FAQ

In general, public relations refers to the process by which a person or organization creates and broadcasts a message to a particular audience via journalists and the media.

At Agency 33, we act as your lobbyists to the media. Your organization has a compelling message or story it wants to tell, and we specialize in identifying and persuading the right journalists at the right outlets to tell it on your behalf.

This involves taking your message and honing it into a powerful pitch or story. Our team of award-winning copywriters, many of whom have worked as journalists, themselves, will help you to do just that.

Next, we take that pitch to a highly targeted list of relevant journalists who would be most interested in your particular story and who are read by an audience you want to reach. With decades of experience, the partners at Agency 33 have cultivated relationships with members of the media throughout Colorado and with outlets across the country, enabling us to rise above the noise and get straight to the decision-makers.

With the media interested, we will quarterback the story from research to publication, working with your organization to provide the journalist with any and all information they need to write the story that best reflects your organization and message.

Once the story comes out, we merchandise the coverage using your organization’s other marketing channels, including the website, blog, social media, and e-mail. We may even leverage the coverage to lobby still more journalists on a regional, national, or international level.

The end result is one or more pieces of earned media that generates immediate attention for your organization and bolsters your credibility. In general, this kind of story is valued at roughly 3-5x what you would otherwise pay for a similarly-sized advertisement.

Absolutely it does!

Admittedly, the rise of platforms like social media have afforded organizations many more options when it comes to spreading your message to a particular audience. Facebook, Twitter, blogs, and e-mail are all powerful content distribution channels.

Nevertheless, getting a story favorable to your organization printed in a widely-read and trusted outlet remains one of the single greatest methods of gaining credibility and building trust. A positive piece of earned media represents a validation of your organization by an impartial third-party, something that a blog post written by your marketing team simply cannot do.

Whether it’s on the morning news, the local radio station, or an online publication, stories generated by public relations remain an essential component to any comprehensive marketing strategy.

Sure you can! But would it be the most effective effort or the most efficient use of your time?

As a business owner, your expertise lies in creating the products or providing the services your customers and clients crave. Every minute you spend trying to write a press release or leaving messages with your local newspaper editor is a minute not spent doing what you do best: running your business.

At Agency 33, our expertise lies in communicating with journalists and lobbying the media on your behalf. We have developed relationships with countless journalists and own proprietary software that helps us reach reporters across the country and around the world. Our staff of copywriters excels in drafting attention-grabbing pitches that will translate into media interest and earned media pieces.

So before you decide to go it alone, contact us to see how we can help you achieve your PR goals in the most effective and efficient manner possible.

Any public relations engagement with Agency 33 begins with us sitting down with you to determine your goals and your target audience(s). Are you looking to simply raise brand awareness? Gain attention for a particular event or company milestone? What outlets are most popular amongst your target audience? All of these questions will form the foundation of our PR work.

Once we have a solid understanding of your goals and audience, we will work with you to brainstorm possible storylines and narratives appropriate to your objectives. Our team of copywriters will set about crafting engaging pitches, press releases, media alerts, bylined articles, and any other materials we believe will most successfully move the dial and catch the attention of the media. Based on your goals and target audience, we will produce a list of the most suitable outlets and journalists whom we will target with your story.

We generally recommend beginning with a “local first” strategy, wherein we reach out to the most relevant members of the media in your city, county, and state with a well-crafted pitch. In our experience we have found that starting with the journalists who cover the community in which your organization lives and operates significantly increases the chances that your story will get picked up, and such coverage endows your organization with local bonafides that we can leverage when we reach out to journalists on a regional, national, and international level.

As we get to know your organization and stakeholders better, we will continue formulating story ideas for your organization based on current events, editorial calendars, and your organization’s successes and milestones. Our goal is to make you and your organization the experts journalists will turn to when they need knowledgeable commentary or authoritative interviewees on a given topic.

Over the years Agency 33 has helped clients across a wide variety of industries generate positive earned media coverage. From retail and consumer packaged goods to law firms and engineering companies, we pride ourselves in developing engaging narratives for our clients that capture the attention of the media.

Nevertheless, due to the backgrounds of our principals, Agency 33 specializes in a few, key industries. These include clean/green technology, biotechnology, healthcare, and professional services.

For more information, please visit the following pages:

Clean Technology     Biotech/Healthcare     Professional Services

The short answer: no.

If you’re looking for a quick and easy way to get eyeballs on your brand immediately, advertising is hard to beat. Whether it’s on traditional media platforms – TV, radio, and print – or on digital platforms – pay-per-click, display, video pre-roll, social media – advertising is a sure-fire way to raise awareness, provided you’re willing to pay for it.

However, advertising is emphatically not as effective as public relations for two reasons. First, people generally don’t like advertisements. When an ad pops-up in your browser, your first reaction is likely annoyance rather than interest.  Ditto for ads in your favorite newspaper or commercials during your favorite TV show. So while ads will certainly get your brand in front of people, they may not always react in a positive way.

Second, advertisements do absolutely nothing when it comes to credibility. Frankly, it is impossible to beat a well-written, positive piece of earned media about your organization if your goal is to improve your standing in the community and among your audience. Having a journalist sing your praises in a major outlet is far, far more valuable than an advertisement that most people will skip through as quickly as possible.

Digital marketing is the process by which an organization gets its messaging out to a specific audience through a variety of digital channels. These channels can include your organization’s website, blog, social media profiles, e-mail communications, and more.

A comprehensive digital marketing strategy includes all of these channels and is organized using a detailed content calendar. If you haven’t already, we recommend downloading our free eBook, How to Create a Comprehensive Digital Marketing Strategy in 10 Steps.

Content marketing is the creation and targeted distribution of text, images, and / or video that seeks to provide interesting and engaging information to customers who are actively seeking answers to their questions in order to raise brand awareness, increase customer loyalty, and provide more opportunities for future business.

Content marketing is distinctly NOT about trying to sell a potential customer on your company or its products / services. Indeed, good content marketing shouldn’t feel like marketing, at all.

Instead, content marketing is about telling a story. It is about providing helpful information to your readers. Above all, it is about answering your audience’s questions without them having to ask.

What might a piece of content marketing look like? It can be something as simple as a detailed Frequently Asked Questions page on your website. It can be a free eBook that explains some of the best ways to use your particular product or service. It can be a market research report, or an instructional video, or a stunning infographic that displays interesting data about your industry. As long as it is informative, engaging, and easily available to your target audience, it’s a piece of content marketing.

If you haven’t already, take a look at our blog post EOP Media: A Comprehensive Strategy, which goes into detail about how Agency 33 organizes and integrates our various messaging tactics into an overall strategy.

In brief, digital marketing integrates with public relations by acting as a platform from which your organization can trumpet the results of your earned media efforts. When you succeed in getting a story in your local newspaper, you want to make sure that the widest range of your target audience has a chance to see it. With digital marketing, we can re-purpose and merchandise your owned media stories by promoting them across your digital channels, including on the website, across your social media profiles, and in your e-mail communications. Digital marketing helps to make the most of your hard-earned news coverage.

For advertising, digital marketing can provide complementary information and materials to those individuals targeted by your ads. This is largely accomplished through content marketing.

For example, let’s say you run a display advertising campaign alerting people to a new product or service. When someone clicks on that advertisement, where will they go? Hopefully, the advertisement will bring the visitor to a dedicated landing page on your website filled with all of the information they’ll need to make a decision about purchasing. This landing page will be filled with your content marketing: product descriptions, FAQs, customer testimonials, pictures, videos, How To guides, and more. Digital marketing acts to support your advertising efforts by providing your prospects with helpful and interesting content designed to move them further down your sales funnel.

Search Engine Optimization, or SEO, comprises all of the tricks and tactics employed to improve a particular website or web page’s rankings on the popular search engines, such as Google, Bing, and Yahoo!. This includes on-page optimization (having relevant meta information and alt tags for images, a well-structured site layout, fast loading times, and lots of relevant keywords) and off-page optimization (building links from high Page-Ranking websites back to your website). For more, check out our blog post  SEO is Dead, Long Live SEO: How to Rank Highly on Google.

Search Engine Marketing, or SEM, is a blanket term for improving the visibility of a website or web page on the search engines. This can include the SEO techniques stated above, but SEM also commonly employs Pay-Per-Click (PPC) advertising. These are the text ads you find at the top and along the sides of search engine results pages (SERPs), and are placed there by, for example, Google’s AdWords program.

At Agency 33, we can help your organization optimize your website and web pages so that they conform to industry best practices and are written and structured so as to rank highly for particular keywords on the main search engines. We can also help to design a comprehensive online advertising campaign, which can include PPC advertising, as well as display and video pre-roll.

No matter what industry your organization is in or who your organization’s main audience is, having some presence on social media is a must. This is because, along with the website, your organization’s social media pages are one of the first things a prospective customer or client will look for when they conduct their research. In fact, your social media profiles will often show up higher in Google search results than your corporate website depending on the level of SEO tactics you’ve employed.

With Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest, SlideShare, Google+, Instagram, and others, your company can cultivate and grow an audience of current and prospective clients while engaging in regular two-way communication with your fans and followers. This communication builds trust and improves your company’s image in the minds of your customers, especially when your company succeeds in producing engaging and useful content that is attuned to your customers’ wants and needs. Thus, social media becomes not only a tool for promoting products and services, but also a powerful method of turning customers into advocates who will share your company’s content with their own social connections and thereby generate new leads on your behalf.

The value of social media holds true for B2C companies as well as B2B companies. Social networks such as LinkedIn and SlideShare are some of the best resources for B2B companies when it comes to discovering potential clients and providing prospects with valuable information on the company’s products, services, history, and expertise. A strong social media presence can transform your company into a thought leader in your industry, expand your brand awareness, and bolster your company’s credentials.

Furthermore, social media platforms, especially Twitter, are used intensely by journalists and members of the media. A well-crafted social media strategy can form a critical component of your public relations efforts by connecting with key influencers and targeting them with relevant content about your company.

Put yourself in the shoes of a prospective customer. You’re researching companies that can provide you with a particular service. You’ve identified a dozen possible choices, scanned their websites, and read up on their service offerings. This process might allow you to eliminate a few choices, but you’re still left with several possibilities. What more could these companies provide you, short of you calling them, that would help you make your decision?

The answer is a blog.

While it is good to have articles published in traditional media outlets like magazines, journals, and newspapers, your blog has the benefit of being utterly controlled and organized by you. Your website may provide important and useful information about your company, your history, your employees, and your products and services, but your blog gives potential clients an insight into your mind, your way of thinking, your expertise, and your voice. A well-written and frequently-updated blog can establish you as a reliable and trustworthy source of information as well as make you a thought leader in your industry (it’s also extremely helpful for SEO purposes).

Short of meeting face-to-face or direct correspondence, your blog is the best way of converting a potential client into an in-person consultation.

Congratulations! You are already one step ahead of most businesses out there.

That being said, there are likely several things we can help you do to help your blog become truly effective.

For example, how often do you publish new blog posts? Daily? Weekly? Monthly? Quarterly?

Does your blog conform to SEO best practices?

Does each blog post contain a distinct call to action that you’d like your reader to take?

Have you gone through your old blog posts and added links to them in relevant newer blog posts?

Does your blog include social media sharing buttons?

Are your promoting your latest posts on your company’s social media pages?

Are you writing about the same topics week after week, or are you providing your readers with an array of diverse and interesting content that keeps them coming back for more?

When you engage with us, we’ll perform a comprehensive audit of all your digital marketing efforts, including your blog, and come up with a set of specific recommendations to help you improve. We can even write interesting, engaging, and optimized blog posts for you.

You bet it does!

E-mail is easily one of the most commonly used forms of digital communication, and therefore represents a powerful channel by which you can communicate with your clients and customers.

However, waking up to an inbox filled with hundreds of new emails, many of them advertisements or junk, has become one of the banes of modern existence. Therefore, when it comes to using email for online marketing purposes, businesses must tread carefully in order to avoid becoming yet another member of the Spam folder club.

At Agency 33 we generally recommend our clients publish regular monthly newsletters that serve to solidify existing relationships, direct clients to your online content, and make them aware of relevant news and events. With well-crafted subject lines and engaging content, our clients typically see open rates well above industry average, and these opens translate into website clicks and eventually conversions.

We provide our clients with Pay-Per-Click (PPC), Display, Video Pre-Roll, Retargeting, and social media advertising services.

PPC advertisements are those that you see on the top and along the sides of results pages on the major search engines. With PPC we can target your advertisements geographically and by keyword. We will create a set of Ad Groups to organize your keywords, design a number of specific advertisements (which we will continuously improve using A/B split testing), employ tactics to boost click-through-rates such as dynamic keyword insertion and site-link extensions, and provide you with monthly analytics reports on our progress.

Display advertisements, also called banner ads, can be found on countless websites, while Video Pre-Roll advertisements can be placed on websites as well as in front of YouTube videos. These advertisements employ more sophisticated targeting capabilities than those available for PPC ads, including contextual targeting, behavioral targeting, and keyword targeting.

Retargeting advertisements are display ads that are shown to previous visitors to your website who do not complete a desired action. For example, if someone visits your website but leaves without filling out your contact form, we can target them with an advertisement inviting them to come back and complete the action. These ads are especially useful when dealing with the “abandoned shopping cart” problem faced by many e-commerce websites.

Social media platforms have increasingly built up their own advertising services, with Facebook being the leader in this area. Due to the inordinate amount of information individuals voluntarily provide Facebook about themselves, advertisements on Facebook can be targeted at users using their demographic and geographic data, as well as their interests, behaviors, and shopping habits. Similarly, LinkedIn advertisements can be targeted at users based on their industry, position, skills, income, and more. The social media advertising landscape is constantly changing, with more platforms rolling out their own services and capabilities. We are here to help you make sense of it all, focus on the most effective platforms for your target audience, and design highly-targeted advertisements to help you meet your goals.

We are willing and able to get involved in your digital marketing at whatever level you desire. Whether it’s conducting an audit of your current digital marketing efforts, providing you with specific recommendations on how you can improve, designing a comprehensive digital marketing strategy complete with a detailed content calendar, and/or executing that strategy for you, we’re here to help.

Our digital marketing team has years of experience not only designing unique strategies for clients in a range of industries but also in managing and executing our clients’ digital marketing efforts. Whether you need extra manpower to create blog posts, social media posts, videos, infographics, or SlideShare presentations, or you simply need someone to help bring all of your disparate marketing efforts together into one comprehensive strategy, our team of copywriters, graphic designers, and digital strategists are at your disposal.

The typical buying process for individuals and businesses has changed. Before making a purchasing decision, people prefer to do a tremendous amount of research online on their own. By the time your sales rep gets a phone call, your prospect will have gone through everything they can find about your company online, including among other things your website, blog, and social media profiles, and will likely already be very close to making their decision.

Therefore, in order to compete effectively in today’s environment your firm must have a plethora of online content for your prospects to discover and peruse. This is where digital marketing comes in. From generating brand awareness to providing content that helps answer your prospects’ questions, digital marketing can help ensure your company is considered when it comes time for your prospect to choose a partner or service provider.

For more information on this topic, check out our blog post Create Content For Each Step in Your Sales Funnel.

Absolutely!

Our team of copywriters and graphic designers has a wealth of experience and expertise when it comes to generating engaging and relevant content for our clients. We recognize that creating new, high-quality content takes time. For many professionals, it can be a difficult prospect to set aside time for marketing, especially if it eats into time that could otherwise be spent servicing current clients and customers.

Agency 33 can work closely with your marketing team and senior partners to develop a comprehensive content calendar that will inform our efforts moving forward. Whether it’s blog posts, social media posts, e-mail newsletter content, videos, infographics, How to guides, Tips, Top 10 lists, and more, we are here to support you and help your firm achieve all of its marketing goals.

Key influencers are individuals who are seen as experts in their respective fields and command a large and loyal following of fans.

When it comes to getting attention for your company, working with key influencers is often the most effective and efficient route. These key influencers are always on the lookout for high-quality content that their readers would enjoy. If you can provide them with that content, they will not only be forever thankful, but they will demonstrate that gratitude by forwarding your content on to all of their fans and giving you a positive shoutout. This allows you to leverage the audience of these key influencers to raise brand awareness and generate interest among a whole new set of potential clients and customers.

Building a dedicated audience is hard and it can take a very long time. Establishing mutually beneficial relationships with key influencers gives you the opportunity to communicate with an already established audience and generate more interest in your organization from a relevant pool of prospects.

The short answer is: it depends.

Specifically, the best times to post on social media are entirely dependent upon the nature of the audience you’re hoping to reach. Facebook provides very helpful data in this regard in its Insights section for your Company page, letting you know when your fans are online so you can plan to publish your content accordingly.

However, there are a few general rules of thumb for timing on social media. We recommend taking a look at our blog post on this very topic: The Best Times to Post on Social Media.