Content Tips and Tricks

Debra Sheridan, president of IVY Marketing Group was invited to present a workshop at last month’s Life Services Network Conference in Chicago.  The prestigious event drew hundreds of professionals in all areas of the senior housing industry. “Being invited to be a presenter was really an honor as this conference draws the very best in the field,” said Debra.

Debra spoke about the importance of keeping good ideas flowing in order to advance the sales process with more interesting content used within blog posts, social media updates, videos, eBooks, newsletters and webinars. “This content serves you in many ways as it improves search engine rankings, drives traffic to websites, helps to nurture leads and assists in establishing you as an expert in your field,” she said. “But it can’t be just any content. It has to be relevant and remarkable.”

Generating a constant stream of interesting topics is challenging. Debra offered some tricks for indentifying intriguing topics.

• Follow the news—if the media is already interested, if people are talking about a certain topic, join that conversation by writing a white paper, comment blogs, start discussions in social media, etc.  Follow industry news as well.
• Subscribe to email newsletters from niche publications that cover senior housing and services.
• Set up Google Alerts for non-branded keywords relating to your industry, products and/or audience.
• Monitor social media conversations.
• Recruit content creators such as bloggers.
• Create “annual” and “best-of” features.
• Bring a video camera with you to tradeshows, events, programs, etc.  Turn videos into blog posts and eBooks.

One of the best tips of all is to keep a backlog of stories and/or topics handy. This should include, but not be limited to, evergreen content. Not everything needs to be hot or trending or the latest buzz.  Evergreen content includes topics that are always interesting to your audience regardless of seasonal trends, economic conditions or other external factors.

Debra concluded that, as is the case with beautiful women, “all content is more attractive if it is well accessorized.  Use photos, videos, links to other sites, research, case studies, quotes ad anything else that will enhance the content of your publication.”

Dare to be Fascinating Presentation 2012

Six degrees of separation

In February of this year, LinkedIn reported that it has more than 150 million members and is growing at an estimated rate of about two new members per second. LinkedIn members come from more than 200 different countries and territories.  Executives from all of the 2011 Fortune 500 companies are on LinkedIn, and more than 2 million companies have LinkedIn company pages.  These huge numbers of professionals and businesses are, through LinkedIn, literally at your finger tips.

What does LinkedIn allow you to do?

• Aside from its enormous reach, perhaps the most significant characteristic of LinkedIn is that it levels the playing field. LinkedIn effectively permits you to compete with larger and more well-established businesses.  You have the ability to tell your company’s story, share interesting content in multi-media formats, highlight specific products or events, engage followers, and establish yourself as experts in your industry.  Professionals, who otherwise may not know about your organization, have access to all of your pertinent information on LinkedIn.
• LinkedIn members rank more predominantly on Google and other search engines meaning that your membership will greatly enhance your visibility to a global marketplace.
• LinkedIn capitalizes on what every marketing professional knows is the most valuable tool for generating new business: referrals/word of mouth.  It does so by permitting you to prove your expertise in your industry (see next bullet point), and also through recommendations that your colleagues, customers, business associates, and others can document on your page.
• LinkedIn helps you to establish yourself and your employees as experts.  By engaging in informative and interesting dialogue and by participating in LinkedIn Groups and LinkedIn Answers, you have the ability to set yourself up as leaders in the industry.
• While exchanging ideas, information and knowledge with your peers on LinkedIn you are also keeping yourself updated on industry happenings and trends.  Furthermore, you are positioned to keep track of your competition.
• LinkedIn has been used since it was first established as a resource for employment, both from the perspective of potential employers, and potential employees.  LinkedIn can help you find the very best employees and the very best employers.
• LinkedIn helps you to maintain the connections you’ve worked so hard to create.  As customers or colleagues change jobs or move, you stay connected.
• In addition to linking LinkedIn to your website, you can connect all of your social media sites including Twitter and Facebook ensuring maximum impact.

Tips for optimizing your LinkedIn Company Page:

• Put your best face forward.  Make sure your information is current, interesting and engaging.  Don’t make silly type or grammatical errors!
• Invite people to follow you.  Email your contacts, post on your Facebook, and tweet about it on Twitter.  Place a Follow button on your website.
• Update your status in a creative and engaging way to help to maximize your visibility. You can do this by asking questions, starting dialogue, posting a call to action and more.
• Join groups! Groups are considered to be the most powerful feature of LinkedIn, serving as a way to connect you with thousands of like-minded business professionals.  Join all relevant groups and engage in dialogue with them.  Better yet…start groups!  This places your website as the featured site, and your name as the owner, helping to showcase you as an expert in your industry.  Use these to direct traffic to your website.
• Participate in LinkedIn Answers! By establishing your expertise, you are also establishing yourself as the go-to-person that business professionals will seek out.
• Used LinkedIn Ads!  Because LinkedIn is comprised of business professionals, your ads are likely to be seen by real decision-makers.
• Encourage people to make positive recommendations for your business. Even better– do the same for others, without being asked.
• Use LinkedIn Apps to better showcase your videos, documents, presentations and more.

Many professionals have used at least parts of LinkedIn for many years. If you’re not yet doing so, join these savvy business people in this enormous network.  You won’t be sorry!

Preparing for a Crisis

Most of us make New Year’s resolutions and many organizations plan to update their crisis management strategies in 2012.  That’s a great idea in this world of instant information and potential misinformation about a difficult or embarrassing situation happening at your organization.

Here are a five things to minimize the negative impact and perhaps even turn something into a positive in a new or updated crisis management plan that meets today’s advanced communications challenges.

1.  Identify potential crisis.  Consider the services you provide and to whom, the inherent risks associated with your industry, your employee base, location, and any judgments that have been levied against your organization.  These are all minefields for you to navigate.

2.  Chose your spokespeople and have them media trained. Who will speak for the organization?  It should be limited to one or no more than two people.  However, anyone who might need to be involved in an interview, such as key senior management and/or specific board members, should be trained on how to speak to the media.  A good trainer will discuss how to stay on topic, what key points to make and how to make them, ways to minimize nervousness and how to listen for hidden agendas.

3.  Consider the power of photography.  As you consider the crisis that might arise, also consider what photographic or video image you would want to project to the news media.  Create a plan that could match a photographic image to a crisis in a more positive light.  The image used by the press initially is usually the image that remains throughout the story coverage.

4.  Outside influences.  Your plan is only as good as you are able to avoid  misinformation .  Your current and former employees and customers, residents, families and vendors  might all have an opinion to share with the media.  Communicate with them as early as possible.  Nothing can stop a “man on the street” interview, a Facebook post or Twitter Tweet, so your constituents should know first about your situation, position and actions being taken.

5.  Messaging.  Nothing is more important than the message — whether it is verbal or non-verbal.  As soon as a crisis occurs, call in the key people to discuss the situation.  During that discussion, it is most important to think about how the victims and their families and friends are going to interpret the crisis.  If you can keep that in mind, you are more likely to understand what the message should be:  factual, compassionate, simple, consistent and with a swift and manageable resolution.

For more information about Crisis and Reputation Management, call IVY Marketing Group at 630-790-2531.

Dare to Create Fascinating Content

Content rules… your website, your blog, your online and offline newsletters and your customer experience.  Make it fascinating by selecting topics that are interesting, entertaining and informative.  The right content will shed a bright light on your organization. A strategic choice of media will create a wide net for your content to fascinate prospects and residents.

As senior housing and service providers embrace the inbound marketing strategies necessary to gain the attention of prospects, they are also challenged to continually create the meaningful content that supports the sales process.

Content marketing is the art of creating compelling and valuable content and distributing it through a variety of channels, online and traditional.  It is the practice of developing relevant content in a consistent fashion to target buyers, focusing on all stages of the buying process, from brand awareness through to brand evangelism.  Good content can circumvent the consumer’s desire to block unwanted messages because they find it personally or professionally beneficial.

Content marketing is also a science born in the strategic plan.  Subjects are planned.  Accessories and outside content to support the topic is decided.  Distribution is determined.   The voice(s) suited for each target group is honed.  Metrics that gauge consumer influence during both the buying and retention process of a customer experience are established.

Here’s an example of how to make a less than dynamic story relevant to your strategic plan, your sales prospects, customers, general audience and media.  The principles in this example can be applied to all the content you are considering.

Your news hook…

You have an ice cream social for residents, family and guests at least twice a year and would like to send  a story and caption to the media for some free publicity and better attendance at the next ice cream social.  You know people really enjoy it — but will the media help you tell your story with free publicity?

Let’s get strategic…

Consider why you want to have media cover and if this placement will hurt other placements you may seek with this publication.  If you still want to move forward with it, think it terms of the publication’s readership; let’s say they are baby boomers who live within a 5 to 10 miles of where your ice cream social took place.  Next, do the photos you took of the participants reflect the image you want to portray for your organization?  At this point, you may decide that you really don’t have a very compelling story, your photos do not reflect the high energy and independence you want your community to be known for and finally you still have to get photo releases from the people whose photos will be submitted to the publication.  Is it really worth it?  It will be!

Look at all the angles…

First, think about the possible story angles that this can take on:  the popularity of ice cream — why is that?  What benefits does it possess?  What are the most popular flavors?  How many places can you buy ice cream within the area of the readership?  Is there a physiological change within a person when then eat ice cream?  Think about what would expand the interest of the reader and what could be relevant or entertaining to them.

Add the extras…

Then look at the photos you have.  Can they be cropped to be more appealing?  Can you add stock photography to the shot to make it more interesting?  Do you have video to add?  Links to other great sources and stories?

Make it last…

Review your distribution options:  local print, online, your website, newsletter.  Consider if this story now interests the readers of any or all of these venues; now, it probably will.  Send it out, email or call to follow-up with the editor(s) and print it out when it is published.  Create links to and from the publication and your website.  This article has just begun to work for you….

Get permission for reprints and put them in your sales folders.  Frame and wall mount the story in a prominent place, post it on your website and feature it in your newsletter.

How your content benefits marketing…

You have just developed a sweet little event into a marketing tool that helps people know what kind of community they are considering, the lifestyle they will enjoy when they move.  You’ve also honored the activities of those who live at the community.

Wow, now you have created something really fascinating!

Lessons Learned at Leading Age

The annual meeting of Leading Age was not only a great time to see old friends and learn new tactics, it was also the 50th anniversary celebration of this association that serves the providers of homes and services for the aging.  We recently returned from the four day meeting held in Washington DC with a dozen take-aways you might find helpful when marketing your communities.

1)         Look at your residency contracts for prospects.  How does it help people preserve their assets?  Considering the cost of home maintenance and the likeliness of another 10 years before home values are restored to their pre-2008 status, this could be a way to connect with prospects on a very real level.

2)         Nurture not only the hot prospects, but all your prospects because 75% of them are interested in the CCRC (Continuing Care Retirement Community) product.  It may just take them 5 or 6 years to finally move-in.

3)         The CCRC is considered a discretionary expense.

4)         Conduct home visits and leave behind a “signature gift” (something that can be associated with your community).

5)         Dig way deeper during discovery.  It’s not enough to just ask what the prospects hobbies are.  You need to know how often they enjoy that hobby.  Where are they when they are doing this activity and with whom.

6)         Segment your mailing lists more to get better returns.

7)         Do the math to determine if television’s cost per thousand is more productive than it is in other marketing vehicles.   And, of course determine if the cost relationship to sales outweighs other options.

8)         Lead generation tactics and your sales approach should be creative.  In other words, it should pleasantly surprise your prospect.

9)         Evaluate the value of outdoor signage, especially billboards.

10)         According to Pew Research, 33% of people use social media and of the people who are online, 51% of them are 50 to 64 years old.  Not only are these the adult children of our residents, they are age-qualified to move in.

11)          Use all the free online analytical tools available to you.

12)          The competition to the CCRC’s is your prospect’s HOME.  The attendees of this conference are very smart — they know that sometimes it’s better to join ‘em rather than fight ‘em.  They attended the Home and Community Based Service sessions in droves, filling room to capacity with standing room only.  This could be key to success in senior housing until 2020 when there will be plenty of seniors to go around.

For more insights into successfully creating leads, buzz and strategies for your community, call 800-489-6584.

Reduce, Reuse and Recycle to Recover

At the recent Life Services  Network conference for senior  housing and services, attendees  came to be inspired and  renewed with ideas and  solutions.  Certainly, the  frustration of our economy and  new healthcare reform confound  marketers, managers and  owners. However, it is also clear  that the rules of engagement  inherent to social media have  permeated all their marketing  efforts.

Reduce your marketing to goals.

Social media is based on the premises of transparency, generosity and caring. As a result, it has earned more than a pat on the head and a passing nod in the C-suite.  Today, marketeers in nearly all industries integrate social media principles and practices into their goals for sales, clients, donors, etc.  The goals are tangible and are established with hard numbers:  how many sales do you want to make?  website views?  requests for information?

Reuse your messages.

Sharing is now a very big deal.  Share what you know and excel at, if it could be of value to your prospects.  However, do it with a purpose in mind and know what you want the reader to do with the information you have just given them.  Do you want them to pass it along to others?  Do you want them to write a comment to your article (then end with a question)?  Do you want them to pick up the phone to learn more from you?  Don’t make your reader guess, tell them what you want them to do with the information you have imparted.

Recycle your efforts.

Cross-promote your message with great care and attention to detail. It is likely that everything in your marketing tool box has the potential to work in more than a single capacity.  For example, your print ads and direct mail pieces have often been related.  Press releases can be posted on line, to your website, e-newsletters, social media venues.  Then published articles can also be printed and mailed as direct mail, reprinted for your brochures, framed and posted in a photo gallery.  Your posts can be shared on RSS feeds, among your accounts on Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter, along with your myriad of other related blogs and outlets.

Recover by responding.

When you get a response, give a response.  Say “thank you” often and quickly.  If you receive a negative comment, address that personally if possible.  If not, do it as soon as possible and with full transparency for the best possible outcome.

These are the essentials of marketing in today’s world.  Thinking in terms of recycling and you will find ways to reduce your marketing costs, reuse your marketing efforts, and recover from the challenges of today’s marketplace.

Fancy New Features with Google+

Anyone who attends IVY’s presentations knows that we like to give you a heads up about what to watch in social media.   Hot new products aren’t always worth your time to explore them but when a giant like Google attracts 25 million people to their new social media platform in just a few weeks — we think that’s worth a glance or two.

Google+, also known as Google Plus, is taking a swipe at Facebook, Twitter and FourSquare with their new social media platform.  It’s got some pretty amazing features…

“Circles” allows users to choose the circles of people you want to communicate with in different ways.  For example, you might chose to have one circle for your family, one for your friends, another for classmates, colleagues and an entirely separate one for your work supervisors.  This handy little feature means your mom or your boss can’t stalk you as easily as before.  You are able to share the different sides of yourself with the appropriate group of people.

Challenging FourSquare is “Hangouts.”  This feature lets you alert chosen people where you are located in real time.  If they don’t come to see you personally, conference your text messages with the Google+ feature, “Huddle.” Automatic photo uploads from your phone are much easier with “Instant Upload”  and you selectively decide which of your circles should be able to view your photos.  This is a nice privacy feature Facebook does not offer.  Even better, Google+ will allow you to permanently delete the photos and other content you post.

Finally, the engineering wizardry of Google’s search algorithms comes alive with “Sparks” where content that interests you is sent as soon as it is available; so when you are ready, it’s there for your consumption.

According to a published report in PRWeb Magazine,  nearly 2/3 of over 2,000 web developers surveyed by Appcelerator/IDC, believe Google can catch up with Facebook in the social networking scene with Google+.  When asked why, 68 percent of developers say that leveraging Google’s assets (eg: Search, YouTube, Maps, etc) trumps Facebook’s social graph lead.

Information about business applications for Google+ has not been released yet and may still be in the research and development stages.  Developers are spending their time working hard to respond to the few early adopters who were asked to test out the platform.  Google+ appears to really be listening to suggestions.

Clearly the battle of the Internet superpowers is gearing up.  Facebook is attempting to develop search engine capabilities and “Facebook Mail” while Google enters the social media fray for a second time (Google Buzz died amidst a flurry of unresolved privacy issues).  We doubt you’ll want to be on the sidelines for long with this great new technology ready to be tackled.

Free Internet Listings Revealed

There are dozens of places to list your business on the Internet and some of them are even free.  So, since the Internet is now the dominant place people go to find just about everything, via their computers or smart phones, it’s time to make sure your business is discoverable.  Here’s where to look and what to expect.

With a Google search, you can find several free listings options.  Most of them are basic listings and do not have a logo option.  However, your listing would consist of your organization’s name, address, phone number and website.  Many have no or limited ability to give a description of your organization.  Occasionally, as with prweb.com, you can also add your 400-character commercial about your company and choose the meta tags and landing page options that best suit your company.

Make sure you get your business listed on the three primary search engines:  Google, Yahoo and Bing.  You can also put your business name and a brief pitch with:  SuperPages, Yellow Pages, ASK.com, locallytype.com, spoke.com and mylocalservices.com.

Eight popular places to add your business’s name are:  YellowBot, YELP, White Pages, MapQuest, SuperPages, CitySearch, YellowBook and local.com.

If you don’t mind a small investment in your Internet listing, you can sign up with a central listing management site.  YEXT.com costs under $100 and they will make sure your listing appears on the eight sites listed above.  It’s a great place to manage these powerhouse business listing sites.  The beauty of Yext is that if you want to add an offer to your listing for a period of time, you can update it on all eight sites at once.  Then, if you want to have your add stand out, you can select just one or all websites to have a more prominent listing.  The fee is annual and gives you a nice presence on the sites you select.  Currently none of them exceed $90 per year.

For companies who are used to the high cost of yellow-page advertising, this is a welcome change.  Do you have other websites that you recommend for business listings?

Remarkable Content

Don’t think you’re a remarkable writer?  Then write about something remarkable.

Remarkable content is within your grasp every day.  What made you smile today?  What made you angry, or sad or surprised you?  Dozens of simple, possibly significant triggers come into your life daily.  Capture them, break them down into their basic parts.  Think about why you reacted as you did and what greater impact that revelation could have on people with the same interests and you — especially those interested in your online content or blog.

It’s really very simple.  Let’s say you see a field of daffodils.  You find them beautiful and it pleases your sensory receptors.  Ask yourself: why?  Do you like the color of the yellows and whites against the rich green leaves with the blue sky backdrop?  Although being in that field of daffodils might be a “you gotta be there moment” what the colors mean to you and others could be an intriguing topic.  Throw in a few serious facts about color, such as studies that support the claim that yellow sparks creativity, green generally means freedom and the blue from the sky is calming.  Invite others to think about color, what it means to them, how they use it, what the “universal” opinion of certain colors may be.  Take a photo or video of the daffodil field to accompany your commentary.  You just wrote a 400 word article that is interesting to read, relevant to your audience, about something… remarkable.

This very easy process can be applied to anything in your life whether it is work-related or personal.  Every day you face new challenges.  You have new ideas.  Again, just think about them in a wider context to test the topic’s ability to be developed into something interesting for many readers.

All writers suffer from ‘writer’s block’ from time to time.  They don’t know where to start and nothing is intriguing them.  That’s when you get out the Guinness Book of World Records or Google something very strange and interesting.  It will spark your creative juices and your fingers will be dancing over that keyboard in no time.

Another writer’s tip is to start in the middle rather than the beginning of your story.  The opening to your narrative will show itself when you have written the body of your copy.  In fact, since many people write two or three paragraphs before they even get to the true lead of their topic, starting in the middle can work out just fine.

The moral of this story is that your don’t have to be a remarkable writer, you just need something remarkable to write about.

It’s Called Inbound Marketing

When an organization engages people enough to have them seek out information about their products and services, it’s called Inbound Marketing.  The process of pulling prospects and customers toward a business is becoming widely accepted because it is the way that consumers prefer to make their buying decisions — via the Internet which is now the first responder to consumer questions about how to solve their needs and wants.

Inbound Marketing differs from traditional Outbound Marketing methods such as advertising, direct mail, telemarketing, etc. that seeks customers via intrusive, unsolicited messages.  Since consumers are able to omit these intrusions from their lives and use technology to filter the messages they want to receive, the prospect’s real value as a lead is greatly improved.  Inbound Marketing also “sweetens the pot” by offering consumers useful tools and resources that attracts them to the organization’s website and creates a relationship with them.

Inbound Marketing primarily uses social media to drive consumers to their website and to communicate with them creating a relationship.  Blogs, Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn are popular and effective social media methods; although, their effectiveness is influenced by the market a business intends to reach. The leads created from social media and a company’s website are considered to be more valuable than any outbound channel because the prospect has sought out the information about the services or products that they have identified as a need in their life.

With a track record for valuable sales leads and today’s economy, businesses welcome the 60% savings on their cost per lead — from an average of $332 per lead for Outbound Marketing to $134 for Inbound Marketing leads, according to a HubSpot report, “The 2010 State of Inbound Marketing.”  Budget allocations to Inbound Marketing have risen 67% and have been shifted from the traditional Outbound Marketing line items.

The HubSport Report further identified social media and blogs as the fastest growing category in lead generation budgets and they continue to be ranked as the lowest cost lead-generation channel.  Businesses who use these tools cite specific sales results, proving that Inbound  Marketing isn’t just for branding anymore!