February 2012

Schwartz MSL Named Largest Boston Public Relations Firm

On Friday, the Boston Business Journal released its annual list of Boston PR firms and Schwartz MSL landed at #1 based on number of PR employees. We're pleased for the recognition and congratulate the other agencies that appear on the list.

The industry is growing, without a doubt. A little more than a year ago, the venerable U.S. News & World Report projected the number of PR jobs would increase by 24 percent between 2008 and 2018. Seems like we're seeing a nice amount of that growth here in Boston.

Posted by Laura Kempke on February 13, 2012 at 3:15 PM
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Only 19.5% of News Release Headlines are Optimized for SEO

For the second year in a row, the Schwartz MSL Research Group worked with Business Wire to determine how many PR professionals are optimizing their news release headlines for SEO. There was slight improvement compared to last year, but there is still a long, long way to go.

The two most important elements for optimizing a news release headline are keyword inclusion and brevity. In terms of brevity, a full release headline must be 65 characters or fewer to be fully displayed in Google.

Many search engine optimization (SEO) experts, including our experts here at Schwartz MSL, advise that companies try to keep the characters in the headline under 70 characters. Anything beyond that will be less effective in supporting a company’s SEO.

This year, the Schwartz MSL Research Group, with invaluable help from Business Wire, analyzed the headlines of more than 16,000 news releases issued over Business Wire in a 31 day period (July 26, 2011 to August 25, 2011). This is the same period we examined last year. Since Schwartz MSL cannot know the keywords that thousands of companies are hoping to use to optimize their content and releases, the Schwartz Research Group focused on headline length as a success factor.

The results?

Most PR professionals are not fully optimizing their headlines. (I am sure Schwartz MSL is guilty of that as well from time to time.) Our analysis showed that only 19.5% of all releases have headlines with 65 characters or fewer, a one percent increase over last year. When we look at 70 characters are less, the total is 23.7%, an increase of less than one percent.

While the majority of releases are under 150 characters, we did see some examples that were much longer than the recommended length. The most egregious cases were the 2% of releases with headlines in excess of 300 characters, with one headline that was over 1,800 characters. The shortest headline we found was 21 characters, which is also probably not ideal for SEO as it’s unlikely that enough of the company’s keywords were included. Overall, the analysis found the average headline length to be 123 characters, unchanged from 2010.

The Schwartz MSL Research Group has written a Research Brief that takes a more in-depth look at this topic. If you would like additional analysis, including buzzword usage, and the geographic headline faceoff, you can download it here

Posted by Mark McClennan on at 8:09 AM
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Can B2B Manufacturers Use Social Media to Support Distributors?

Just about everyone in marketing knows that many B2B companies are having a tough time integrating social media into their marketing mix. They understand they should do it, but oftentimes can't figure out how to do so. Plus, they're generally budget constrained, so can't hire experienced staff or consultants to create a solid strategy and then execute. The result is that many underfund initiatives centered on one or two social platforms and often skip right past the strategy step.

Certainly, there are examples of companies Getting It Right, but they feel like outliers at the moment. 

One group of B2B marketers who I think are a part of that majority--those who are trying to figure it out, but not quite there yet--are manufacturers. A few weeks back, Derek Singleton blogged about this issue on Software Advice. Sourcing a Forrester Research report, he states that "only 30 percent of global manufacturers planned to increase social media spending in 2012."

Mr. Singleton is mostly interested in opportunities presented by social media for smaller manufacturers to do things like get feedback from customers and share their own thoughts. He's got several recommendations for those businesses. As I read his post, I wondered whether one additional use of social media for manufacturers, which often rely on networks of distributors to get their products into the hands of customers, might be supporting those partners by producing great social content that they can use.

The idea of creating social content specifically to fuel outreach by partners, who in turn touch customers, has been on my mind since reading "Drive B2B Channel Sales with Social Media Content" earlier this week on the Social Media B2B blog.

It seems to me that a manufacturer looking to explore how social media might work for them could consider the recommendations from both of these posts if they know they want to do more work online to support sales, but often work through distributors or other partners.

+++

For a reasonably recent (October 2011) look at how B2B marketers are faring with social media, download "Truth from the Trenches" from Penton Marketing Services. A few findings:

• "81 percent of respondents told us they find online marketing moderately to extremely challenging."
• "58 percent want [their] site to generate sales leads." [I'm shocked that the number is so low.]
• "77 percent say their site is not that effective at generating sales leads."
• Of those B2Bs using social media, 90% are on Facebook. Just 53% are on Twitter. Surprisingly, only one in three blog.

Posted by Laura Kempke on February 7, 2012 at 6:30 PM
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If You Write it, They Will Come

An understated fact from this past holiday shopping season was the torrid sales pace of tablet computers, especially iPads and the new Kindle Fire. For anyone watching developments related to content marketing and marketing automation, the news is significant, for these devices are useless unless there is something on them to read.

At least that's one of the findings in this year's "State of the Media Report," which was recently issued by the media tracking and analysis company Vocus. "When people hold a tablet in their hands and seek content to consume, they are willing to pay for it," the report quotes Rebecca Bredholt, managing editor, Magazine Content. The context of the analyses was the iPad's impact on magazines, but the implications of both tablet adoption and the Vocus study reach far wider.

It would seem that humans have an insatiable appetite for consuming media. I would love to see a study on the most prolific iOS apps. Something tells me that beyond apps for searching, the most popular category has to be news (even more so than games). That's because of our innate desire to gather content.

Enter content marketing. No discipline can have a greater impact on both SEO (affecting those search iOS apps) and materials that can be consumed by those tablet devices. Given the value of the content and the insatiable desire by all of us to consume it, consider two other realities: the shrinking universe of professional media and the low-cost of entry for becoming a content producer. The Internet today allows anyone to be a publisher, which means companies have a significant opportunity to fill the void left by shrinking professional journalism staffs.

Companies are hiring journalists to write content for their blogs. Many of Schwartz MSL's clients are signing up for our content marketing services, and we are driving the content creation efforts for them. When done correctly, such efforts aid SEO, increase website traffic, align to other marketing efforts and campaigns, and--when tied to a marketing automation solution such as HubSpot-- ultimately lead to leads and sales.

More fundamentally, the content marketing efforts work because, very simply, people want the content. To radically oversimplify the point, it really is a case of if you write it, they will come.

Posted by Ross Levanto on at 9:12 AM
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