins to serve Southern-style sweet tea while explaining the sales funnel. Well, she doesn’t exactly serve sweet tea, but she describes how tea and the sales funnel have plenty in common. She also provides insight on using data to report your social media story to the C-suite. Drink up.

With Instagram boasting 800 million active monthly users and 80% of them following brands on the platform, we asked communicators for best practices for being successful on the graphic-based platform. They told us carefully picked influencers and attention to creating consistent visuals are critical.

Letters, digital or sent via U.S. mail, are likely to make direct contact with customers. It’s important, then, to be certain they reflect your brand’s well-crafted messages. We offer many tips on how to make such letters more effective, but most important is that they burnish your company’s reputation with all stakeholders.

To be an effective and persuasive presenter, you must build trust and believability in the audience’s mind. The goal of presenting is likely to inform the audience of something or persuade it to act or not. To do this successfully, the speaker must be believable and likeable.

Credibility is not a naturally occurring phenomenon. People are not born credible presenters. Credibility is something a speaker must gradually build in the mind of the audience.

There were other stories last weekend, but all we talk about is Kanye and Taylor. How can brands cut through that clutter?