Qasim Raza

Marketing content or content marketing? Every day I get to talk with clients about content. All sorts of content. How do you build a content strategy? How can we hire great content marketers? What tools should we use to streamline content creation and store it for reuse? There is a long list of topics we can talk about – but I start most conversations with a question: Do you want to focus on marketing content or content marketing? What? I can visualize their heads cocking to one side and looking at me like, “What do you mean, lady? It’s all content.” What do I mean by marketing content or content marketing? Content marketing is an approach to content creation that applies to a subset of ALL the content that marketing makes – i.e., marketing content. This graphic illustrates how content marketing fits within marketing content. (Clients can see all the topics we cover in the Content Marketing and Management Primer). Content Marketing within Marketing Content To be...

marketing, public relations, Business owners often hear different promotional buzzwords — marketing, advertising, public relations and branding — passed around when it comes to selling a service or product. Each of these facets has its own unique identity and will produce different results. Depending on what is being sold, the business may only need one of these strategies to target the right audience, but more often than not, it’s an integrated approach that leads to the best results. Marketing The action of promoting or selling products or services. This involves market research. Marketing involves anything from choosing the right location of the business, to knowing how much it costs to produce each product/service, deciding where to advertise and deciding who to advertise to. This also includes all marketing material, or “owned media,” such as brochures, websites and pamphlets. Think of someone named Brandon telling you, “I’m a wonderful fisherman.” Public relation...

PR Blogs Cision recently published a list of top PR & Marketing blogs which is timely, because having worked in both worlds for 11 years plus, I’ve seen the convergence accelerated by shifts in technology and consumer behaviors. In the list, Cision published an influence score to sort the blogs (TopRank’s Online Marketing Blog is sandwiched at #2 between Chris Brogan and Jason Falls) and it made me wonder about their influence when it comes to search. Most bloggers say they know what SEO is and some even profess to engage in SEO best practices, but I thought it would be interesting to do a simple analysis of the top 10 on the list to see what their referring organic keyword and inbound link profiles looked like. Arguably, if a blog is optimized, it will attract traffic through search with phrases that represent the topics the blogger wants to be known for. The blogs I looked at include: chrisbrogan.com toprankblog.com socialmediaexplorer.com blog.blisspr.com ...

PR Digital Marketing Why is online PR important in digital marketing? Public relations or PR, in a traditional sense, serves as a playground for large companies and corporations, with the biggest market players relying mostly on positive public image to make more sales.      Although the importance of traditional PR is not a secret, what is its role in the digital world? Why is online PR a necessity these days? Here are the most common reasons why online PR is a must for your digital marketing campaigns: A Fully Integrated Campaign Online PR should and can be a completely integrated campaign. You release the news, and let the industry websites and journalists know about it. Now, you can tell your fans using your site’s blog, social media, your mailing list, as well as other avenues for reaching a much bigger audience than ever. in particular, the use of social media can help prolong a great digital PR campaign to further maximize its impact. Promot...

Public Relations You may have heard the term PR or public relations, but might not be quite sure what it means – and because it’s a term that is somewhat familiar, yet undefined, you feel it’s too late to ask its meaning! In short, public relations is the way organisations, companies and individuals communicate, in a targeted and strategic manner, with identified stakeholders. It is all about establishing and maintaining effective lines of communication to encourage understanding, acceptance and cooperation between an organisation and its stakeholders. Stakeholders are those who have a stake or interest in a particular organisation, those who influence or can influence the organisation as well as those affected by it. Your stakeholders can include employees, the general public, the media, shareholders, suppliers, local authority, government and designated public officials, neighbours, and the community in which the business operates. In order to communicate effectively and...

THE INTERSECTION OF SOCIAL MEDIA, PUBLIC RELATIONS & DIGITAL MARKETING It’s undeniable that the world is much different than even five years ago. Even over the course of the last year, major changes have affected the ways companies market to their audiences – from advertising on Instagram to Facebook and Google algorithm changes, staying on top of the trends is more crucial than ever. These changes have, for lack of a better word, forced companies to ensure their social media, public relations, and digital and content marketing strategies are integrated and working in-step together. Consumers are making all of their decisions about brands, services, companies and projects at the intersection of earned, owned and paid media. These decisions and opinions are constantly shared across all channels. Whether it’s via a review on Yelp, a quick post by a publication, or a complaint about a service or experience on Twitter, a company’s reputation has the opportunity to be dam...

  SEO strategy Search engine optimisation (SEO) is the backbone of brands when it comes to online presence. Ranking higher on SERP takes effort and time – and gets even more challenging with trends that change without a moment’s notice. Google is anamorphous search engine which is popular (and even notorious) for rolling out changes in its search algorithms pretty often. The year 2019 brought fresh updates from Google – some radical enough to ensure a swift departure from the usual SEO effortsused by professionals in the past. From the V’s (Video, Voice, and Vernacular) to the emphasis on local queries, Google is bringing a lot of changesas   perthe changing internet consumption.