As the structure of traditional PR comes down, so too do the walls that have historically separated PR and marketing teams. No longer are the two groups siloed, one working to promote specific products and services while the other focuses on improving the reputation of the business as a whole. Together, they’re working toward a unified communications strategy.

Almost half of PR professionals and more than 60 percent of marketing executives believe that their two disciplines will become more closely aligned in the next five years, according to the USC Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism.

If your business isn’t aligning PR and marketing, it’s more than just an efficiency issue. You’re missing out on a critical step in connecting your communications strategy to your core business outcomes. 

Here are four reasons why PR and marketing should be aligned:

1. Marketing amplifies earned coverage

The new model of PR—what N6A calls Outcome Relations—is built to deliver tangible business outcomes, like completing a capital raise or hitting a sales benchmark. The PR team works to secure earned media results that support that outcome. 

But the work isn’t over once that big company feature is published in Forbes. This is where the marketing team can provide the critical step in connecting earned coverage to measurable outcomes: amplification. 

Maybe they pull a quote from the feature and create a branded graphic to publish on Instagram; maybe they create a paid LinkedIn campaign targeting new leads; or maybe they share the article in an email campaign to your existing clients. 

Once the PR team has earned that big media piece, the marketing team ensures the right people see it. 

2. PR can increase your search visibility

Marketing teams spend a lot of time working to increase the search visibility of their brand’s website, be it bidding on search terms as part of an SEM plan or optimizing organic content to increase rankings.

Effective PR teams can play a key role in that strategy by generating organic search traffic and backlinks.

Being featured in a major publisher will naturally create more search traffic as readers seek out additional information about the featured company. If your business is mentioned in an article from The Wall Street Journal, you can bet you’ll see a significant spike in organic search traffic.

Some publishers may also include backlinks, or links from other websites to your own website, in their coverage. These backlinks are considered by Google and other search engines to be votes of confidence for your site. If a credible publisher is linking to your site, Google figures, it must be pretty credible as well. Up goes your search ranking.

If the PR team is aligned on the key search terms your business is trying to rank for, they can pitch to relevant and credible publishers to drive increased visibility.

3. Joint news monitoring can benefit PR and marketing teams

PR pros spend a considerable amount of time monitoring media coverage for opportunities for newsjacking, or leveraging a major news story to draw attention to their own brand. Content marketing teams, meanwhile, are constantly monitoring social media feeds looking for relevant news and conversations the brand can engage with. 

When PR and marketing teams coordinate, this news monitoring system becomes more efficient.

Let’s say a PR team working on behalf of a cyber security client comes across a story about the data breach of a high-profile company. In addition to pitching publishers on a byline from the cyber security brand’s CEO, the PR team flags the news to the marketing team, who publishes the original article on LinkedIn along with a few insightful tips for avoiding security breaches. 

The well-timed social post could drive significant visibility and help establish the brand as an authority in their industry… all because the PR team was quick to flag the news.

4. PR can boost marketing campaigns

Designing a marketing campaign to increase lead gen or hit a sales goal? Think about how PR can support the effort. A byline or feature in a relevant publication can drive people to your site, then funnel them into the campaign.

Let’s say you’re an automated CX brand who’s just published a lead gen campaign built around a PDF download. In addition to budgeting for Google Ads and designing a social media blitz, you pulled your PR team in to support. They’ve been busy pitching and landed a CEO byline with a major publisher, which publishes the day you launch your lead gen campaign. That byline drives a ton of qualified readers to your website, where they’re met with a pop-up offering the PDF resource in exchange for their email. 

By bringing the PR team into the campaign design early and aligning timelines to create a cohesive campaign, you can significantly expand your reach.

None of these things are possible if your PR and marketing teams are sitting in separate departments—or separate agencies—with little to no communication. Aligning the two disciplines from initial outcome development all the way through messaging and campaign deployment is key to optimizing ROI. 

If your PR and marketing teams aren’t working together to drive business outcomes, you’re not getting the most out of either.

The post 4 Reasons Your PR and Marketing Should be Aligned appeared first on N6 Powered by KRMA | Fully Integrated Digital Marketing.

The new landscape of the COVID-19 era will bring potentially permanent behavioral and business pattern shifts. Will business leaders revert to their previous practices once they’re able to return to their normal routine? Will there even be normal routines anymore?

A lack of clarity around how businesses need to respond, and how long the restrictions could last, means it’s critical to adopt a proactive stance with expanded services above all else. Clearly it’s up to business leaders to establish what is possible and how to thrive.

Photo by Ivan Samkov from Pexels

1. Providing the Most Value to Customers

This was the number-one mantra in-practice for businesses before the COVID-19 era, and it’s guaranteed to be even more important as the pandemic continues. In fact, it’s more important now to truly dig down into this mantra as more sustainable patterns emerge and companies learn from every possible scenario to sustain growth and maintain ROI for clients. 

Consumers want to see brands as a living, breathing organism in the market. They associate enterprises with normalcy, especially if those brands continue to drive results for them. This will force businesses to choose their post-COVID partners more wisely. With budgets shrinking and increasing speed-to-market pressures, brands will assess their collaborators with an eye toward ease-of-execution over anything else. Knowing the breadth of the wide range of in-house services in a single agency can help brands consolidate functions for more streamlined success.

2. People are the Most Important Asset

If businesses want to win, they need the best people standing together to serve customers across all touchpoints. Brand advocacy will help drive future growth as positive information spreads via word-of-mouth on various channels. 

This requires business leaders to make whatever sacrifices they need to make. It may sound easier said than done, but targeting the right areas in your business will ease up on making some truly gut wrenching decisions. Expect to run thinner margins, enact travel and hiring freezes, and dial back on meals and consulting costs — especially if it comes with the benefit of team preservation.

3. Embrace Inorganic Growth Opportunities

Superficially it may not seem like it, but now is the time to take even smarter risks towards innovation. 

Most businesses have already changed the way they function. The way they service customers, communicate, and engage is much different than a couple of months ago. Technology, communication, the supply chain, education, and many other core parts of the consumer’s daily lives are completely up for grabs. The agencies flexing new functionalities and services will create solutions for clients in brand new areas.

There is an opportunity to innovate and consolidate functions for customers like never before. Now more than ever, there is room to create great opportunities to diversify revenue streams, capabilities and vertical footprints. Quick, previously unorthodox moves now can create sustainability to both serve brands and succeed into the future. 

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The economic downturn has become crippling to many industries and businesses that are trying to continue on are struggling to connect the dots to stay afloat. Now more than ever, executives and marketers are under intense pressure to prove that every dollar they spend yields a healthy return on investment. Smart businesses only need to look as far as Outcome Relations (OR) and amplification assets for the accountability and certainty they need.  

N6A’s OR model combines earned media and paid media to drive specific business outcomes for CMOs, CEOs, and brand marketers. Our teams secure earned media results — or what we like to call credibility assets — against those outcomes. 

We view each media hit as a credibility asset that can be used at various stages of the revenue funnel, from driving new site visitors, to generating more demo requests and completed lead forms, to nurturing leads, all the way through to helping sales close a deal. 

But these assets can only yield ROI if those targeted personas actually engage with them. That’s where amplification comes in. 

The relationship between credibility assets and amplification assets can be one of the most effective channels to drive ROI for your organization. With the OR model, companies get as specific as possible with personas — what is their job title, are there any geographic locations where they operate, what is the size of the company, and more — in order to properly select the credibility assets and amplification assets that will drive the desired outcomes for each campaign.    

For example, take a credibility asset such as a report or a whitepaper used on the media side for newsjacking and byline content. Your company is looking to also increase revenue through this report, so we would develop a campaign as the amplification asset to drive lead generation in support of revenue goals. We’d then execute a LinkedIn campaign and content syndication campaign that promotes the content as a gated asset.

This particular target persona is unlikely to, for example, watch CBS News on TV at 6pm sharp. But they are more likely to catch your thought leadership because they’re highly connected to like-minded professionals through their LinkedIn and social feeds. 

Other examples of amplification channels can range from highly targeted Instagram sponsored posts, Google Ads showcasing certain credibility assets, lead nurturing campaigns, and much more.

With amplification, budget-conscious brands can be confident because they can measure the impact of leads generated from amplification channels, and then, ultimately, the see-rate of conversions from leads to pipeline. These are the key ROI metrics that resulted from the amplification of the credibility asset. 

Through OR and the key amplification step, we create an inherent level of accountability for normally imprecise PR metrics and allow brands to consolidate budget but not their results. 

See how we can drive your business forward — without the uncertainty. Talk to us today.

The post Amplification is the Key to Outcome Relations Success appeared first on N6 Powered by KRMA | Fully Integrated Digital Marketing.

When we first introduced Outcome Relations, it was the result of many years of sitting in front of business leaders and CMOs and listening to the same common challenge that all of them were struggling with: They wanted their PR spend to align with specific business outcomes. Outcome Relations addressed this by creating a PR service model which combined earned media, amplification and KPI alignment to support clients’ specific business outcomes across six critical categories: revenue, recruiting, M&A, capital raise, enterprise value and competitive.   

We’re now excited to take the next step in our vision for Outcome Relations with the launch of N6A Enterprise Value Services. 

Traditionally, public relations has never been accountable at a board level for achieving specific financial outcomes. Our vision is to change that, and that’s exactly what our newly formed Enterprise Value Services group is here to do. 

N6A Enterprise Value Services was born out of a strategic partnership with the Berlin Group, which is led by world-class investor relations and financial industry veteran Lawrence Delaney, Jr. Larry has served as an embedded investor relations advisor for public, pre-IPO, and earlier-stage companies for the past three decades.

Our Enterprise Value Services group will enhance and expand our Outcome Relations offering by giving clients a financial extension to their marketing function in order to help them achieve specific financial and shareholder outcomes, including defining and reaching valuation targets, IPO preparation, public company investor relations consulting, shareholder communications, and outcome-driven liquidity events. 

Our Enterprise Value Services group will be hard at work with our clients’ C-level management and boards to align the marketing and finance function in order to add value to their enterprises. Larry and his team will work with early-stage, pre-exit and enterprise-level clients with a range of services customized according to the needs of each. Here’s a look at the group’s full range of services:

• Investor Relations and Strategic Services: Investor relations planning and strategy; IPO preparation; public company investor relations consulting services; valuation analysis; quarterly shareholder video conferences; and additional stakeholder communication needs assessment.
• Investor Marketing and Production Services: Investor presentation refinement and assumptions-testing; online investor portal development, email-linked multimedia investor updates; point of contact for investor queries; and physical and virtual investor events.
• Analyst and Investor Outreach: Investment community relationship cultivation and management; shareholder analysis and targeting; analyst and investor call preparation and management; and deal and non-deal roadshow support.
• Financial Communications Services: Investor-driven disclosure policy guidance; PPM and other registration statement drafting support; earnings and other financial press release consulting; investment profile and fact sheet creation; annual and quarterly reports; and proxy statement and other shareholder communications.

We’re thrilled to welcome Larry into the N6A family, and to introduce N6A Enterprise Value Services. It is another important step in our vision for Outcome Relations, where marketing and business outcomes are in full alignment. 

The post N6A Enterprise Value Services Aligns PR with Financial Outcomes appeared first on N6 Powered by KRMA | Fully Integrated Digital Marketing.

Marketers are under more pressure than ever before to prove that every dollar they spend yields a healthy return on investment. But that adds complications. It’s often difficult to identify the specific marketing efforts that bring robust returns in a short amount of time, and it’s a constant struggle to highlight the tangible impact from the various parts of the marketing toolbox — specifically PR.

To measure PR effectiveness, marketers have established a wide variety of key performance indicators (KPIs) as a way to track key marketing objectives. Digital marketers typically define these KPIs as forward-looking metrics of end performance. But they also show the short-term impact of a campaign, drawing as direct a line as possible to the bottom line. 

But what else is a good measurement for the impact of PR exposure, and what KPIs will truly count for marketers in the future? How can marketers achieve their intended outcomes with PR credibility assets? Marketing leaders from across the country gave us insights about the key takeaways that other marketers must know.

Photo by Stephen Dawson on Unsplash

1. If You Think You Know What’s Important to a Marketer, Then You’re Wrong

Things have shifted over the course of any marketer’s career. Previously, it was about outputs, and now it’s about outcomes.

In the past, marketing leaders would report on, say, publishing a certain amount of blog posts, or creating a webinar series and tracking that 200 people joined. Metrics were focused merely on volume, including increased site traffic and leads. But that was it. 

Today, marketing’s constantly evolving responsibilities are all about revenue. Marketers need to show that they’re actually contributing to the pipeline. If your target audience isn’t consuming what you are putting into the market and buying your product as a result, then your plan needs to change.

The inherent difficulty is accountability. So many marketing channels — especially digital marketing channels — are now eminently trackable. If you send an email marketing campaign or roll out a content strategy, a marketing manager can, through attribution, determine how much revenue it drove through the prospects that engaged with that content. 

Content, analytics, and customer-centric strategies compel digital marketers to evolve or risk not making impactful decisions that tip the bottom line. 

2. Results (and Revenues) Are Key

All the largest brands have multiple people that can analyze how high impact, non-digital channels are moving the needle — television, print, radio, and billboard ads. But if you’re a startup, it can feel like a bit of a leap of faith. Smart, scrappy marketers have to look directionally at metrics like increases in site visitors and qualified inbound leads, but it’s often not as simple as a one-to-one correlation. 

The old way of thinking about a PR agency for many was: we are a company, therefore we need a PR agency. Now, marketers must deploy PR strategically in order to achieve desired  business outcomes. PR strategy needs to be aligned to the full marketing plan to achieve results and drive revenue.  

The question for marketers now is, how can PR actually help me sell more of my product? Marketers should start with defining their customer personas — the people who are responsible for buying their product. Then, within each persona subset, what types of credibility assets are going to matter to them most?

Marketing leaders can’t just sit and wait, and hope that target personas are maybe going to see these assets. Instead, PR should be used as an additional content marketing tool for precise audience targeting through earned media amplification that yields desired results. 

Part of the changing role revolves around being able to connect results and revenues to these evolving efforts, including PR.

3. Marketing Is Now a Long-Term Measurement Game

If you can show how brand marketing drives revenue, and in turn how PR drives brand growth, you’re in good shape. But it’s easier said than done.  

Any marketer knows it’s difficult to make immediate connections with brand awareness efforts, but at the same time so much affects the bottom line. PR can be a major factor in that bottom line beyond the length of a quick-hit PR cycle through proper amplification and ensuring the strategy is aligned to the broader content marketing and demand generation plan. 

Consistent media is key when keeping a brand fresh and relevant in the eyes of customers. Businesses need a trusted, third-party voice that people listen to. It’s always more trustworthy than just hearing from a salesperson, and media provides a key avenue to measure long-term success and loyalty within an established network. It is then taking that brand awareness and channeling to through your sales funnel that will ultimately result in the outcome that matters most to your business.

Still curious about how marketing leaders can create an inherent level of accountability and attribution for normally imprecise PR metrics? Be sure to check out our webinar on Outcome Relations, our PR model that drives credibility assets to support desired business outcomes and a concrete, measurable impact.

The post Why Marketing Leaders Want to Link PR Success to the Bottom Line appeared first on N6 Powered by KRMA | Fully Integrated Digital Marketing.

When we launched Outcome Relations (OR) in 2019, it was the product of sitting in front of thousands of CMOs, CEOs, founders and brand marketers over the past decade and hearing the same concern: how can PR align with specific business outcomes? When we defined the OR model, we knew it directly tackles this pain point by assigning PR the same level of accountability as other components of the marketing stack. 

We’ve loved spreading the OR gospel whenever possible, so we recently launched a monthly webinar series to give business leaders some key insights straight from us. 

In our first session, we covered how businesses can define desired outcomes in order to link PR to ROI, how to clearly define target personas aligned to your desired outcomes, how to drive credibility assets to support desired business outcomes, and how to create an inherent level of accountability and attribution for normally imprecise PR metrics with Outcome Relations.

Photo by LinkedIn Sales Navigator on Unsplash

We covered a ton of ground on our first webinar, and we’ll get to cover even more in the subsequent sessions. But you can only get to so much in 20 minutes! Below are a few of the questions that we didn’t get to that we felt will illuminate our OR model even further. 

Can you elaborate more on how you can connect credibility assets to ROI?

• The first place to look is the ROI relationship between each credibility asset and amplification asset. For example, take a credibility asset such as a contributed article that is published for your brand in a trade publication. Let’s say you amplify that credibility asset through two different channels; one is a LinkedIn campaign that promotes the asset and another is an email newsletter that showcases the asset. You can measure the impact of leads generated from both channels, and then, ultimately, the conversions of those leads to sales. That will help guide you on ROI metrics that resulted from the credibility asset. 

Can you elaborate more on the process behind clearly defining targeted personas within the OR model?

• You need to get as specific as possible with creating personas in order to properly select the credibility assets and amplification assets that will drive outcomes for each campaign. For example, let’s take a revenue campaign. Get as specific as you can with creating the target buyer persona; i.e. what is their job title, are there any geographic locations where they operate, what is the size of the company, etc. The more specific you can get with defining the personas the more effective the ROI will be on the outcome campaign.

How can OR address the quantity over quality problem when it comes to measuring what success looks like in PR?

• Ultimately, it’s all about outcomes with OR. Therefore, some campaigns might be measured on a qualitative basis, where there are fewer results but the results are more impactful once they are secured; while other campaigns might be measured on a quantitative basis, where there are a high-volume of results but they are less comprehensive in nature. The ROI on the outcomes will determine if a qualitative, quantitative or combination approach, will be the most effective.

Why is recruiting the most unheralded outcome?

• The talent function is typically one of the most expensive lines on a company’s P&L, regardless of size and industry. Between internal and external recruiters, rewards programs, culture initiatives, training and more, brands spend a significant amount of money to recruit and retain talent, and understandably so. The role of PR, and the relationship between credibility assets and amplification assets, can be one of the most effective channels to attract talent to your organization. In many cases, this can be an easy offset to expenditure in other areas of your talent function that are not driving anywhere near the same value as PR could drive if it’s practiced properly with the outcome approach.

How do you suggest approaching OR if you have a small marketing team without a demand gen function?

• Be smart, scrappy and resourceful. Even small marketing teams can effectively amplify PR results to drive outcomes in the absence of big budgets or extensive resources. If you don’t have the luxury of big budgets for paid media, look at channels to amplify credibility assets such as email newsletters, organic social and landing page creation.

If you didn’t get to join us live the first time around, be on the lookout for next month’s session!

The post Leveraging PR to Drive Business Outcomes: N6A’s OR Webinar appeared first on N6 Powered by KRMA | Fully Integrated Digital Marketing.

But the growth-at-all-costs mindset isn’t in vogue like it was a few years ago. Customers care more than ever about the brands they support. Whether you’re pitching the board or just getting buy-in from your boss, here are nine ways to justify spending on PR.

1. PR Means Credibility

Did you know 84 percent of people trust online reviews as much as recommendations from a friend? For better or worse, most people believe what they read. And when you invest in PR, customers are reading about you instead of your competitors.

A single press release won’t win over your customers. But a perfectly placed mention of your brand in a thought-provoking article on a trusted industry website is a great start. Gaining confidence and credibility in the eyes of your target audience takes more than a swipe right.

Like any successful relationship it takes time. Investing in PR means playing the long game. Of course, you can always try and get lucky on the first date, but it’s exactly that—luck. If you want customers to know, like, and trust you then you have to invest in a mutually beneficial relationship.

2. PR Drives Business Outcomes

The days of promising performance without an ounce of data to back it up are over. It doesn’t matter how clever your presentation is or how perfect your pitch, if it doesn’t drive real world results, nobody cares.

 Savvy marketers know every dollar in their marketing budget has a job to do. You can’t afford to invest in anything that’s not going to work. That’s why our agency is built around driving measurable outcomes. In the high-growth technology sector alone we’ve launched more than 100 startup brands, raised $2B+ in strategic investments, and lead over a dozen IPOs.

3. Customers Care About the Brands They Support

In 2018, Casper opened The Dreamery, a whimsical storefront filled with private sleep pods, complimentary PJs, and an “outrageously comfortable bed.” Now I don’t think Casper is abandoning their business model. Instead, they realize that in order to win customers you have to connect with them on a more personal level.

If you’re wondering where the ROI is of opening a nap bar, the launch was covered by Business Insider, Fast Company, and AdWeek garnering more than 115 million impressions. In the world of direct-to-consumer shopping, brands are the business. From Casper to Quip, D2C brands are finding novel ways to win over their customers.

4. PR Improves SEO

PR outcomes have a halo effect not just on your brand, but also on your website. The number of referring domains (aka backlinks) to your website is a ranking factor in Google’s algorithm. This means every time your brand is linked to from another domain, your own website actually becomes more valuable.  

How valuable you ask? Search engine optimizers pay thousands of dollars for high quality backlinks from authoritative sites. According to Brian Dean, Founder of Backlinko, “The number of referring domains is one of Google’s most important ranking factors.”

Search-engine-optimized articles aren’t known for their quality. Instead of paying for backlinks in guest posts you didn’t write, on websites nobodies ever heard of, invest in a solid PR strategy.

5. Good PR Opens Doors

Public relations professionals have been called a lot of things like spin doctors and liars. The truth is good PR doesn’t rely on misdirection. It’s telling the right story to the right people in the right place at the right time—and then amplifying that story to expand its reach and impact.

Good PR puts you in front of the people and publications you need to grow your business. Whether you’re selling to Main Street or industry-leading enterprises, PR will help you get your foot in the door until the deal is done.

6. It’s Easier than Ever to Measure the Value of PR

Traditionally, it’s been difficult to tie PR to revenue, leads, or even website traffic. But that’s not the case today. UTM parameters attached to backlinks on websites make it easier than ever to understand the impact of PR efforts.

In addition to UTM parameters, multi-touch attribution models, cross domain tracking, and event-based analytics platforms have all helped PR professionals measure and optimize their impact across the entire marketing funnel. Although not every placement is going to lead to (trackable!) net new revenue, tracking ROI will show just how valuable it is.

Photo by William Iven on Unsplash

7. PR Helps You Stand Out from the Competition

Reporters are always looking for a scoop. However, it’s unlikely they’ll give you too many opportunities to make your pitch. If you’re not ready, your competitors will be.

If reporters do call, and you’re up against a tight deadline, it pays to have your press kit in order. A complete press kit includes logos, headshots, brand photography, and typically a few company descriptions.

When it comes time to IPO or getting acquired, every press mention could mean more money for your business. Defining your desired outcome and ensuring all of your efforts are aligned ultimately to that goal enables you to be prepared and march forward in support of that goal.

8. PR Grows Your Audience

A constant stream of good press can help your brand become a thought-leader. It can also help you establish an audience on social media.

If your newsfeed is anything like mine—it’s messy. There’s never been a greater need for curated content. People are desperate for reliable sources of information. Turning your business into a trusted industry source will have a massively positive impact on your business in terms of friends, followers, and funding.

9. PR Creates Branded Evergreen Content

When it comes to content, everyone has a different definition of what “good” means. The creative team wants it to have a catchy headline, the demand generation team wants it to have a form, the product marketing team wants to see a framework or flowchart.

Branded content from PR can easily meet all of the above goals and then some. In addition, long-form PR content can live on long after it’s published in the form of evergreen content. If you know how to pitch a reporter, you can position the article to be relevant long after it’s bumped off the homepage.

In the early days of marketing it was more art than science. In the last decade we’ve seen a seismic shift back to science. While they’ll always be some art to it, today you can’t convince your boss, let alone a boardroom, without some numbers to back it up.

As marketing has become more data-driven, so has PR. Anyone that tells you differently is living in the past. If you’re more interested in outcomes than impressions, then I invite you to explore our KPI-driven model for accountable PR.

The post Responsible for a Marketing Budget? 9 Ways to Justify ROI Spend on PR appeared first on N6 Powered by KRMA | Fully Integrated Digital Marketing.

There are a few awards and recognitions that are important traditions in honoring the people that make N6A the unique place that it is. The recipients of these two awards are the N6A team members that embody our core taglines like “Embrace the Pace” and “Compete and Care.” 

The “N6A Chairman’s Pick” is a quarterly program to determine which N6A team member has most effectively demonstrated the values and work ethic that are aligned with N6A’s culture and foundation. The “N6A Bucket List” is the second of N6A’s two signature annual vacation competition programs, and was designed to reward the highest-producing N6A team member for the second half of the year (July through December), according to our internal ranking system. 

Read more below to learn more about these awards and join us in congratulating these outstanding leaders in their field!

Q4 2019 – Chairman’s Pick:

Kaitlyn McAndrew – Senior Account Executive, Enterprise Group

“I’m honored to receive the Q4 Chairman’s Pick Award. The focus we place on designing the right OR strategy for each of our clients keeps our work diverse and interesting. It’s so rewarding to see our work directly impact our clients’ business goals. I’m excited to continue to strategically drive outcomes for clients in 2020 with the team.”

— Kaitlyn McAndrew

 “The Chairman’s Pick is an important N6A tradition. Each quarter, N6Aers nominate which of their fellow teammates displayed the essence of what it takes to be an N6Aer — sacrifice, teamwork and positive energy. I’m thrilled to award this quarter’s Chairman’s Pick to Kaitlyn McAndrew, someone whose spirit and energy is on display for all of us to see every day, and one of the many examples of the people who make N6A the special place that it is.” 

— Matt Rizzetta, CEO & Founder

2019 Bucket List Trip Competition:

Erin Pugh – Account Coordinator, Pro Group

“I’ve always been proud to be an N6A member, as my team members are constantly setting the standard for hard work, but winning this award makes me proud on a different level. It means that my work is truly being recognized and appreciated and I’m extremely grateful for that. Although I haven’t chosen a destination yet, I’m looking forward to the adventure, wherever it takes me!” 

— Erin Pugh

“Erin has been a wonderful addition to the Pro team. She embodies N6A’s values of teamwork, dedication and positive attitude. In less than a year, she has become a seasoned PR professional and we can’t wait to see her continue to grow with the agency. Thanks to her hard work, she has contributed to various positive client outcomes through successful awards and speaking submissions, research and media outreach.” 

— Florence Lousqui, Director, Pro Group

The post Team Members on N6A’s People-First Approach and Our Core Mission appeared first on N6 Powered by KRMA | Fully Integrated Digital Marketing.

In the new year, we must be clear about the work that is required to change, and become obsessed with doing what is required to achieve the business outcome that we truly and passionately desire. To take your business to the next level you need to establish a plan and rigorously follow it in order to reach and surpass your goals.

Commit today that this year — 2020 — will be your best year yet in contributing to making your business successful at a new and higher level. When you set this goal early in the year, each and every step you take will be subject to this outcome. 

[Photo by Andrea Davis on Unsplash]

Here are some tips and questions that will help you craft this year’s vision and the path to achieving your business outcome.

1. How well do you understand your customer’s needs?
   You need to understand your customer’s needs, and the relationship between your product offering and those needs, in order to be compelling in the market. If you aren’t relevant this year to those needs, then get working early to gain that relevance.
2. What new products and/or services are needed? 
   As you understand your customer’s needs, you must be brutally objective in making an assessment about your current product portfolio. Are there new products and services that need to be developed in the near-term in order to remain compelling in the market? You should’ve started working on this effort yesterday.
3. What’s needed in order to retain more of your customers? 
   There is a difference between generating transactions and building a loyal customer base. If you’re losing customers, begin by asking a simple question — why? Then figure out what has to be done in order to retain more of them and build a strong revenue base.
4. Are you clear about how your customers form their buying decisions? 
   The market for your products and services continue to change in real-time, so you must anticipate how your customers and prospects make their decisions in 2020. Understanding their buying process is essential to targeting prospects and engaging customers.
5. Who are the players in your competitive set ? 
   It would be nice if you were alone in the battle to grow your business. You aren’t. The more that you understand your competitive set and the work they do to compete with you, the smarter your strategy will be in the year — and years — ahead. You must become a student of the competitive set in order to win your outcome. 
6. How can you reach and engage your target audience efficiently? 
   You aren’t working with a limitless marketing budget. The challenge ahead is to cost effectively and efficiently leverage media. It’s all about the ability to reach a high concentration of prospects for your product, and, most importantly, engage with them to drive the desired outcome. The vision for 2020 is to leverage an optimal mix of media and messages that gets the job done. There is no way to achieve this goal without proper attention and performance monitoring of established KPIs.

The results of your efforts in achieving your vision for 2020 must be measured on a real-time basis. In a highly competitive market, you have no time to waste in terms of getting started and executing. We cannot delay our work — not even by a month or a day. Doing so will open up your efforts to the competitive set and provide them with a huge opportunity to take advantage of your lack of decisive business-building action. You cannot waste time with the misguided hope that you can make up the gap later in the year. 

Commit today to a better vision for 2020.

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In the OR model, PR becomes something that can be tracked, measured, and proven to play a role in driving tangible impact. Throughout our rollout year, the N6A team has been able to assign an unparalleled level of accountability to PR strategies, and completely changed the game to produce bottom-line outcomes at all stages of growth for our clients. 

What kinds of results did the N6A team drive this year? Let’s take a look at some of our best outcomes of 2019.  

Enterprise Value

Our biggest Enterprise Value Outcome of the year was an IPO assist with customer experience management platform, Medallia, which hit the NYSE in mid-July 2019, experiencing a 77 percent opening day price increase — larger than Uber or Slack — making it the largest opening-day increase of any tech stock

As well as an after-market strategy, N6A perfected the company’s communications strategy in the lead-up to going public with a consistent flow of releases and coverage in the lead up to going public in numerous top-tier outlets like Forbes, TechCrunch, the Wall Street Journal, and more. 

“N6A was an integral part of the successful media coverage surrounding Medallia’s IPO. They set forth an excellent strategy, thoroughly prepared our executives, and then executed flawlessly. It was the best possible outcome.” – Sophie Chesters, CMO, Medallia

Capital Raise

Unqork, a next-generation enterprise application platform that brings all of the tools required to build complex applications onto a single intuitive no-code platform, engaged N6A for a Capital Raise Outcome this year. 

N6A’s professional services team led Unqork through the process of securing nearly three dozen pieces of earned media coverage results tied to its $80 million Series B round, which was led by Google’s investment arm, Capital G. Another component was to establish consistent media-facing messaging from the C-Suite down to ensure complete alignment with the company’s two-year growth plan.

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