Sometimes the Picture Has 1,000 Words You Do Not Want

Photos are a critical element in content marketing. Whether your story is strictly online, being used for a media article or your own collateral, a picture does tell a thousand words. But, what if the words are wrong?

The following are key factors to consider when staging, using or choosing just the right photo.

• The first and often most important factor in photo use is resolution. Most print publications require at least a minimum 300 dpi. Not sure how to get the highest resolution on your digital camera? Simply set your digital camera to capture the highest resolution, or put it on a “raw” setting. This will ensure you have the depth, pixels and ultimately the resolution publications require. Just because it looks good on a website or on Facebook, does not mean it is large enough to be used in print or even with your very large trade show booth display

• When taking a photo, it is important to not only feature what you want to show, but also what you do not want to show. Often we might see great photos of workers getting the job done. What is often overlooked is safety. Are the workers on a roof tied off properly and wearing OSHA and industry standard safety equipment? Your photo runs the risk of being rejected if your facility and workers are not up to industry standards. Even worse, if the photo gets published and others notice your workers, with logo-emblazoned helmets, prominently displaying an obvious safety violation, you could greatly tarnish your brand and reputation.

• During the photo selection process, ask yourself “Are we giving too much away?” Look carefully at not only the subject of your photo, but the background. Here are some key points to consider:

1. Is there proprietary equipment in the background?
2. Are secret processes able to be seen in photo?
3. Is the environment messy?
4. Are there people in the scene that are distracting?
5. Are customers featured and do you have their permission? Be cautious about tipping off your competition.

• When pre-planning your photo shoot (please tell us you just didn’t charge your iPhone and wing it), make sure to review your company’s branding and messaging guidelines. Endeavor to capture photos that support your brand. Are you proud to be union and American made? Look for opportunities to take photos that support that image. Do you profess to have associates that roll up their sleeves and get the job done? Choose a scene and personnel that shows just that.

With these tips in mind, you’re ready to capture and utilize the perfect photo. Now, the big decision is can you take the photos yourself or should you invest in a professional? This topic will be addressed in a future post.

Manufacturing Day falls on October 7th, 2016. While it may seem light-years away, it’ll be here before you know it. Manufacturing Day provides manufacturers with the ability to connect with colleagues around the country,  create buzz for their company, and provide an inside view into some of the region’s best careers. In 2015, Ohio was ranked the top state for Manufacturing Day events in 2015 (see chart). Now is the time to plan or your competition will outshine you during this great opportunity to showcase your products and services!

Founded in 2012, Manufacturing Day is an annual national event that “has been designed to expand knowledge about, and improve public perceptions of manufacturing careers and manufacturing’s value to the U.S. economy.” Participants of Manufacturing Day use the hashtag #MfgDay to join the movement and support US manufacturing as a whole, with people and businesses around the country. Popular Manufacturing Day events include plant tours, job fairs, manufacturing community events, expos and celebrations.Don’t forget to register your event on the website.

Plant tours

Are you looking to showcase your plant to prospective clients,  students, and the community? Now is the time to start send out invites. Schools will be out of session in four months. School administrators and teachers are now beginning to plan their first few months of the 2016-2017 school year. It is important to start the discussion now so they can coordinate with you and get students at your tour.

Job fairs

Job fairs create a great platform to recruit the next generation of manufacturers. Often job fairs can happen at a manufacturing business. However, if you are looking to get a larger pool of candidates, partnering with other manufacturing employers, or perhaps, a staffing firm is an excellent option.

Manufacturing Day Celebrations

Manufacturing Day events are extremely popular and are held the week of Manufacturing Day or even the entire month of October (deemed Manufacturing Month.) Celebrations can be organized by local or regional manufacturing associations, chambers of commerce, or business development groups. Also banks, accounting firms and other businesses that do a significant portion of their business with manufacturers may want to partner with you for a Manufacturing Day event. These can be simple events such as breakfast, lunch, and dinners, followed by tours, Q & A’s and even the occasional political dignitary appearance.

Manufacturing Day is a great way to showcase your company and what makes you special. Ohio had the top Manufacturing Day events last year. There are many ways your company can stand out during this celebration of manufacturing including plant tours, job fairs, and manufacturing celebration events. For more information on Manufacturing Day visit www.mfgday.com or to discuss event ideas, call or email Felber PR at 330.963.3664 x2 or AllisonMiller@felberpr.com

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You are a manufacturer, which means you are ‘head down’ most days. Your days are jam-packed between responding to customers, managing inventory, solving a technical issue and the list goes on, and on and on. Now’s its 6 pm and your ‘pesky’ PR agency is asking about content. Yes, content!? Your company is having great success, for many customers, all at once. You are knowledgeable about your processes and your market.  Perhaps you even know of or follow the trade publications that report on your industry. Industry trade publications call once in a while to speak with you but you never really had time during your week to gather the data that would be the meat of the article.

You’ve heard it before – Content is King! Whether you are developing your sales literature, creating social media to attract engineers (that seems younger than your oldest daughter), or preparing to tell your story to the media. You need to have content. Content is the fuel by which your business can grow. You will use it on your website and  blog, as well as in your trade show graphics and email newsletters, .

We get your world and can help. Relationships with media need to be fostered, just like relationships with your best customers. Your PR person needs to know the publication’s editorial direction, engage with editors on social media and arrange interviews and tours. Your job? Open the content vault and let the magic happen. And, once you have industry media interest and trust, you may soon find your manufacturing firm, your staff and yourself elevated to “expert” status. Reporters will continue to call you to discuss industry trends. Instead of lamenting on how your competitors are always interviewed, your competitors can now look at your company with the same envy.

So, you’re an engineer, a scientist and entrepreneur – but NOT a writer. No problem, that’s what we do. We Get Manufacturing. We connect people, processes, and ideas together. We turn this raw material into content utilized in multiple marketing and publicity tools. Want to see more? Check out our success stories here or call us at 330.963.3664.

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What you need to know before you agree to  speak to a reporter

They like you, they really like you. So, you have a reporter or editor interested in speaking with you about your work and company. Perhaps he/she responded to a press release, met you at a trade conference or your agency arranged the conversation. Preparing for the interview and obtaining just the right coverage is critical. In this article, we will discuss the strategy you should take for nailing media interviews. Note, in this article, we are talking about a typical media interview NOT a crisis situation or the dreaded “ambush” interview with a reporter shoving a microphone in your face. How to handle a crisis or “ambush” interview will be discussed in a future article.

For your typical interview, you should have a strategy for these five steps: 1) Know their audience, 2) Research the reporter and their history, 3) Have your facts straight, 4) know your desired outcome, and 5) Have your art ready.

First, are you familiar with the publication? You need to know who they consider their audience and if there is a fit with the content you hope to convey. Research their website, peruse past issues, and look at their media kit. The editorial calendar is of particular interest. These are the “big rock” issues they will be covering editorially. If you can align with a proposed topic, you will be doing yourself and the reporter a huge service. Second, get to know the reporter. Read articles they have written. Pay attention to tone, depth of technical expertise and look for any bias the reporter may have, especially if that could either help or hurt your cause. By demonstrating your familiarity with both the publication’s editorial direction and the reporter’s work, you are also showing you have respect for their organization.

Make sure that you are well versed in your subject matter. Whether you are meeting in person or over the phone, make sure you know the facts about your organization. While you cannot anticipate every question, you should know your content cold. If you are not the expert, either get briefed by one prior or better yet, have them participate in the interview. Knowing your facts and developing key message points are not always the same thing. Your message points are fact-based content that you want to highlight. One tactic you can use is to request questions ahead of your interview. You have to be tactful here and be prepared for no. But, if you get the questions ahead of time, do not squander this opportunity to prepare.

Now that you have your facts and message points ready for your interview, know exactly what you want to get out of this interview opportunity. It’s perfectly acceptable to ask the report how their story will be used. Is this a feature on your company or are you being included in a larger piece? Is this a sidebar to a separate story or simply a product mention with a photo and caption?

Lastly, have graphics in the form of charts, photos or infographics ready and in the proper format. When you reviewed the publication, you already made note of the “art” they publish to support their content. Make sure your supporting graphics are ready to be emailed or uploaded. If this is a print publication, they will undoubtedly want the highest resolution photos or graphics you can provide. A jpeg off your website will usually NOT work. We have seen time and time again our client’s interview featured simply because we had the best and most readily available supporting graphics. Just as important, relax. You are prepared and ready for this opportunity. And, if you string a few of these together, you will certainly be viewed as an industry expert.

The new year is right around the corner and with that comes reflection. What did you accomplish? Where you can improve? I decided to be nostalgic and take a look back at our blog since its inception in 2008 and compare it to our blogs in 2015 to see how our blogging has changed (and hopefully improved). One of our very first blogs talked about the importance of organic (meaning unpaid for) search engine optimization. In this blog, I’ll discuss what we thought then about SEO, our current SEO strategy, and what we’ve learned as a firm from about SEO over the last several years of blogging.

Our SEO Strategy in 2008:

In 2008, our sole SEO focus was using keywords. In a 2008 survey, we polled approximately 50 publishers (60%) and marketers (40%), through online surveys and phone calls, to determine our core keyword areas. Then we took those findings and would cross check with services such as wordtracker.com and websitegrader.com to continually help us in choosing the right key words.

As you can see is the example photo to the left, our blogs in 2008 were very brief. We were on the right track with linking multiple sources in our blogs, as that helps in getting blogs to be found in searches more frequently. Although we used keywords in our blogs and monitored Google Analytics to try and find a correlation between keywords and blog traffic, we weren’t using keywords to their fullest potential. Also, we didn’t understand the value of using photos and tagging them with keywords for Google indexing.

Our SEO Strategy Today:

Today, Felber PR & Marketing uses a very thorough SEO strategy that we utilize across ours and our clients’ social media platforms and blogs.

On the left side is a recent blog I wrote. As you can see, the title is straight and to the point and utilizes our focused keywords “Manufacturing Day”. The keyword can be found in the URL, image names, and the majority of all photo captions on the page. The more the focus keyword is used, the more likely it is to be seen in posts. Like in 2008, we link and cite multiple sources in this blog (and make sure that the hyperlink opens in a separate tab so that people stay on the blog and read our content!

 

Our blogs are much more thorough in 2015 and highly researched. We also have worked to create a much more visually appealing layout with photos and captions, to make the blog more aesthetically appealing and improve readability. After our blogs go live, we social media the blogs out on all our platforms with the keywords and other appropriate hashtags, all in an effort to gain more readership.

What We’ve Learned:

Organic SEO has changed and grown as a field since 2008. While we were on the right track in 2008 using keywords, we did not realize the extent that we needed to use keywords throughout the blog, photos, and in the URL. We also did not utilize hashtags to our fullest potential in sharing our blog content. Today, continuously monitoring LinkedIn Groups, Twitter, and other key resources to find the latest trends and keywords to use to give ourselves and our clients more visibility. SEO is an ever changing and evolving field. We’ve stayed up-to-date on the latest SEO trends and will continue to learn new processes and ways to leverage SEO for years to come.