Whatever vehicle your choose, timeliness of delivery is essential. Consider when the prospect/recipient is most likely to buy from or refer to you and that make be exactly when it should arrive. For me, dinner at 6PM is a=ok.

Online and offline publications looking to fill their growing pages are more interested in bylined articles. 

Bylined article submission should play a  part of every PR strategy but requires an extra layer of effort past drafting and pitching news releases. Bylined articles are simply articles written by the business on non-promotional topics and placed in their target media. Bylines are great for positioning of executives as thought leaders in their space. The gotcha here is that bylined articles can’t be self-promotional pieces where basically the author is telling the audience to buy his or her product. That is an advertorial. And that is where the landscape starts to blur.

Publications have long accepted advertorial submissions as part of a pay for play model. Normally advertorials are accepted with the purchase of a certain level of advertising. As such, advertorials are part of an advertising strategy and not a PR strategy.

Bylined articles have to more closely follow the editorial calendar of a publication and are subject to edits. That’s right, edits. And here is where things can get stickier.

Submit an advertorial and you’re pretty much guaranteed that it will run as submitted. Submit a byline and you have only slightly more control than submitting a news release. Editors still reserve the right to edit your byline for content or overall length. Further, they exercise control of the publication date, more so than the advertorial which usually runs when the ad is placed. That’s why building and maintaining a strong and respectful working relationship with editors is important and requires an investment of time and effort.

Does that mean you shouldn’t run the of submitting bylines? Certainly not. Just set your expectations.

Now, the real trick would have been to populate the message with something that I really wanted to buy. That didn’t happen but they got their click and for that I extend my kudos to SmartStream. Remember: you can compose great content but if the recipient never opens the message, it doesn’t matter. You missed your chance. Spend more time composing your subject lines and you’ll see a proportional improvement in your overall email performance.

So this morning I came across Josh Bernoff’s MarketingNews.com contribution, entitled Customer Service is Marketing, and realized now I could make a good case for telling yesterday’s student yes. No caveats about plans or objectives. The answer just solidified in my mind as yes. But the execution of that strategy may be different than what she expected.

Listening should be your first social media strategy. Listening to what your customers have to say. Listening to what your competition is saying. Listening to the buzz and hum of happy, unhappy and just undecided folks talking about your product, service, market, geography or basic primal need that you fulfill should be your first step in a social media strategy.

Bernoff reports that Best Buy pays 2500 frontline Blue Shirt employees to listen – and then respond when it makes to help out the customer. I’d been made aware months ago that Comcast had a similar program, a guy or team of guys who monitor twitter for unhappy users and then jump in to resolve their problems. The Comcast Twitter guys are apparently so helpful that some folks go there first, instead of their phone or web support line.

But before you start engaging, or thinking about who you have or need to hire to engage, just listen. Listening is a fabulous marketing tool. And if you experience a vast sucking noise while monitoring the buzz on one or more social mediums then you have to come to one of two conclusions: your customers and prospects aren’t using this medium OR just perhaps, there is a great big opportunity to activate a program here because apparently your competition hasn’t discovered it yet.

How often have you poured good money after bad on a marketing program or message that wasn’t working just because you didn’t have the time to come up with a better idea?

Make today the day you find the time to stop wasting money on a bad campaign (or no campaign at all) and find something new.

• Change where you are marketing, from one publication to another.
• Change how you are marketing, move from print to online or even outdoor.
• Change who are you marketing to, by trying a different demographic.
• Change the places that you market, from one event or association to another.
• Change your message; pick different words to describe your value proposition as see how people respond.

Shake things up. Then measure the results.

Once a lead is in the pipeline, you need to nurture, nurture, nurture them until they convert to customers. Because your field sales personnel can’t possibly call these folks every week (and that kind of pestering would be downright creepy), let your frequency marketing campaigns do the work for you. It is not uncommon for purchase decisions professional services to take several months and for technology to take up to a year. Regular professional touches delivering updates and educational material about your biz, your industry and your products help keep your company of mind so that when the prospects is ready to purchase — next month, next quarter or even next year — they think of you.

Marketing is not like lima beans, you can’t try them once and make a decision on the spot that it doesn’t work for you. Yet I continue to run into businesses who use that excuse when I suggest that better or more targeting marketing efforts might improve their bottom line. I try to give the benefit of the doubt when meeting a new biz owner and assume that they are at least doing something — thus the suggestion that there might be room for improvement — but that isn’t always the case.

One direct mail campaign, one e-mail blast or one display ad is, for a great many, a waste of money. There are lots of rules about the number of impressions required before your audience recognizes and reacts to your offer — with somewhere between 3 and 7 as the rule of thumb — but the general idea here is that you have to keep plugging along.

The first time your audience sees your message they may not even recognize it. The second time it may trigger some kind of awareness of the product category or offering. Hopefully by the third time they’ll remember your name.

The key is not only awareness and recognition but being in the right place at the right time: when your best prospect is ready to make a purchase decision. Sure, once in a while those single wave campaigns actually land in the lap of a prospect at the right time and they get the business. But this is pure luck that rides on the back of a competitor that already established awareness and education for the product category.

When I worked for a direct marketing firm, we typically planned all campaigns in 3 waves. Today we encourage clients who want to see the greatest ROI to invest only in programs that they can sustain for a full year.

Typically this is the plight of organizations run by really smart and highly educated professionals like engineers or attorneys. They know they are really good and what they do. And they have a high expectation that prospects will recognize the value they deliver without any push in the right direction.

Unfortunately, sometimes your customers aren’t as smart as you are and they have to be taken by the hand and led to your great idea. By making the time to explain to them not just what you do but how what you do can make them successful, you’re educating your audience and building loyalty for your brand.

The more complex the subject matter, the greater the opportunity for the delivery of educational material. This education process can take place in many formats and forums besides the ones pushed out from your internal marketing department. Highly educated professionals are sough-after for public speaking and by-lined article contribution. But it takes a little investment in PR to secure these opportunities.

Successful operators will always be the ones that get out in front of their audience early, beating their competition to the punch. Besides, there’s nothing worse than losing business to a provider with less expertise who will ultimately do a mediocre job of satisfying your prospective customer.

So why aren’t these a plus for my client? Because they aren’t interesting.  The entire reason companies host events at entertainment venues like the GA Aquarium or in a suite at Turner Field is because of the innovative venue. While you don’t have to go to the lengths of booking an entertainment location for your next event, sometimes a nice restaurant can make a big difference.

The same idea holds true for individual meetings as well as events. Next time you’re trying to secure a prospect for a lunch, consider bumping up your investment a bit from an $8 sandwich place to a $14 plated lunch with white table cloth service. You’ll see a measurable difference in the outcome of even that 1:1 event.

This week I received a postcard from the photographer. He used my images as the art on the face and included a thank you on the back. Thi was a fantastic use of the medium and the properties he had.

Placing my photo on the card immediately captured my attention and made me read it but using the image he had created further reinforced shis value and our relationship.

He actually used SendOutCards for production, which doesn’t work for all but proved to be a great platform for his purpose.

This approach could easily be transferred to any business who creates images for their client — graphic designer, illustrator, even architects or perhaps a dentist or orthodontist to who takes before and after glamour shots.