Many of today’s communication firms are moving away from just public relations to include content creation and marketing. But with the huge amount of content flooding the internet, many are realizing that it is the distribution of their content that is driving real results.
I had the opportunity to interview Jerry Goldstein, VP of marketing services Atlanta-based William Mills Agency about the challenges facing a newer company in gaining visibility and engagement within their highly targeted audience and how the agency utilized traditional PR tactics to achieve, and exceed their visibility and sales goals.
The goal of the Entersekt content marketing program was to increase the awareness of Entersekt and drive sales within their core audience. To achieve this, the team from William Mills Agency worked with the client to identify a small, but crucial audience to activate. Once identified, the team created a highly relevant white paper. But their work was not done yet. While distributing the content across Entersekt’s social and existing marketing channels did increase awareness and triggered downloads, the real success came after William Mills Agency added PR support to the mix.
The first step in increasing the overall visibility of their created content outside Entersekt’s own audience was to distribute a press release over Business Wire. William Mills followed this up with media relations efforts. This is when real success was achieved. By supporting the created content with paid distribution and PR outreach, William Mills not only met Entersekt’s goals, they surpassed it. By combining broad news distribution with traditional media relations, not only did they receive placements in publications such as the Wall St. Journal, they enjoyed website traffic growth, increase in engagement with key prospects, increase in early stage leads and one significant new business opportunity.
Read on to learn more about this successful content marketing program:
Jerry, what can you tell us about your content program for Entersekt, the innovative pioneer in out of band authentication? What were the elements of your program?
We have been working an integrated public relations and content marketing program for Entersekt for some time now. Our content marketing services include the creation of blog posts and white papers, social media marketing, SEO and the management of Entersekt’s HubSpot marketing automation platform. Platform management activities include the creation of landing pages, publishing of all content, outbound email campaigns and monitoring and reporting of program results.
Who was the client? Tell us a little more about Entersekt.
The company’s one-of-a-kind approach combines the power of electronic certificate technology (PKI) with the convenience of mobile phones to provide financial institutions and their customers with full protection from online banking fraud. With its patented security products authenticating millions of transactions globally, none of Entersekt’s clients have experienced a successful phishing attack on their systems since implementing the company’s technology.
What is the goal of William Mill’s content marketing program for Entersekt?
Entersekt is headquartered in South Africa and has successfully worked with clients in that country and in Europe. Entersekt engaged William Mills Agency to assist with its launch in North America. The content marketing program is being used to increase awareness for Entersekt and assist the company’s sales people with lead generation and moving prospects through their sales funnel.
We recently published a white paper for Entersekt on transaction signing, an important issue for financial institutions.
What tools did you use to promote your content?
We use all of the tools available within our public relations and content marketing program to cross promote Entersekt news and self-published content. For example, a news release will include links and social media sharing information within the actual release; our team also promotes all releases through the organization’s targeted social media platforms – LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook. These are typically standard practices being used within the industry.
Which tools really made your program stand out?
What we believe is more unique, is our use of traditional public relations activities to support content marketing initiatives. We issued a Media Advisory via Business Wire on the white paper and pushed this to our media contacts. The media advisory targeted key audiences and encouraged readers to download our white paper.
What were the results of your white paper promotion?
We are receiving outstanding results. Website traffic growth has been significant, Entersekt’s existing prospects are engaging and reading the content and the program has produced a number of early stage leads and one very promising and significant new business opportunity.
How would you define the role of PR, Business Wire and the press release within this program?
Our agency’s public relations activity and Business Wire have increased the visibility and awareness of Entersekt’s lead generation content. For example, the Media Advisory was picked up by Ben DiPietro, a journalist at the Wall Street Journal and led to a mention in their online weekly Risk and Compliance Report.
Since the implementation of its integrated content marketing and public relations program, Entersekt has reported that prospects are expressing a much greater familiarity with their company and the issues. They perceive interest as being remarkably higher from a year ago, when the company first entered the U.S. marketplace.
About William Mills Agency
William Mills Agency is the nation’s largest independent public relations and marketing firm to the financial services industry. The agency has established its reputation in the industry through successful execution of media relations, marketing services and crisis communications campaigns for hundreds of companies ranging in size from entrepreneurial start-ups to large, publicly traded corporations throughout North America, Europe and India.
Serena Ehrlich, Director of Social and Evolving Media, Business Wire, is responsible for internal and external content creation and distribution services, ranging from content marketing and PR programming to social media channel management. With more than 20 years of experience in the content consumption and distribution, Serena understands both sides of the content and news industry.
Follow Serena: @serena
Follow Business Wire: @BusinessWire