Welcome to the investor relations blog of OTC PR Group. As a Top IR firm specializing in investor relations, our primary goal is to keep our clients and followers well-informed about the industry’s latest news, events, and developments. Our audience ranges from management team leaders to institutional investors, encompassing all levels of the investment community and stakeholders in management teams.
Our investor relations blog aims to provide timely articles covering various aspects of investor relations. These include updates on SEC filings, corporate governance, earnings calls, public relations, and other strategies related to investor relations. We constantly strive to offer valuable insights from our team of experts, so be sure to check back regularly.
IR & PR Outreach For Retail & Institutional Investors
In recent years, there has been a notable increase in investment capital flowing into companies. This trend is driven by the belief among investors that these companies possess significant growth potential, which can result in substantial returns in the future. The dynamics of the investor relations landscape have experienced significant changes, particularly during the past year of the pandemic, with stock activism and analyst shifts leading to substantial transformations.
Our investor relations blog guides CEO’ & CFO’ on the latest topics and insights relevant to their industry. As physical offices on State Street become less relevant, virtual platforms like Zoom have taken the lead in connecting retail investors and day traders with directors, division heads, board members, and even CEOs.
Understanding Capital Markets with Investor Relations Blog tips
We hope you found this IR blog post informative and beneficial. If you have any questions or comments, please don’t hesitate to contact us. We also encourage you to subscribe to our newsletter, where we discuss the significant challenges that companies face and provide analyst feedback from the world of capital markets. Our discussions encompass various topics, from company sustainability to customer confidence, and we strive to maintain a consistent interaction record.
Thank you for your readership. -The Investor Relations Blog Team at OTC PR Group
Greater Reach: Digital advertising provides a platform for companies to reach a broader audience than traditional advertising methods. With billions of people online worldwide, digital advertising allows companies to reach millions of potential customers with a single campaign.
Better Targeting: Digital advertising offers advanced targeting capabilities, enabling companies to tailor their message to specific demographics, interests, and behaviors. This targeted approach can increase the effectiveness of campaigns and drive better results.
Cost-Effective: Digital advertising is often more cost effective than traditional advertising methods. Companies can run ads on social media platforms and other websites for a fraction of the cost of television or print ads.
Measurable Results: Digital advertising allows companies to track their campaigns in real time and measure the success of their ads. This information can help companies refine their campaigns, optimize strategies, and drive better results.
Enhanced Engagement: Digital advertising offers more interactive and engaging ad formats, such as video, interactive ads, and rich media ads. These formats can increase engagement and generate higher levels of brand awareness and customer loyalty.
Increased ROI: By combining the benefits of greater reach, better targeting, and measurable results, digital advertising will generate a higher return on investment (ROI) than traditional advertising methods.
Overall, digital advertising provides an effective and efficient way for public companies to reach their target audiences, generate brand awareness, and drive revenue growth.
Digital Advertising Public Companies:
At OTC PR Group, our experienced creative teams and partners start with a big idea or a well-told story about your company. We make sure your story connects your company’s vision of the future.
At OTC PR Group, using the tools in the Google Search Console offers valuable insights into your site’s performance. Optimize your Website for the right keyphrases to fix: low rankings and click-throughs. How to decide on the next step? What’s the best strategy to improve your SEO based on Search Console data? Should you improve low-ranking posts first or low-CTR positions?
Google Search Console offers tremendous information for Optimizing the right keyphrases for site owners. Companies can find out which pages don’t rank well or get few clicks.
We’re obsessed with speed! Faster websites are better for users and better for search engines. That’s why SEO experts spend a lot of time working out how to make our site faster. It’s also why we stay on top of the latest trends in browser technology and performance techniques—website design tips.
That’s all good, but while speeding up our site, we kept hitting a bottleneck — no matter how many things we tweaked, our CSS slowed us down.
So we thought about ways WordPress might handle CSS differently and better and devised a new, faster approach. If you want to squeeze every last performance drop out of your website, this is the thing for you!
That first step? Optimizing for the right keyphrases, of course! The key phrases you aim to rank for should contain your customers’ words. Imagine yourself selling dresses for gala events. In your marketing, you refer to these dresses as [gala dresses]. However, Google Trends shows people do not search for [gala dress]. They search for [gown]! You won’t get much traffic if you optimize for [gala dress]. So, make sure you target the right keyphrases.
At OTC PR Group using the tools provided in the Google Search Console offers many valuable insights into your site’s performance. Optimize your Website for the right keyphrases to fix: low rankings and low click-throughs. For example: how often a page is shown, or how often people clicked on your website in Google’s search results. But, once you have a list of posts that could do better, how to decide on the next step? What’s the best strategy to improve your SEO based on Search Console data? Should you improve low ranking posts first, or low CTR posts?
You must maintain your web presence when trying to get exposure and gain investor attention. Site Speed Influences SEO.
Performing Site speed SEO optimization practices is more critical than ever.
Site Speed Influences SEO, and Google has repeatedly said that a fast website helps you rank better. Recently, Google launched the ‘Speed Update,’ making site speed a crucial factor for search engines.
For now, the slowest sites take the hit, but what about the future?
New articles are published almost daily, telling us that optimizing for
greater speed is one of the most critical things you can do now. And they’re right, of course! Site speed influences SEO in many ways. Here’s a small overview of how site speed and SEO go together.
If you don’t put in the effort to ensure your site works well,, there will be a significant drop-off, and fewer people will visit your site. It’s essential to have a great structure that includes fabulous, targeted, and relevant content. You need the first experience your potential visitor/investor/consumer has with your site to be flawless. They need to load your site first before they can access company content. If it takes ages to load, A much faster competitor is just a single click away. Site Speed Influences SEO and not investing in a fast site is almost like you don’t care about your corporate image. No reason for them to stay, right?
On mobile, site speed is even more of an issue. According to research by Google, the average mobile site takes over fifteen seconds to load. At the same time, people expect them to load in less than three seconds before they consider leaving altogether. Every second counts, as conversions drop sharply with the longer your site takes to load.
OTC PR Group founders have over 30 years of experience managing awareness campaigns. We understand that SEO optimization, increasing investor recognition, and broker awareness through network advertising can be extremely daunting. Having a properly coordinated marketing plan can provide a positive impact and accelerate trading activity and brand and investor attention.
We all know that stocks are sometimes undervalued or, for the fortunate, sometimes overvalued.
In most situations, this can be from general market conditions, such as a trending industry sector. The positive side can be enormous if you are fortunate enough to be in an industry in the news.
Nothing excites investors more than a rising share price. Such situations can become self-fulfilling prophecies when an increasing stock price attracts more investors willing to pay more for the stock. Momentum traders buy stocks simply on the assumption that once an uptrend starts, it will likely continue.
Most CEOs or CFOs never admit their share price is too high — at least not to the public. This obsession with seeing your company shares as “cheap” can lead to unfortunate corporate actions.
Given all the time corporate executives spend generating investor interest in their stock, it would be very hard for them to ever see, much less say, their stock is overvalued.
First and foremost is the desire to buy back shares at the market’s peak. In the peak stock market year of 2007, many members of the S&P 500 index bought back billions worth of their stock, which was much more than they repurchased in 2009 when the S&P 500 index hit its lows.
The problem, of course, is that investors used the same approach, however, undervalued most stocks were during the credit crisis of 2009. The problem is often recognizing this at the time. Overvaluation or undervaluation can also be applied to an industry or company running hot or cold.
It’s troubling that even when the overall market is hot, most senior executives tend to believe their stock is undervalued. This mindset is often reinforced by investment bankers who won’t even use the term “overvalued,” preferring instead to refer to companies using words such as “fully valued.”
If your company is fortunate enough to have an overvalued share price, now is the time to “strike the match” Following these four actions can increase shareholder value when the share price is high.
Issue Shares. This can also help build the financing capacity needed to make opportunistic acquisitions when stocks again become undervalued in bad times. It is better to have more leverage during an up-cycle to increase the share-price appreciation and less leverage during a downturn to dampen the decline.
But be careful; since investors may react negatively in the short term, management must have a disciplined process of making only investments that truly create value.
Issue Convertible Debt. For management concerns that they cannot convince investors of the merits of stock issuance, issuing convertible debt is an excellent way to at least take some advantage of an unusually high share price.
When stock prices are at cyclical peaks, they are less likely to rise in the coming years, so convertible debt is less likely to convert — making this an attractive form of financing when stock prices are high.
Use Your Stock to Make Acquisitions. Cash acquisitions usually don’t create value at the top of the stock market cycle. In many cases, exchanging your company’s overvalued stock for the acquired company mitigates the risk of overpaying.
This strategy can lead a company that believes they are particularly overvalued to seek acquisitions to take advantage of its shares’ high-valued currency.
Avoid Buybacks. Companies that buy back stock when the price is high earn much lower returns on their buybacks than those that buy when the price is low. Refraining from share repurchases should go without saying. But it’s worth repeating that most companies should avoid the temptation to buy back stock when the market is high.
Continually assess your valuation and maintain objectivity. If the company appears overvalued or undervalued, make sure to take strategic action. At OTC PR Group, we can help you capitalize on any given condition and help increase shareholder value.
When you think about how people find your company, it will become clear that blogging can provide an effective strategy to increase traffic and investor awareness. Build a Social Media Marketing Blog for Investors.
Social Media Marketing Blog for Investors
#1: Define Your Marketing Goal
At OTC PR Group, creating a social media marketing funnel is directly tied to your marketing goals. To begin, think of one marketing goal you want to accomplish. Starting with a single short-term goal is much easier than tackling long-term goals. Also, choose a realistic, measurable plan to identify whether you’ve reached it.
Examples of goals that would make a great starting point for a social media marketing funnel:
If you’re launching a new business or acquisition, aim for a specific number of blog posts describing the latest company and the positive aspects of that sector.
If you’re reaching out to new investors, focus on making a certain number of press or company updates for your first quarter of business.
If you want to grow your investor audience, increase your rate of new subscribers from 8% per week to 10% per week.
#2: Publish Six Blog Posts to Create a Funnel to Support the Stake Holder Journey
After you identify your goal, you want to publish content that leads people toward that goal. To do that effectively, your content must cater to people at different stages in the funnel. Write two blog posts that support your goal at each stage: awareness, trust, and conversion.
Stage 1: Blog Posts That Create Awareness
To create awareness, consider blog posts that would attract new people to your brand and demonstrate what you can offer. Also, if your blog posts give people a quick-fix solution to a problem, you’ll earn enough trust for them to hang around and learn more.
In this first stage of the exposure process, these types of blog posts work well:
Top resources post: Share your best resources with your audience.
Product and guides: Share about and rank products and/or services that suit a specific purpose.
How-to posts: Present a problem and demonstrate a solution (or many solutions) to that problem.
Question-and-answer posts: Write a post in Q&A format to answer your readers’ burning questions about a product.
Stage 2: Your Prospect Wants to Know, Like, and Trust You
At this stage, the word “want” is essential. Marketers often assume that loyalty is hard-won. However, when you help people, they naturally want to like and trust you. Your prospect becomes eager to learn more and determine if you can help. The higher the price tag, the more content you’ll need.
Here are five blog post types that work well for building trust, likeability, and loyalty:
Customer case studies: Share a customer’s experience to show readers how your business helped that customer.
Expert interviews: You might ask an expert to give insight into an issue relevant to your readers.
Inspirational and motivational stories: Tell a personal story to motivate and inspire your readers.
Opinion pieces: Persuade readers to consider an alternative point of view by challenging conventional wisdom on an issue.
Research breakdown: Analyze the takeaways from several current surveys or studies about a trend in your industry. Or summarize an industry report to help your readers understand how the information may affect them.
Stage 3: Your Prospects Are Warm and Ready to Take the Relationship Further
Conversion doesn’t necessarily mean asking for the sale. To illustrate, you might ask the reader to join your email newsletter so you can nurture the deal via email. However, it’s a myth that blog posts should never contain sales information.
You’re supposed to ask for the sale when you’re in business. It’s okay and necessary to communicate how you can help your audience. Focus on attracting and nurturing relationships 80% of the time, but you can focus on conversions with the other 20%.
Social Media Marketing Blog for Investors
Here are some types of blog posts that work well for conversions:
Call the reader to action: Run a challenge that motivates your readers to take action. You can organize a formal challenge where readers must sign up to participate or an informal challenge designed to foster a sense of community.
Invite the reader to enter a competition/giveaway: Promote a product or service by enticing readers to enter a competition by writing no more than 25 words about a given topic.
Launch a new service or product: Write a blog post announcing a new product and explain how the product helps your customers.
Re-purpose Published Blog Posts to Create Social Media Marketing Collateral
Because you’ve started with blog posts, you can easily re-purpose the content in other formats on Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Twitter, and other channels.
From the content in each example blog post, you can create social media content chunks such as the following:
Why I dropped everything to found a tech startup: Behind-the-scenes video, inspirational quote graphics
Create your content calendar in 7 days – Join the challenge: Lead generation ad with the downloadable document, live video Q&A for each day, and Facebook group for challenge participants.
Small beginnings: Our content tech experiment has begun: Conversion ad with a call to action to purchase, a recorded video that demonstrates the product, an infographic that shows the product’s value
Creating the Right Amount of Content for Your Prospects
Depending on your product, prospects may take their time to make a purchase, especially if what you’re selling is at a higher price point. In that case, it helps to allow a longer lead time in your marketing campaigns. Your audience’s tolerance for information frequency will determine your lead time.
Conclusion
Social Media Marketing Blog
When you build a social media marketing blog funnel that supports a goal, you create more targeted and relevant content on your blog and social media. Also, you can easily re-purpose your blog posts for your social media marketing.
Remember to create content for each stage of the shareholder journey and adjust how much content you post based on your knowledge of your product and audience.
At OTC PR Group small cap investor relation firm, we know to gain investor awareness, public companies must overcome the hurdle of garnering business exposure. You need to Increase Investor Exposure with Youtube! The days of simply going public and releasing press releases about your business are long gone. Small business owners and entrepreneurs must actively promote and get more exposure.
When increasing your brand’s online presence, search engines and social media are where your focus should be. Video is often the top in search results. Search engines love fresh and engaging content because it’s expected to be consumed, shared, and video often tops the content list due to its social and exciting nature.
In the past, written content was king. Today, you can attract stakeholders and customers who are more comfortable watching a quick video than reading through a long list of company press releases or a boring article. A well-thought-out video can also help you appeal to a broader demographic and extend the reach of your marketing efforts, seeing as people can share your video on social media and instantly reach thousands of friends, contacts, and followers.
It is hard to beat a creative YouTube video to attract new investors and company exposure. With over one billion viewers, YouTube can be a powerful way for your business to reach millions of people who can become prospective customers.
Creating a YouTube video is a powerful asset to any company building an online marketing strategy. The mass appeal and widely recognizable format make it perfect for introducing a service or product.
YouTube videos are simple to share. This makes posting them into any social media strategy plan relatively easy. Your business exposure can increase exponentially by posting YouTube videos on other popular media sites like Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn. Social media and video are the new SEO, and that’s why we incorporate them in our PR campaigns. Social media adds social proof to your video because if people are prepared to share it on their networks, it bolsters companies’ website confidence in your company and products.
Hosting an investor day can have a positive impact if you know the secrets to a successful investor day —both during the event and in the following weeks and months. It can be a great way to raise management visibility and credibility, highlight the depth of your management team, and clarify your company’s growth strategy. Here are some insights to guide you thru the process.
DEFINE YOUR OBJECTIVES
Why are you hosting the event at this particular time? What messages do you want to communicate? Who should deliver prepared remarks? There’s nothing that says an investor day must be held every year. In fact, they shouldn’t be held annually if there’s no new or exciting information to share. Companies should feel free to hold the event when the timing is right, and the information is relevant. Ensure the event is appropriate; don’t want the information to get too stale for the investment community.
For example, if you are planning an investor day around a major announcement, you can provide investors with an additional incentive to attend the event. It also can make sense to include third-party speakers in addition to your management team, depending on the focus of your investor day. For example, a company recently announcing a new medical device might invite a physician to discuss its benefits.
PICKING THE LOCATION AND TIME
Many companies like to have their investor day at their headquarters because it allows them to show off their facilities, equipment, and operations. It can be helpful to reach out to your sell-side analysts and key shareholders in advance for their opinions about the timing or location you are considering.
Companies can boost attendance, awareness, and participation by taking the event to a location that is more likely to draw attendance. Cities like Chicago, New York, San Francisco, or Miami can be big draws because they’re convenient and attractive destinations. One idea to encourage attendance is to piggyback off a big industry conference or trade show. If analysts are already in town for the meeting, they may be willing to stay one extra day for the investor event.
A company could promote the event online by giving the event its splash page or even its mini-site. The site could contain the event’s agenda, speaker bios, and check-in info. When the event ends, attendees could reference the place to listen to the audio or download slide decks and other relevant information, such as the event transcript. The microsite or splash page will work best if designed with all the other event collateral, including invitations, save-the-date emails, and presentations. A design company with experience marketing investor days can create a cohesive package that accurately reflects a company’s brand and captures the event’s theme.
Only some companies are up to speed on the power of Twitter. However, many of the attendees likely use Twitter regularly. Live tweeting the event serves two purposes. First, it relays information to those not in attendance and builds buzz around the event. However, it also provides a documented transcript of the day’s happenings. If a company creates and pushes an event-specific hashtag, it can monitor and review all tweets surrounding the event. Those tweets can provide critical information about how the day was received and what information should be communicated better going forward.
PREPARE AND REHEARSE
Rehearsing for the investor day is essential. It allows your speakers to practice their delivery and ensure they are successfully communicating the key messages you want stakeholders to take away from the presentations.
An investor day can be as fun and original as a company wants. Far too many companies fall into a default program that isn’t compelling and provides too little helpful information. By thinking creatively and embracing non-traditional ideas, a company can make its investor day a positive experience for the business and the attending analysts and investors.
Properly executed investor day can help companies build and maintain market value. Working with our experienced team at OTC PR Group allows companies to achieve solid and positive results from their IR initiatives.
Social Media Improves Investor Communications. Social media usage also improves the company’s information environment. Companies may benefit from developing different approaches to disseminating positive versus negative earnings news.
Conventionally, when a company wants to publicize investor-related information, such as an earnings announcement, it sends a press release to intermediaries such as newswire services, equity research databases, and brokerage firms. A company needs to know if or when any of its existing or prospective investors received the information.
Social Media Improves Investor Communications
With social media platforms such as Twitter, a company can send one or more short messages directly to a known number of followers with a link to a press release on its corporate website. As such, a company can use Twitter to target its news dissemination, increase the speed and flexibility of news dissemination, and reduce information acquisition costs for its investors and the traditional media outlets that follow it.
Twitter and Facebook are the two most frequently adopted social media platforms for corporations and are highest for customer-facing industries such as meals, retail, books, and services and lowest for industrial sectors such as oil and steel.
Quarterly earnings-related tweets are the most prevalent type of investor-focused tweets, far outnumbering tweets related to executive turnover, dividends, board of directors, and even new products and customers. The number of firm-quarters with earnings announcements on Facebook is approximately half the number on Twitter, suggesting that the preference for Twitter is even more vital when it comes to earnings news.
Using Twitter, rather than other social media data, is advantageous because earnings announcements have been shown to be of first-order importance to investors, and the information content of earnings announcements can be controlled more effectively than the information content of other financial disclosures. Also, the precise time that earnings announcements are disseminated through Twitter can be identified.
There can be a significant increase in the mean volume, primarily due to the rise in large trades. Therefore, while social media is commonly viewed as a dissemination channel that provides timely access to information for all investors, the results suggest that more prominent investors react more quickly to earnings-related tweets.
Social Media Improves Investor Communications
Studies show that the usage of social media by corporations has grown dramatically over a relatively short period of time, from less than 5 percent of S&P 1500 companies in 2008 to more than 50 percent in 2013. This trend suggests that social media usage for communicating with investors has the potential to become an integral part of many companies’ disclosure policies. The findings show that even in the absence of the Securities and Commission’s approval of social media as a channel for investor communication, companies used it to disseminate a variety of information, including earnings news, board and executive changes, new contracts, and dividends.
Appropriate social media policy for investor communications differs from social media usage for other business purposes, such as marketing campaigns, in which companies often want to generate viral reactions to social media dissemination. At OTCPRGroup, we incorporate the latest Social Media Solutions, Website design, SEO Optimization, and video productions in order to maximize investor communications. Companies that adopt social media disclosure policies benefit from developing different approaches to disseminating positive versus negative earnings news. Social media usage improves the company’s information environment, and it improves investor communications.
Raising Capital & Getting VC’s Attention is perhaps the most difficult challenge any entrepreneur faces, and for many, it’s unavoidable.
In today’s business climate, there are hundreds of ways to fundraise.
Here are rules to keep you on the right road to Raising capital & Getting VC’s Attention.
Establish clear, realistic goals. From day one, clearly state your objective. If you can’t explain your vision in concrete terms to potential investors, you can’t expect them to give you their money. Be realistic about what you are trying to accomplish. By laying out your plan in detail, you should confidently say what you can expect to achieve. Investors deserve transparency and truth. Your partnership must be based on trust — and only credibility can breed it.
It is essential to make a good impression with a solid pitch presentation and corporate website, but it won’t guarantee funding. Credibility invokes confidence, which mitigates risk and opens wallets.
At OTCPRGroup, we encourage you to follow these basic rules to get started:
Have a solid team in place. Any startup is only as good as its people. A robust, efficient, and success-driven squad is necessary. Recruiting people with sound reputations for honesty and integrity helps attract investments. After all, you are your team.
Focus on the “real” market. Exhaustive, in-depth market research is the only way to map a blueprint for success. Many early-stage businesses are too eager to start and set out in the wrong market. The best market for a new business is not always the biggest or the steadiest. You have to do your homework. There is no replacement for in-depth market research.
Market research can be tedious, but it is the bedrock of a solid business plan. You and your startup team should profile a variety of markets. That is the only way to determine the best fit for your business.
Get your name out there. The biggest irony in raising capital? It would help if you had some means to do it. Investors won’t know every detail about your project, so you must decide what essential information to deliver. Fortunately, the Internet is the best advertising medium invented and is always open for new business. The web is, without a doubt, the most powerful place to advertise. Even better, it’s cheaper than broadcast TV, radio, or print media. Social media can also be a boon, as reliable networking can help you connect directly with potential investors. That’s how you create the support network for your project.
Consider crowdfunding for validation. Crowdfunding is one of the best fundraising tools available for startups today. The concept is simple: You advertise your business on several dedicated platforms, and users vote with their wallets. A crowdfunding pitch can also be a good litmus test. You should consider tweaking your angle or business model if you don’t attract investors (or interested customers).
Choosing the right platform is paramount. Again, do your homework, this time in the form of due diligence of the companies managing your crowdfunding initiative. It would be best to verify the platform’s solidity and validity, including the track records of those running the forum.
Keep them close. Ultimately, your success will depend upon the credibility you’ve built and the connections you’ve established. A successful venture results from positive interactions between the business and its investors. Keeping investors in the fold will make them comfortable and confident about how things are run. Remember, they will keep the engine running, but only as long as they are sure you are moving in the right direction.
Raising Capital & Getting VC’s Attention
The road to raising capital can be a bumpy ride. But with the right approach, the right people, and the right funding avenue, it’s one worth taking.
We connect our clients with groups that invest, introducing our clients to experienced teams and communicating your business’s investment potential to secure funding under the best possible terms and conditions.
Investor and Public relations professionals do more than draft press releases. Top Public Relations Firms craft persuasive messages and implement key communication tactics while building relationships with media representatives. Great PR is the telling of a good story. We all know the public wants to hear an exciting story. The more engaging the topic, the better the acceptance by investors and the better the public outreach. Of course, if the story is appealing, hitting on all the hot buttons of investors and clients, you could have a PR slam-dunk. In this case, communication with your target market and all possible media outlets put your company on the map.
At OTCPRGroup.com, we feel nothing more rewarding than helping an organization overcome business challenges with all the benefits outlined below:
Public relations produces media results, including articles, radio interviews, and op-eds that provide strong marketing materials and credibility. For example, a well-executed media placement can be distributed as an e-mail blast, a physical mailer, and social media post. Further, that content can be sent to existing customers or member bases and potential ones to demonstrate company value.
Brand visibility, placing your company name and products in front of your target audience, is powerful. In most forms, media coverage often validates a company in the eyes of investors and makes them more familiar with the brand when they see it again, be it from an e-mail blast, sales call, and other marketing techniques.
Top Public Relations Firms know how to influence an audience and can position a company or individual as an expert within their industry. For companies with very targeted audiences, when impactful news occurs, or trends develop, making your voice heard through a story in the press, blog, or a strategically placed op-ed/byline is essential.
Driving lead generation for your brand, effective PR can influence and motivate your target audience. As people continue to see your company or product in the media, it increases the chance of them making a call, sending an e-mail requesting more information, subscribing to a newsletter, visiting a website, and/or other calls to action.
Public relations addresses brand competition by ensuring that your company is presented with the same opportunities to get in front of targeted audiences as others in your industry. It is essential to be seen in similar media coverage to your competitors regarding story ideas, trends, product features, etc.
Over time, PR can improve a company’s website rankings based on a high volume of high-quality media placements. Public relations efforts can be leveraged across social media to drive more traffic to the article, resulting in SEO Optimization for the page and the links within it. They will continue establishing the brand publishing via social media to increase visibility.
The most critical task is to get the word out about your company’s potential to those who could invest in you. PR may help your company look more influential, bigger, and more critical in the public eye. Investor/Public relations are essential to marketing and advertising and must be considered in your advertising budget. The good news about PR is when done effectively can lead to strong community and industrial partnerships and even financial support.
Top Public Relations Firms for Emerging Companies
Our investor relations firm can deliver robust investor awareness programs to meet your goals.
Tools we use TO SUCCESSFULLY USE SOCIAL MEDIA FOR INVESTOR COMMUNICATIONS”
Small Cap Stock OTC Investor Relations for Emerging Companies. Your company should have clear objectives of how you will need to broaden your investor base and how you retain the current ones. Institutional and retail investors must be apprised of your company’s evolving business model in real time — and measuring your investor relations program’s success for your entire management team is critical. The investor relation function is becoming more strategic in the organization, as they are working closely on corporate governance, M&A, and market analysis which is a new and challenging pattern for this role. Measuring your effectiveness by your stock price alone is not enough. Instead, your best measurement is found by gathering feedback from the buy- and sell-side analysts and what the general market says about you (i.e., retail investors, the media, and the general public.)
In this fast-paced market, Small Cap Stocks can easily be overlooked. Without the resources and funding of Fortune 500 companies, it can be challenging to maintain a consistent presence in the public’s eye. Whether you hire an in-house professional or put an external advisor on retainer, your IR specialist must create buzz and guide your company’s strategic communication and beyond. The investor relations function involves:
Educating the public about the company’s position in the industry.
Delivering a regular update of forecasts.
Identifying any key business issues that could impact the company.
Persuasiveness: They should be able to draw the market’s interest and attract sell-side coverage and potential investors.
Creating buzz: Your IR professional should also be able to continually publish and generate articles for your company. “Get you in the press.”
Risk awareness: Your IR professional should also be able to manage the risks associated with external messaging.
Storytelling: Your IR professional will have to continually retell the company’s story, fine-tune the investment value proposition, and provide the appropriate guidance on milestones and financial performance.
Integrity: Your IR professional must be transparent and honest and instill confidence in your organization.
OTC PR Group is a Small Cap Stock OTC Investor Relations firm that affords you the most significant coverage in developing stock support and higher market capitalization by utilizing News Letter publishing sites that broaden exposure.
A good corporate video is one of the best ways you can bring visibility and corporate recognition. If you are a public company you can increase shareholder recognition with video. If you are not communicating your story with a corporate video whether it’s an interview style format or a well-developed commercial video you are missing out on what is a tremendous marketing tool. Online video has been gaining strength as a source for content marketing the benefits can be increasing shareholder recognition; increase sales, web presence, along with exposure to media.
A commercial video is the first chance to show the world exactly what your company is doing giving investors or potential partners the opportunity learn about your business and goals. Yet another advantage for preparing commercial videos from video production companies is that you can use the video for press release exposure and distribution. Videos have the ability to reach the right venues and create the right impact.
The reason we encourage clients to incorporate video in public relation campaigns is that it is simply the most powerful digital marketing tool available. It’s better for recall, it’s more persuasive and search engines love it. A professional interview can draw out plenty of information, which is why the interview format is so effective in relaying information to others. The exposure of video content continues to grow, and it’s more important than ever for investor relation professionals to develop an engaging video marketing strategy In fact, research has found that using the word “video” in an email subject line boosts open rates.
An interview by itself shows that both parties are experts in their chosen niche, which means people watching or listening to the interview will consider the information being talking about as valuable. This video interview can then be placed on various video blogging or streaming websites so that it gets plenty of exposure for your business. The modern way of advancing this tradition of oral communication is through video blogging. Through interviews that can be posted online, people are simply able to capture knowledge in a very effective way. There are different type of learners in this world, and when it comes to content, your goal is to gain exposure. You may be informing someone why they need your services, how they can use your products or when they will need your expertise. No matter what you sell, your basic content creation goals will all boil down to attracting a targeted audience.
As a top Investor Relations Firm we know one of the best things about video content is that you can post it on YouTube. While video can dramatically increase your website’s visibility on the major search engines (Google, Bing, Yahoo), few businesses understand how to take advantage of YouTube, the world’s second largest search engine.
Depending on your marketing objectives, your videos can live either on YouTube or on your website. If your video is on YouTube, you can increase your brand’s visibility in search fairly quickly, but the traffic will go to YouTube. But if your video lives on your website, the traffic goes to your site, but it takes longer to build up your rankings and traffic. That’s what video does: it increases email click-through rates, ensuring that your email campaigns get the highest ROI possible. If you’re ready to become an expert in your niche, then it’s time to see what a good video marketing team can do with an online interview. Learn More:
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The stereotype of an angel investor is a hardened business entrepreneur who has amassed great wealth but is always ready to earn more. Angel investors invest in early-stage or startup companies in exchange for an equity ownership interest. Angel investing in startups has been accelerating with many high-profile success stories that have spurred angel investors to make multiple bets to get outsized returns. Many angel investors may not be as wealthy as you think but are financially savvy. Most are looking for a way to grow their money by promoting innovative new businesses.
Angel investors fill a gap between the venture capitalist and the commercial lender. They don’t want to play an active role in the business but have business savvy. Venture capitalists and financial institutions lend more significant amounts, with the former willing to accept the high risk and the latter expecting minimized risk. Many angel investors invest smaller amounts of money, $20,000 instead of $200,000, but there are no limits, so $500,000 up to $ 1 million is possible.
Angel investors are also groups of people who pool their money to fund startup businesses. They include investment clubs, professional groups like doctors or lawyers, and other entrepreneurs. There is a bit of mystery surrounding angel investors because they keep a low profile, making them difficult to categorize. What you know is that they are financially savvy, thorough in their evaluation of businesses, and hopeful of earning a high return on their investments. So don’t stereotype angel investors because they can be anyone. Learn More
Important things angel investors LOOK for in a company?
The quality, passion, and integrity of the founders.
The market opportunity is being addressed, and the company’s potential to become very big.
A thought-out business plan and any early evidence of obtaining traction toward the plan.
Interesting technology or intellectual property.
An appropriate valuation with reasonable terms.
Questions entrepreneurs should anticipate from angel investors?
How much capital are you raising?
How long will that capital last?
Do you have detailed financial projections for the next two years?
What are the key assumptions underlying your projections?
What are the likely gross margins?
The angel investor will want to understand how the company plans to market itself, the cost of acquiring a customer, the long-term value of a customer, and management. So the entrepreneur should be prepared for the following:
How does the company market or plan to market its products or services?
What is the company’s PR strategy? You can find help with this question at OTC PR Group
What is the company’s social media strategy?
What is the projected lifetime value of a customer?
What advertising will you be doing?
Who are the founders and key team members?
What relevant domain experience does the team have?
What key additions to the team are needed in the short term?
Why is the team uniquely capable of executing the company’s business plan?
How many employees do you have?
What motivates the founders?
Raising capital can be very time-consuming, and raising angel financing will always take longer than you expect.
Not only do you have to find the right investors interested in your sector, but you also have to go through meetings, due diligence, negotiations on terms, and more. There are a variety of ways to find angel investors, including:
After finding investors, you should determine whether a prospective angel is a good fit for your company; questions you should ask:
How do you like to help your portfolio companies?
What amount of follow-on investment will our company need to succeed?
How can you be helpful to us in growing the business?
How do you like to interact with your portfolio companies?
Angels will often invest in the company through a convertible note. The key terms negotiated are:
Unsecured or secured, the company’s assets are almost always unsecured.
Interest rate and payment – the interest is usually accrued and not paid currently.
Discount rate – this is the discount rate the investors enjoy for taking the early risk in the company, expressed as a discount from the company’s Series A round of financing. A discount rate of 20 percent is typical.
Valuation cap – this is the maximum valuation of the company where the note can be converted in the next round of financing.
There are many reasons an angel investor will reject your pitch.
The great majority of prospective investors are likely to reject you. Here are some of the typical reasons for rejection:
The business’s market opportunity or potential size is perceived as too small.
The founders don’t come across as knowledgeable or passionate.
The entrepreneur, through a blind email and not a referral, made the pitch from a trusted colleague of the angel investor.
The financial projections were not believable, and the founders couldn’t convince the investor of the reasonableness of the underlying assumptions.
The investor wasn’t convinced of the need for your product or service.
The investor needed to be convinced that your company was going to differentiate itself from competitors.
Bring your team to the pitch meeting but only have the CEO speak.
Showing me uninteresting or unrealistic projections
Taking too long in your presentation
Not doing a demo
It is not being able to explain the key assumptions in your projections.
Unable to articulate why your product or technology is differentiated from a competitor.
I need to find out how you will use my investment capital and how long it will last.
What benefits can an entrepreneur get by taking on an angel investor?
Other than money, some or all of these benefits are obtainable from good angel investors, such as contacts with venture capitalists and strategic partners—advice and counsel along with credibility by being associated with the investor. Also, contacts to potential customers, employees, lawyers, banks, accountants, and investment bankers, the list goes on, and suffice to say, more than enough reason to make a go at it and raise needed capital.
View the YouTube video for answers to your company’s PR solutions and gain needed exposure and advice: YouTube
Disclosure of CEO pay regulatory-issues. It is always a wise time to consider the regulatory problems requiring decisions and action. Court cases alleging excessive pay have focused on whether plans that govern director may include:
“Meaningful limits.”
Suggesting that employers might want to consider what compensation level constitutes a “meaningful limit,” for example.
A fixed formula.
A dollar/share limit.
Should different limits exist for roles or a single cap for all directors?
Companies should consider reviewing and documenting their pay-setting process thoroughly, including how the board sets director pay and the role of peer group selection. Consider the optimal time to adopt a limit, whether it should be in the omnibus plan approved by shareholders, and whether the board can amend that plan without shareholder approval. Also, consider if shareholders should be asked to approve a new stand-alone plan solely for directors.
Compensation committees would be well served to ask finance departments and their accounting firms to consider GAAP rule changes as part of the compensation planning process.
Disclosure of CEO pay regulatory-issues
Companies should think about their communication strategy sooner rather than later, as this could be a multiyear project for many companies. Communicating the CEO pay ratio will be necessary; the ratio will be out there for all to see, including employees, customers, competitors, potential employees, and the press.
The hedging regulations proposed by the SEC require companies to disclose their adopted policy to shareholders. Given the heightened shareholder focus, the rules do not need any specific hedging policy; companies should consider adding or amending an approach.
Companies that still need to do this should start modeling to develop the best approach to disclosing the comparison to the peer group’s total shareholder return. Under the rule, companies must choose whether to use the peer group in the disclosed TSR table or the one used to benchmark executive compensation.
The overarching concern should be implementing a Clawback Policy in a way that does not trigger shareholder lawsuits; this might be the issue that will require the most work. Companies should undertake a deliberative, well-documented process to understand how any restatement of results would affect executive pay. Finally, review the process in which pay decisions are documented to clarify which payouts are based.
The data reveals How Press Releases drive traffic to your company. We are experts in creating shareable content and enabling sharing capabilities through the relevant channels that can dramatically increase your shareholder base.
Optimizing content for sharing pays off regarding the amplification of news. Press releases shared on Facebook and Twitter drive significantly more traffic back to your company. Optimizing content for sharing works for investor awareness and should be implemented for each release. Key conclusions from the analysis include:
Each press release share generates two new views; expands the audience.
Creating engaging content and enabling sharing capabilities through Social channels can increase exposure and views for News. Crowd Factory and PR Newswire found that each share generates an average of nearly two click-backs to the original press release. Additionally, sharing press releases across social channels builds stakeholder base and social reach.
Twitter drives more traffic than Facebook and Press releases need to be shared on many platforms to gain the best coverage
The three largest U.S. based social media channels, Facebook is tops when it comes to sharing news:
Approximatly 40+ percent of press release sharing happens on Facebook.
30+ percent of sharing happens on Twitter.
15+ percent happens on LinkedIn.
But not all shares are created equal: despite Facebook’s more significant popularity for sharing, each share on Twitter drives about 30 percent more press release views than a share on Facebook.
Multimedia news enhances engagement more than text only.
We recommend that you include photos, videos, or audio to generate more views, shares, and clicks than text-only press releases. Adding an image to a press release increases exposure; adding a video and a photo doubles the engagement rate. Press releases that contain pictures, video, and audio generate the most attention.
Twitter has been more heavily used for news and business purposes in driving traffic back to press releases. This data reiterates the importance of creating engaging press releases that motivate people to share, whether pairing your release with a video or photo or simply creating a more tweetable headline. Since a single share can drive two new people back to your press release, optimizing sharing content can easily amplify your investment’s impact in news distribution.
In today’s social media era, OTC PR Group understand how many views or shares your content has received is not enough – it’s essential to know where and how your content is circulated among top influencers and which networks have the most impact.
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Are you communicating the right message to your stakeholders?
The Best Investor Relations Firms start by identifying your shareholder base to understand who they are and how they feel about particular issues that affect your company and community.
Though shareholder identification has been controversial in the IR community, it can help ensure you’re talking to the right people about the correct issues.
Have you been delivering it through the proper channels? Make a mistake; at best, you risk missing your audience. At worst—I’ll leave that to your imagination.
Effective investor relations are critical in today’s economic climate. When markets are volatile, and regulation continues to rise, the stakes grow even higher. Naturally, the effort is complicated by risk management considerations, leading to the possibility of tension between investor relations and corporate legal teams.
The key is to work together; following these steps, you can make shareholder communications more effective:
Build relationships with your investors.
Shareholders don’t exist only during proxy season. You should invest in your relationships with them all year long. One idea is to create “a historical chronology of what you have spoken about with each investor that includes a few notes on each conversation.” You’ll have notes ready to go at the next meeting, even if it does come a year later.
Figure out who votes.
Identifying shareholders is only the first step; the next is to ensure you know who is voting for those shares. (Don’t chase people who don’t have actual voting authority) These are the people who will determine your company’s future.
One tip is to try and find one person, hopefully, someone you can then leverage and work through whatever that particular investor’s organizational structure is.
Understand the correct issues.
You need to set an agenda based on your audience of shareholders and voters. Take a look at your corporate governance processes with a critical eye. Prepare for any questions or concerns from your shareholder community. Anticipate needs rather than push your company’s agenda.
Determine whom you need most.
Issuers can make strategic errors when they target investors for communication. Set aside concerns about which shareholders have the most significant stakes; it may be smaller groups of investors that have more pressing questions for you.
Please focus on the concerns of your constituency; communicate with concerned shareholders with answers to what’s on their minds.
Seek out help.
Proxy advisers can give you a hand in engaging shareholders in a variety of ways. These firms can do more than help you with a proxy campaign. Get them to help you identify the key people with each institutional shareholder and to analyze voting results for trends and insights.
OTC PR Group combines public, investor, and media relations into a powerful networking tool. We are an experienced firm with financial knowledge, high familiarity, and understanding of the investment community. Through our networks of dedicated and creative professionals, we provide a comprehensive social media marketing strategy that benefits our clients and their investors. Read more:
Delivering messages that gain analyst coverage is what good Investor relation professionals do when creating proactive strategies for building long-term, engaged relationships with shareholders.
Investor relation professionals also need to proactively communicate the right message to the right investor, which starts with understanding that investor’s decision-making criteria. Due to fundamental changes in the brokerage industry and sell-side, many companies, especially smaller and medium-sized businesses — are struggling to attract or maintain analyst coverage.
Investor relation professionals can no longer rely on analysts to regularly report on their business. With diminishing coverage, investor targeting has become a critical function for Investor relation professionals.
It’s key to understand how the function of corporate access plays into your meeting schedule and to push for the most strategic meetings. There is no substitute preparation and strategy when it comes to seeking and maintaining investors.
Investor relation professionals also need to proactively communicate the right message to the right investor, which starts with understanding that investor’s decision-making criteria. Investor relation professionals need to ensure they get their message out to investors and get an early read on anything that may be creeping up on them, including activist intentions.
The 2008 financial crisis was a watershed moment. The aftermath exposed many problems within the industry, including a growing disconnect between some management teams and their investors.
Companies started receiving poor scores regarding executive compensation from mutual and index funds which was followed by a wave of activist campaigns and proxy fights. Investors are changing the way they classify companies; peer groups are evolving to take rapidly changing conditions or investment strategies into consideration.
Say, for instance, a company increases its dividend from 2% to 4%. This company would then be perceived as part of a ‘synthetic basket’ of stocks made up of companies that have drastically increased their capital return programs.
Investor relation professionals need to be aware of these types of emerging investment strategies such as Socially Responsible Investing (SRI) which is becoming more meaningful to investors. Shareholders are increasingly making decisions around investments and divestments based on socially or environmentally responsible factors.
Peer group considerations and SRI represent just two of the growing types of ‘thematic’ investor characteristics (another example is passive investors) that companies need to monitor and engage with. As a result, it’s no longer effective to focus solely on factors such as assets under management or specific sectors.
Investor relation professionals need a broader view of investor characteristics and tendencies that they can’t get from traditional peer analysis. This could mean identifying ideal investors in entirely new ways. A savvy IR professional will want to adjust his or her company’s story and targeting program to account for these trending themes.
With growing business and market complexity, the role of investor relations has evolved to become more strategic.
The typical Investor relation professional is now tasked with helping the company’s board members understand the way investors perceive business strategies and developing a more engaged shareholder community based on long-term relationships. In some cases, companies are increasingly turning to perception studies to better understand their vulnerabilities and develop a stronger offense.
Delivering messages that gain analyst coverage is crucial to help bridge the gap left by the changing broker model and to compete for coverage with the remaining sell-side analysts and the increasingly influential buy-side analysts, Investor relation professionals require more advanced data sets to provide them with insight into their company, industry, peers and prospective investors.
It’s clear that the era of the Investor relation professionals focusing on reactive communications is long gone. Instead, the modern Investor relation professional is creating proactive strategies for building long-term, engaged relationships with their shareholders. As they do so, the insights that Investor relation professionals provide are becoming a critical part of board-level conversations.
OTC PR Group provides a full suite of small cap public relations services utilizing the latest technologies coupled with relationship building processes to develop and maintain interest from your shareholder base.
We work to build shareholder value by engaging with key-stakeholders and effectively following up and communicating your message, investment potential and corporate vision to investors, Brokers and the media.
If you think about the ways people find your website it will become very clear that blogging can provide a effective strategy to increase traffic. The following methods also drive traffic but lets consider how they stack up:
People cantype your name right in to their browser, but that’s an audience you already have. They know who you are, you’re on their radar, and that doesn’t help you get more traffic on top of what you’re already getting.
You could pay for traffic by buying an email list (not recommended), blasting them, and hoping some people open and click through on the emails. But that’s expensive and, you know. Not legal.
You could pay for traffic by placing tons of paid ads, which isn’t illegal, but still quite expensive. And the second you run out of money, your traffic stops coming, too.
So, how can you drive traffic? In short: blogging, social media and search engines. Here’s how it functions. Think about how many pages there are on your website. Probably not that many, right? And think about how often you update those pages. Probably not that often, right? Well, blogging helps solve both of those problems. Every time you write a blog post, that’s one more indexed page on your website, which means it’s one more opportunity for you to show up in search engines and drive traffic to your website in organic search. That’s one more ping to Google and other search engines that your website is active and they should be checking in frequently to see what new content will surface.
Blogging also helps you get discovered via social media. Every time you write a blog post, you’re creating content that people can share via — Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, and Pinterest — which helps expose your business to a new audience that may not know you yet. Blog content also helps keep your social media presence going and your blog can serve as that repository of content. You’re strengthening your social reach with blog content and driving new website visitors to your blog via your social channels. So, the first benefit of blogging? It helps drive new traffic to your website and works closely with search engines and social media to do that.
Now that you have traffic coming to your website through your blog, you have an opportunity to convert that traffic into leads.
Just like every blog post you write it is another indexed page, each post is a new opportunity to create new leads. The way this works is really simple: Just add a lead generating call-to-action to every blog post. Often, these calls-to-action lead to things like free whitepapers, free fact sheets, free webinars, free trials … basically, any content asset for which someone would be willing to exchange their information. That is how you turn that traffic coming to your blog into leads for your company.
The best business blogs answer common questions their leads and customers have. If you’re consistently creating content that’s helpful for your target customer, it’ll help establish you as an authority in their eyes. This is a particularly handy tool for Sales and Service professionals. Can you imagine the impact of sending an educational blog post you wrote to clear things up for a confused customer? Or how many more deals a salesperson could close if their leads discovered blog content written by their company? “Establishing authority” is an important metric. Because at the end of the day, that’s what many of your blog posts are. Think about the sales enablement opportunities blogging presents:
If prospects find answers to their common questions via blog posts written by people at your company, they’re much more likely to come into the sales process trusting what you have to say because you’ve helped them in the past — even before they were interested in purchasing anything from you.
Prospects that have been reading your blog posts will typically enter the sales process more educated on your place in the market, your industry, and what you have to offer. That makes for a far more productive sales conversation than one held between two relative strangers.
Salespeople who encounter specific questions that require in-depth explanation or a documented answer can pull from an archive of blog posts. Not only do these blog posts help move the sales process along more swiftly than if a sales rep had to create the assets from scratch, but the salesperson is further positioned as a helpful resource to their prospect.
Blogging does — largely through search engines help you drive site traffic and generate new leads. If you sit down for an hour and write and publish a blog post today. Let’s say that blog post gets you 75 views and 7 leads. You get another 50 views and 5 leads tomorrow as a few more people find it on social media and some of your subscribers get caught up on their email and RSS. But after a couple days, most of the fanfare from that post dies down and you’ve netted 150 views and 12 leads.
It’s not over. Business Blogging Benefits
That blog post is now ranking in search engines. That means for days, weeks, months, and years to come, you can continue to get traffic and leads from that blog post. So while it may feel like day one or bust, in reality, blogging acts more like this:
The effort you put in yesterday can turn into hundreds of thousands of views and leads in the future. In fact, about 70% of the traffic each month on most blogs comes from posts that weren’t published in the current month. They come from old posts. Same goes for the leads generated in a current month — about 90% of the leads we generate every month come from blog posts that were published in previous months. Sometimes years later.
This demonstrates the scalability of business blogging. While you might not see immediate results, over time, you’ll be able to count on a predictable amount of traffic and leads for your business without any additional resource investment — the work to generate that traffic and those leads is already done. There are other reasons businesses might want to blog, they also become great outlets through with marketers can communicate other PR-type important information — things like product releases or event information and press releases. It’s certainly easier to get attention for more company-focused initiatives if you’ve built up your own audience on your own WEBSITE, as opposed to pitching your story to journalists and hoping one of them bites. These are all great side effects or uses of a business blog that must be implemented to ensure an effective marketing campaign.
OTC PR Group is an investor relations firm specializing in comprehensive programs for micro-cap, small-cap and mid-cap public companies increase stock visibility in a range of industries. We combine knowledge of capital markets communications, and an unparalleled reputation for integrity and client service with evolving industry best practices to design and execute investor relations programs that help deliver long-term shareholder value.
How to get your company published in all those reputable places (like Forbes, Inc, The Washington Post, Mashable, Techcrunch, and more).
How to get your company published
If you have no experience speaking with journalists or you’ve never gotten press before, the question of how to get your company published and get others to write about you? For even the most seemingly “boring” businesses, there are some basic strategies and tactics for getting major media coverage–regardless of your past marketing experience or budget.
If you want to get media coverage, you need to have something to say that others will want to hear. Start to think about ways in which your story is unique:
What do you believe?
Why did you start the business or create the product? Was there some personal, painful experience you went through that inspired you to take action to solve the problem?
How is your product or service delivered that makes it stand out?
What popular issues are people talking about today that relate to your business and how you run it? The economy? Healthcare? Income?
‘The advantages of getting press over other forms of marketing is powerful”
From an entrepreneur’s perspective what is press coverage? Why does everyone want it? It’s free advertising, that’s why, and more than that it’s someone else’s; with their own built up brand credibility talking about your business.
Here are the specific advantages of getting this free advertising via media coverage:
Exposure – People who haven’t heard about your business will hear about you
Increased recall – The more often a person hears about you, the more easily they can recall the name of your business in the future i.e. when talking with friends.
Sales boost – Even if you get bad press, you can still see an increase in sales. I’ll talk more later about “bad” press…
More press – Getting published in one place often leads to interest from other journalists and bloggers. I call this a the “media echo effect.”
Boost in search rankings – If you’re published on one or more media websites with authority in the eyes of Google, your overall search rankings will increase.
Miscellaneous opportunities – Others in business will often reach out to you with partnership or joint marketing offers after they read about you.
Before you begin establish a strategy by deciding on what outcome you want to receive from executing your PR campaign:
Do you want to be able to list reputable 3rd party logos (e.g. The New York Times) on your website?
Do you want to grow sales and awareness?
Do you want to improve your traffic and search rankings?
Each of these goals requires a slightly different approach.
For example:
If you just want the option to slap some “as seen in” logos on your website, you should go for just getting mentioned.
For growing sales, you should seek to get a full write-up on your business.
For improving traffic and search rankings guest blogging works well.
How to get your company published starts by making a list of your target publications or venues. Your list might look something like this:
Wall St. Journal
Washington Times
NY Times
Venture Beat
Mashable
Fox Business News
The reason we use national outlets like these is are because it fits the profile of many mass market B2B service companies. Your company might be different though. The key is to aim for publications or blogs that are well known to your target customer.
How do you differentiate and pitch that to a journalist?
Remember, our strategy here is to get mentions, not to get a full write-up or anything like that. So that affects the tactical approach.
The easiest way is to begin by networking with bloggers and journalists.
The way that you do this is you take the list of target publications you listed in the step above (again, they should be relevant and/or respected by your target customer) and begin searching out articles, on Google and on the actual publication’s website.
Look for anything that is relevant to your business. What do I mean by relevant? Do a quick keyword brainstorm on words that are related to [your] business:
Local business
Local economy
Industry tips
Lower costs
The next step after that is to look up who the author of the article is that comes up in your search. Often, a writer’s email address will be directly on the publisher’s website, on the article, on past articles, or you can find it on his or her personal website. We recommend against contacting someone via Twitter or Facebook, because it is not as effective as email.
The final ingredient is the will to reach out to a journalist and make your case for why you can be a resource to them on an upcoming or future article. And yes, that’s the exact approach you need to take–it’s not about you when you reach out, it’s about helping them.
Here’s what a sample outreach email might look like:
Hey Thomas,
My name is [name] and I’m emailing you because I recently enjoyed reading your article here on some innovative ways consumers can lower their electric bill in the winter months.
[Link to article — putting the link on it’s own dedicated line makes it easier to click on if they’re reading your message on a mobile phone]
Here’s one other tip that I think could work well in a future article or if you decide to update this: [value added tip that positions you as an authority]
I’ve been running a growing electrical business in CA for the last X years, in which we’ve helped Y hundred household consumers — I would love to serve as a resource to you for any future articles since my expertise is in:
Electrical, bill economics, and small / local business formation and development
My direct number is below or you can email me back anytime you want a fresh perspective from someone with direct experience.
Thanks,
[name]
[number / signature line]
You can tweak and reword that template to fit your business but in my experience sending short, personal, valued-added messages like that helps to position you as an authority. And since many journalists never receive any direct email responses to their articles, they appreciate the effort and will respond.
I recommend sending at least 3 of these types of messages at a time for good measure since some percentage will not yield a response.
In closing, some other easy ways to get press mentions are to join a networking group like the YEC (Young Entrepreneurs Council), your local chamber of commerce, or another established group of individuals from your industry.
Journalists frequently will reach out the leadership of these organizations, asking for referrals to people who can talk on a certain subject or answer a specific question.
Some companies try to blur the lines between the words “mention” and “featured” but if you’re going to be intellectually honest, being featured in an article is a much bigger deal because that usually means the focus of the article is you and your business.
Many of the same key factors used for getting mentioned also apply for getting featured:
Uniqueness
Story
Niche Industry
Create a new category, or in a relatively new category created by someone else (think Living Social in the “Group Deal” space which started by Groupon)
However, because the end-goal is completely different this affects the specific tactics you should use. The main difference is that in order for it to be justifiable for anyone to write-up a full article on you, you have to be “news” which means you have to be saying or doing something new.
The key takeaway from this story is, if you want to get a full featured write-up, the kind that gets you sales and awareness, do or say something new and unique, and then reach out journalists via their “least crowded” means of communication: Email, in-person or Video chat. I believe that pretty much anyone with something new and compelling to say can with absolutely zero name recognition or reputation can get incredible exposure following these basic steps.
There are a few basic steps in marketing that will work in every situation when you’re trying to grow a business. They work if you’re trying to build an email list or close a deal. If you do not apply them, you will not succeed. At OTC PR Group we apply these basic principles in order to be competitive. Follow These Basic Steps To Grow Your Business
Things must be Easy and To The Point
You have to make things as easy and obvious as possible. This is true whether you have a brick-and-mortar store or a website, but it’s doubly true if you’re trying to accomplish something on the Internet, where competition is great. Don’t assume users of your website are sophisticated, navigational problems are major stumbling block for the average user. Dumb down everything. Make your webpage simple and to the point.
Few Words are a must
The MOST important marketing principle is to use as few words as possible. If you can’t tell someone what you’re doing in a few sentences, your chances of capturing a customer’s attention has just walked out the door. You must explain the benefit of your product or service in an extremely short sentence or phrase.
You must think of several short phrases that will drive you to go to a web page, or push “add to cart” or fill out a contact form. Putting a well crafted, short, descriptive phrase in front of your ideal customer is very powerful.
Sell your Benefit
For many in business, it becomes difficult to separate the features from the benefits. Further, we tend to become so deeply in love with the features we have developed, we think that everyone should love them just as much. That’s what you should always be asking yourself in regards to your customers, and the important word is “done.” How will the action you want your prospects to perform benefit them?
Everything must be repeated
Things that work and are important should be repeated.
If you ever wanted to share or credit something in the social media, but the page you were on didn’t have sharing icons or links to the social media accounts. They might be on the front page, but not on the inside pages. And because you might just be a little busy, sometimes it’s possible you will just drop the idea of sharing or crediting the source. Don’t let your landing page fall in this category. You should have a great landing page for all the different attributes or “hooks” that will pull someone into your website. They are usually free and you can never have to many.
Track your efforts
You need to have good analytics that show you what is working and what isn’t. With that information you are able to do more of the right marketing and stop doing what doesn’t work. Very soon you will have a business or website whose performance has significantly improved.
Help increase stock visibility with OTC PR Group
We are an investor relations firm specializing in comprehensive programs for micro-cap, small-cap, and mid-cap public companies that increase stock visibility in various ways. We continuously strive to maximize clients’ ongoing corporate visibility and market capitalization through comprehensive, multi-tier proactive programs. Website design, SEO Optimization, Shareholder Outreach for Small Cap Investor relations.
