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Steve Staedler – Account Supervisor, Public Relations Clients have great stories to tell, but getting their editorial pieces in front of the right audiences can be challenging. This is especially true in B2B, where the available media that target a client’s key demographics are limited. The process of placing a story begins with a pitch to let an editor know that you have a story that you feel would be a good fit for their audiences. You’ll be up against countless other stories vying for limited space, so making a good first impression with the pitch is critical. These four tips can help give your story the best chance to make it to print or online. Know the publication – Research the publication you’re pitching to and familiarize yourself with the kinds of articles it publishes. Do they run stories submitted by agencies or end-users, or do they just publish articles written by the staff? Have they published similar content to the story you’re pitching? Are there upcoming special editions or topics that would be a good fit? Knowing this information will show an editor your familiarity with and interest in their publication and will help you craft your pitch and resulting story to be more successful. Know the audience – Who exactly are the target audiences of the publication or website you’re pitching to? Your proposed topic needs to speak directly to those audiences with supporting arguments, tips or other information that will be useful to them. Editors go to great lengths to ensure the content they run best serves their audience, and making your story’s relevance obvious in the initial pitch keeps it in the running. Provide value – The content in trade publications and associated websites can be very technical in nature. Editors are looking for articles that provide a resource to their readers. Your pitch should highlight the novel concepts you will be presenting and any ties to larger trends or events in the industry that would add relevance to the story. When done right, the final story should present the client as a thought leader in its field. Deliver on the deliverables – Editors operate under tight deadlines. If the editor is expecting a story package with 1,200 words and four high-resolution photos by a certain date, you need to deliver. Missing deadlines not only places added stress on the production schedule of the publication or site, but you lose credibility with the editor which could affect future pitches. Earning media placements is not an exact science, and there is a bit of luck involved. However, doing some basic homework up front and communicating that extra effort to the editors sets both you and your client up to turn that pitch into a homerun.

Mike Isaacson – Senior Account Executive Account executives (AEs) play a key role in establishing the culture and dynamic between clients and agency teams. As they navigate through the responsibilities of meeting client expectations, managing projects and fostering team collaboration, it can be difficult to effectively maintain positive working relationships. In these situations, the principles of servant leadership offer an easy guide to cementing healthy team dynamics and reinforcing productive communication practices. Servant leadership is a management style that focuses on serving others first and leading second. The term was coined by Robert K. Greenleaf to emphasize empathy, collaboration and the well-being of team members. Applying these servant leadership principles in an agency setting creates a positive work environment, fosters trust and ultimately leads to better outcomes for clients and the agency as a whole. Empathy and Understanding:  By understanding the needs, concerns and aspirations of their clients, AEs can better align agency efforts with client objectives. Similarly, showing empathy towards the creative and account teams creates a supportive culture that boosts morale and productivity. Active Listening:  Servant leaders are adept at active listening – a skill crucial for AEs dealing with diverse stakeholders. By truly hearing and comprehending the perspectives of clients, team members and other participants, AEs can make more informed decisions for better strategic outcomes. Clear Communication:  Clear and transparent communication is essential in advertising. Servant leaders prioritize open and honest communication, creating an environment where untried concepts can grow into effective campaigns. AEs can apply this principle by fostering a culture of open dialogue, where everyone feels comfortable expressing their thoughts and concerns. Fostering Collaboration:  Successful advertising campaigns require a collective effort from different departments. Servant leaders actively promote collaboration by breaking down barriers and encouraging cross-functional teamwork. Account executives can create a collaborative environment by facilitating regular team meetings, brainstorming sessions and knowledge-sharing initiatives. Development and Growth:  Servant leadership emphasizes the growth and development of each team member. AEs can take on a mentoring role, providing guidance and support to those around them. Recognizing and investing in the professional development of individuals enhances team performance and contributes to the long-term success of the agency/client business relationship. The most successful AEs clearly demonstrate the values and behaviors they expect from their teams. AEs set the tone for a positive and collaborative work culture by embodying the principles of servant leadership in their own daily actions and decision making. By embracing empathy, active listening, clear communication, collaboration and a commitment to development, AEs create a more positive and productive work environment that meets client expectations and fosters the growth and success of their teams. Even as advertising agencies evolve, the proven principles of servant leadership can help AEs build relationships that endure.

Taylor Brazell – Account Executive A regular status meeting between agency personnel and their direct client contacts is not just a chance to hang out with your favorite team members, it can also be an extremely useful tool to check in on goals and keep projects on track. Whether they’re once a week, once a month or at any other time interval, meetings between clients and agencies covering a single project or multiple campaigns can allow for better input, increased organization and clearer communication while saving time and money. Input Similar to the yearly planning meetings between the agency and its client, a recurring update meeting gives both groups the chance to evaluate how campaigns have been going and map out the next steps; it just does it on a smaller or more focused scale. While these meetings typically include the client representative or team and the account executive from the agency, they also offer opportunities for other agency staff to receive and give input directly. Depending on the projects, members from the agency public relations, creative and digital departments can hop into meetings as needed to help the process of translating client requests into deliverables, offer their expertise, provide recommendations and offer a new perspective for any brainstorming discussions. Even the meetings themselves can be reviewed at the meetings. Most agencies bill clients according to the time spent on projects. With that in mind, update meetings should only happen as needed. The initial frequency should be set based on the expected workload, but adjustments can be made to meet more or less often as project needs increase and decrease. Organization Everyone has heard of the meeting that should have been an email, but what about the email that should have been a meeting? When multiple projects are going at once and several versions of drafts are circulating to different people within the agency and client teams, keeping up with the most current information can be a challenge over an asynchronous communication channel like email. An in-person or online meeting alleviates some of the dependence on emails by giving everyone the space to discuss decisions, while getting immediate feedback that keeps projects moving and saves time. To keep both the meeting and any ongoing projects on track, account executives should prepare an agenda that includes important steps for each project, including the history of completed components, current needs and upcoming deadlines. The report should also list who is responsible for completing each task, so no one is confused about where their responsibilities lie. Savings Clients may not think of meetings as a way to manage budgets, but good status update meetings will do just that. A real-time conversation can take the place of countless rounds of emails and edits as the client and the agency try to understand each other’s input, ask questions and get on the same page. With a thorough agenda, the right meeting frequency and team members ready to discuss important steps and project goals, regular update meetings can be one of the best investments clients make in their marketing program.

Brendt Glaunert – Digital Marketing Specialist The language you use when setting up a website should do more than just sound nice; it also needs to bring in customers. Having the best copy in the world won’t matter if no one makes it to the site. To increase traffic to a site, you don’t just need good words, you need keywords. From a fundamental SEO standpoint, keywords are the terms that your customers are putting into search engines when they’re trying to find your products or services. An effective keyword strategy includes matching the language on your site to the language your customers are using in the search bar, naturally bringing your site to the forefront of their search results. These three steps can help implement a simple keyword strategy that has shown to organically improve site traffic. Step 1: Investigate Your Competitors Your direct competitors are likely using a lot of these same digital strategies. Running through a list of these companies and auditing their sites for keywords and phrases can give you a solid list of terms to incorporate into your own site. Organic competitors are also important to monitor. These are the websites that come up along with yours in a search, regardless of any direct competition. Auditing these sites too, especially ones that are performing better than yours in SEO, can expand your list of keyword terms. Step 2: Identify Your Target Keywords Using the competitor research and your own understanding of your brand, products and services, you can now start to build a list of keywords. The metrics need to include both high-volume and specific keywords to generate the right quantity and quality of traffic to your site. Semrush and Google’s Keyword Planner are both great tools to show you the metrics of specific keywords you’ve identified. This will help measure the words and phrases with metrics like high search volume, so you can put them to work boosting your SEO. Picking only the terms with the most searches can be tempting, but keywords also need to be specific to your audience. Using just the word “veterinary” when building a site for a B2B veterinary diagnostic equipment manufacturer will generate a lot of traffic, but much of it will be people looking for a clinic for their pet, clinical research or other non-related products and services. The keywords “veterinary diagnostic equipment” may reach fewer people, but it will reach the right people, which, in this case, are veterinarians looking for equipment acquisitions. Step 3: Develop an SEO Checklist Each page of your site offers multiple opportunities to plug in those keyword terms. These words should be worked into the titles, section headers and other copy on the page, but they should also be written into the back end of the site. Title tags, meta descriptions and alt tags are the page name, page overview and image descriptions, respectively, that you give to the search engine, so it knows what your site is all about. This language should follow SEO best practices, such as character limits and suggested structures, as the crawlers that rapidly search the web only know how to flag keywords, not interpret text. Once your keywords have been identified, refined and strategically placed in both the front and back ends of the site, relevant site traffic and the number of quality leads should start to grow. However, these steps are just the tip of the SEO iceberg.

Mike Isaacson – Senior Account Executive With new advertising media popping up constantly across the digital landscape and print remaining a solid presence for B2B marketers, the options for available advertising platforms can seem overwhelming. A good advertising plan incorporates elements from several different channels, but how and when should each be utilized? To answer this question, businesses can work with their agency to identify how much priority needs to be placed on various parts of the sales process to drive awareness, build interest, encourage evaluation or activate decisions. While several advertising methods can fit each need, some match up better with certain phases than others, and supporting each of these steps with the right medium will solidify branding, grow impressions and ultimately, generate leads. Awareness: Print When looking to establish your brand presence, trade publications offer the specific audience you are trying to reach and the physical space needed to deliver your key points. The media relations department within an agency needs to pay close attention to the readership of a potential advertising partner to reach the decision makers the client plans to target. Reputable publications will be able to provide a detailed audience summary. Using this resource, the agency and the client can work together to review the facts and determine which ones are worth the advertising investment and the right message to influence the publication’s audience. Interest: Eblasts Once awareness is established, eblasts can be used for more personalized email prospecting. Many publishing groups offer options to contact their readers via email, including spaces in newsletters or sponsored eblasts. The contact lists they provide for these campaigns can usually be broken down by job role, geography or several other demographics for an even more targeted advertising strategy. There are also other services available to find contact information and build your own contact lists. Eblasts are a much more personal form of advertisement, delivering content directly to someone’s inbox. This allows the business to make a connection with potential buyers and expand on the points established in the awareness phase. Within the email design, clients can also direct interested leads to valuable resources, such as blog posts, infographics, case studies and ebooks, with a link to a landing page. Evaluation: Videos Most B2B purchases are made at a larger cost than B2C purchases, making the stakes for potential customers much higher. B2B consumers cannot make buying decisions on a whim and need to be highly informed about your products or services’ specs and differentiators. To help inform their audience, businesses should be well-stocked with a variety of resources that can be reviewed to help the purchasing process. One highly adaptable medium to use in this stage is video. Videos are easily viewable and can be shared on a variety of digital platforms including social media, emails, websites, paid ads and more. Content is both audible and visual to provide a multi-sensory experience and efficiently communicate your information for customers to evaluate. Decisions: In-Person Demos Even with all the information in front of them, a customer may still not be fully confident in your ability to enhance their business and provide a solid ROI. Offering an in-person demonstration with a sales representative builds confidence by allowing leads on the verge of committing to see what you offer in action. Your agency can work with you and your sales team to develop a checklist of features to cover during the demo and create flyers, product books and other deliverables for a more polished presentation. This also allows reps to leave physical copies of those sales resources with the lead, which has proven to positively impact their final decision. If done correctly, this phase of the process should be your strongest – leaving a positive, lasting final impression. Every advertising plan is going to look different with these tactics and a variety of other options available to express your brand in the best way possible. Clients can work with their agency to research and analyze the target audiences, build messaging and develop a well-rounded advertising strategy that advances the brand’s position.

Taylor Brazell – Account Executive Everyone’s favorite time of year at an agency isn’t summer or the holidays – it’s planning season! This is the time when account executives will sit down with each client to review the previous year’s goals and set new ones for the coming year along with budgeting for the strategies and tactics used to accomplish them. Each client will have a slightly different planning process, but it generally follows this basic timeline. Step 1: The Agency Gathers Information Planning for the next year begins at the end of a client’s fiscal calendar. For companies that follow the calendar year, this means that between October and November account executives and clients will each do a review of the previous year to see how the budget was followed and what goals were achieved. This will help indicate any necessary adjustments going forward to accomplish ongoing and new goals or maintain the current level of success. Most B2B clients also rely heavily on relationships with trade publications and websites for advertising and public relations. In the late fall, these publications and sites will release a media kit outlining opportunities and pricing for the upcoming year, which agencies and clients can use to make decisions about how and when to work with each opportunity. Step 2: The Client and Agency Meet Once the agency has some baseline information to discuss, both teams sit down to review the current year and talk about the next. When this meeting takes place will usually depend on the client. Most need to submit a marketing plan and budget between November and December, so a meeting should be set with enough time for the agency to review the information and develop a plan, as well as any review within the client’s organization before that deadline. Clients coming to this meeting should have a handle on major upcoming needs, such as sales goals, product launches, branded events or business expansions that will need marketing support. They should also bring up any shifts in the company’s priorities like improved lead management, performance data from online marketing efforts – like an increased emphasis on social media – or decrease in tradeshow presence. When the discussion is over, the agency and client should be on the same page with a list of SMART (specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, time-bound) goals for the coming year. Step 3: The Agency Builds a Budget After the meeting, the agency team will take all the input from the past year, available market research, data analyses, media partners and the client to develop a budget breakdown. Some clients prefer to allow the agency to come up with a plan without first revealing their target budget. Using the input from the planning meeting, account executives can create tiered options, with the first including the most barebones tactics to reach the essential goals, the second adding in some additional tactics to elevate those campaigns and the third incorporating those additional goals. The client can then select an option to develop a marketing plan that best balances budget and ambition. This method offers clients more options, but it is highly time consuming and requires a lot of back and forth to cut or add tactics that make the plan fit into the budget. Instead, starting with the budget number gives both account executives and clients more freedom and clarity. With this method, the agency has all the pieces of the puzzle from the beginning. Account executives won’t have to guess how much money there is available or try to cover the possible by taking the time to build multiple budget options. The process will be faster, and the final plan will be the best fit for accomplishing goals without going over budget.