Happy Halloween from CMA!

CMA gets into the Halloween spirit! 

Our costume contest winners - The Beverly Hillbillies! a.k.a. Matt Kulcsar (Jethro), Melanie Kotsonis (Elly May), Danielle Carrick (Ms. Hathaway), Darrell Christmas (Jed) and Erin Higgins (Granny).

CMA - Top Agency Winner at 2011 JASPERS!

CMA Public Relations Manager, Kaitlin Friedmann (left) and Public Relations Account Executive, Meghan Higgins (right) accepted seven JASPER Awards from Board President, Rich Jack at the 37^th Annual Jersey Shore Public Relations and Advertising Association (JSPRAA) Awards Gala on October 14.

CMA received seven JASPER Awards at the 37^th Annual Jersey Shore Public Relations and Advertising Association (JSPRAA) Awards Gala held Friday, October 14 at the PNC Bank Arts Center in Holmdel, New Jersey--the most out of any agency who entered the competition. 

CMA received three gold awards for the creation of a brochure for a financial publication, a print magazine for an electrical buying group and public relations campaign for a meetings industry association. The firm also received four silver awards for a brochure and internal newsletter for a global accounting association, sales kit for a regional medical dermatologist and a web banner for a national transportation association.

“It is an honor to be one of the agencies with the most wins of the night,” said Jeffrey Barnhart, President and CEO of CMA. “This success coupled with our outstanding showing at the ASTRA awards confirms our commitment to serving client needs effectively.”

What a Scary Thought!

Your company’s website URL was misspelled in an e-blast sent to current and prospective clients.

Your print advertisement missed the mark and confused your target audience.

Your products brochure doesn’t include photos of your new product line.

Your whitepaper report doesn’t link to the correct URL to download the report.

These nightmare scenarios show you a glimpse into what can happen when you skimp on marketing talent. Before you opt for the inexperienced “cheaper option,” consider the impression you’re leaving on your current and prospective customers. You might just end up scaring them off for good!

In honor of Halloween, CMA wanted to share with you the worst marketing blunders of all time. 

What marketing nightmare is keeping you up at night? Use the comment box to let us know. Fret not! CMA specializes in marketing—let us lighten your load by handling your next brochure, e-blast or advertisement.Give us a call today at (609) 297-2235.

CMA Staff Recognizes Diane Galante Haggerty

CMA is proud to recognize Diane Galante Haggerty as the company’s third Crew Star program winner for 2011. The Crew Star program recognizes a CMA employee every quarter for exemplifying CMA’s core values and going above and beyond.

Diane is responsible for the overall management of association clients on both a national and international scale. Along with the management of day-to-day association operations, Diane applies successful membership development and recruitment strategies, meeting planning expertise and other best business practices to her leadership of associations. A resident of Yardley, PA, Diane is a graduate of The Pennsylvania State University. She has been with CMA for five years.

Diane was selected by her peers for her willingness to help fellow employees, her positive energy, passion for her work and servicing clients. As 2011’s third quarter Crew Star, Diane will enjoy perks such as a prime parking spot, lunch with the executive team and her picture on the wall in the CMA reception area.

Congratulations, Diane!

Finding the B2B Bull’s-eye

CMA works with many different kinds of business-to-business (B2B) clients and each are unique in their own right. They face different market challenges, they have different goals and have unique sales cycles. Perhaps the largest variable to consider in B2B marketing is who the target audience is.

Within a B2B company’s target zone, it’s always essential to find out who makes up the “bull’s-eye.” After all, it’s a common rule of thumb that 80% of your sales come from 20% of your clients—the most loyal clients. The genesis of this theory was an Italian economist Vilfredo Pareto, who in 1906 noticed that 80% of Italy's land was owned by 20% of the population. He then carried out surveys on a variety of other countries and found to his surprise that a similar distribution applied.

The way marketers are building brand loyalty has obviously changed drastically since Pareto’s time, but the principle remains. Consider this recent eSurvey of 1,100 North America marketers. It found that B2B marketers employ an average of eight different tactics to achieve marketing goals and those tactics mostly included content marketing.

“Content Marketing,” or custom media (sometimes called custom publishing, custom content or branded content) is the creation and distribution of educational and/or compelling content in multiple formats to attract and/or retain customers.

Essentially, what this says about the new B2B marketing landscape is that marketers are now publishers. There are many different avenues for creating useful information for potential customers while showcasing a company’s expertise.

Ready to be a publisher? Give us a call to learn the many ways CMA can bring these tactics to life for you.

Jeffrey Barnhart

President and CEO

jbarnhart@cmasolutions.com

Keep it Consistent

In today’s fast paced world, we can end up moving from one marketing project to another without a second to breathe. It’s important to take a step back regularly to make sure each “project” still has a consistent message and relates back to your brand in a meaningful way.

These questions can help you figure out if your brand is in conflict.

Are you having an identity crisis? Moving quickly to keep up all of your marketing needs can sometimes make you lose focus and miss the big picture. You might find that your brand changes with each new project. Before you know it your website, print ads, e-newsletter and printed collateral don’t hang together any more. 

Have you put it all out on the table? To see if you have a problem, you have to bite the bullet and put all your marketing in one place at the same time so that you can review them. Make this a team effort because you’ll be surprised what other marketing pieces are being used throughout your company that may not reflect your brand properly.

Is your website speaking a different language? While you don’t want your website to be simply a digital version of your corporate brochure, you need your online presence to be cohesive with your collateral materials. Be sure when one is updated, so is the other.

When is it ok to be different? Like any rule, sometimes there needs to be an exception. Special promotions might require a unique look and feel or a certain target audience needs to be communicated to differently. Overall, even within these specific circumstances you want to make sure your marketing messages and identity are inline and the returns from these promotions pay off for your overall brand.  

Need help getting your brand back together?  CMA can help you evaluate your current marketing program and get your brand back on track.

Jeffrey Barnhart

President and CEO

jbarnhart@cmasolutions.com

Proven Tactics in PR and Social Media

CMA's PR Manager Kaitlin Friedmann was recently invited to contribute another guest blog for e-Xplorations, a blog that aims to help small to mid-sized businesses adapt to digital marketing strategies. Check out the excerpt below....

I grew up in the MTV generation so when I hear social media experts predict the death of the press release, it makes me think of the panic SEO Marketing that must have stricken radio stations across the country when “Video Killed the Radio Star” was popular.

Rather than making predictions for one thing eclipsing the other, PR pros should embrace the many tools available to them. A mix of classic media relations skills and web-savvy strategies are essential now more than ever to raising awareness and proving ROI.  

To maximize your social strategy, increase the reach of your content and stay as relevant as you can to your target audience, PR professionals should take the necessary steps to optimize their next press release distribution or overall social media strategy.

The Role of the Press Release

Past – The only eyes on a press release were that of a reporter, editor or other member of the media (setting aside investor relations). Its purpose was purely informational and was rarely taken verbatim.

Present – Press releases are seen by a larger audience—they are blasted out to far-reaching lists of media and the general public optimized press releasethrough PRNewswire, PRWeb and other distribution sites. In the age of Google Alerts and RSS feeds, mass distribution is as crucial as ever. Press releases are additionally posted on company websites, sent in customer e-newsletters and linked to social networks.

While I can’t speak about the pre-Internet days of PR, I can make an educated assumption that the most proven public relations tactic has always been flexibility. What this analysis says is that PR pros don’t rely on any one method of communication and the press release must simply be newsworthy for the media and, more broadly, for the end user. The above-mentioned wire services will take care of the release’s optimized delivery, but it’s up to the PR pro to use keywords, anchor text and key messages that resonate with the target audience. The press release in the “classic sense” must also still have a real-live voice behind it (the PR pro’s follow-up calls) to increase the chance of media placement. 

The Gatekeeper-Free World of Social Media

Social media content has the power to bypass the media as the “gatekeepers” of information and go straight to your target audience. This is not just an awareness-raising tactic—there are sales to be made directly from social media working in concert with SEO. According to a comScore study, buyers “who purchase or convert online are almost as likely to use a combination of search and social resources (48 percent) as they are to use just search (51 percent) along the path to purchase.”

It’s nearly impossible to not mention social media in the discussion of the “future” of public relations, so let’s examine the future of the press release in this context.

Future – As attention spans shrink, experts say the press release could be phased out and replaced by viral infographics (visual representations of announcements that particularly involve statistical data used most prominently by FourSquare) or social media posts (Tweets, Status Updates, Discussion Points, etc).

To these predictions, again, my answer is to diversify. Why does one have to replace the other? Some of CMA’s most successful PR campaigns have been those that utilize the full arsenal of PR, SEO and social media tactics.

We recently used a healthy mix of classic PR practices, SEO and social media to “scare” up awareness for an association of haunted attractions. The first foray into our Halloween PR campaign started earlier this month with the keyword-riddled press release describing haunted attractions’ ability to compete for young adults’ attention. Distributed via PRNewswire, the release was also posted on 10 free press release distribution websites.

We also recruited the social media savvy of the association member base to further widen thepress release distribution reach of the press release to industry insiders, while following up directly with phone calls to a variety of consumer media covering the Millennial generation’s behavior. The results—placement on over 200 news websites, a feature article secured in an industry magazine and an in-depth feature article in the works on 10 haunted attractions for a major consumer magazine with more than 10 million circulation.

The bottom line here—SEO gets you on the right pages, but it’s up to you to make the most of your opportunity once you’re there.