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Thursday, January 28, 2016
Campus Media Group Promotes Joel Eisfelder to Director of Account Services
In order to balance exceptional client services with continued growth, Campus Media Group, Inc. has promoted Joel Eisfelder to the recently created position of Director of Account Services. A specialized media and marketing agency that combines cutting-edge digital and nontraditional marketing strategies to help national brands reach the elusive college student market in the U.S., Campus Media Group has experienced significant growth in the past two years with revenues up 20 percent year-over-year.
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In his new role, Eisfelder will oversee the execution of client campaigns and will be responsible for rolling out the agencies new inbound marketing services in 2016. Core to his new role will be ensuring that services provided are on strategy, on time and within budget. Prior to the promotion, Eisfelder served as the agency’s Sales Director and was responsible for the management of both the Account Development and Account Management teams. |
“While it is core to our agency DNA, we (Campus Media Group) had reached a point in our growth where we needed someone focused solely on ensuring we meet our client’s needs and expectations,” said Jason Bakker, COO at Campus Media Group. “Having worked with Joel for more than a decade, we knew he was the perfect person to take ownership and shape this new role. Not only does he understood the dynamics of our services and the intricacies of marketing to college students, he also embodies the agency’s ‘100% say-do ratio’ philosophy.”
After spending several years within the Star Tribune’s sales organization, Eisfelder rejoined Campus Media Group in 2013 as Sales Director. During his tenure at the newspaper, Eisfelder held multiple roles including Sales Development Manager, Director of Channel Revenue and most recently Director of Radius. In these positions he was responsible for driving revenue growth through new digital marketing products and strategy.
Eisfelder first joined Campus Media Group in 2002 as an Account Manager and was promoted to Media Director in 2006. He remained at the agency until 2011 before leaving for the Star Tribune.
A resident of Richfield, Minn, Eisfelder graduated from the School of Journalism and Mass Communication at the University of Minnesota –Twin Cities.
Wednesday, January 27, 2016
PR Strategies for the Entrepreneur
One of the most important facets of enhancing communication with the public for any entrepreneur is public relations (PR). PR competence greatly helps entrepreneurs focused on expanding their boundaries and keeping their image intact. It is not enough to only maintain good branding for your products. You must have a positive image in the eyes of the public, especially in today's world of social media. PR, however, is quite challenging for most entrepreneurs, who have busy daily schedules. For this reason, entrepreneurs need to consider the following PR tips:
Collect good testimonials. A testimonial is a direct way of improving your visibility, reputation and trust in the eyes of consumers. A good testimonial will spread your brand across the board. Consumer interaction that leads to referrals. Testimonials are also a great search engine optimization (SEO) tool.
Use effective press releases. It is important to have a plan for occasional company press releases. Press releases are one of the easiest ways to tap into high authority media. Publications have a high readership and this will help improve your brand visibility.
Allocate time. "Set aside a few minutes daily to keep up with your brand progress in the public eye and have first-hand interactions," said Barry O'Brien, owner of Creative Construction Home Remodeling. "Doing this gives you a direct perspective on your brand and you are then able to move side by side with it. This helps a lot in giving you an opportunity to make the small decisions that ultimately have a big impact on your products in the long-term."
Narrow down your strategy. Pursuing a multitude of channels and targeting a wide demographic will result in you spending your resources inefficiently. Whether you are a startup or an established entrepreneur, it is important to focus your strategy on specific targets that are related to your brand
Utilize photography. "Potentials consumers react to visual stimuli," said Sarah Bull, a photographer in Bemidji, MN. "An image will make or break your product. Make sure that this is element is not something that you overlook."
Utilize photography. "Potentials consumers react to visual stimuli," said Sarah Bull, a photographer in Bemidji, MN. "An image will make or break your product. Make sure that this is element is not something that you overlook."
Use strategic networking. Building relationships with public influencers is a great way of letting PR do the work for you. As an entrepreneur, any small favor – such as a tweet or a mention from a well-known public figure – goes a long way in increasing your own visibility.
Bellmont Partners Hires Breanna Welke as Group Account Director to Lead Growing Consumer Team
Minneapolis-based Bellmont Partners has announced that consumer PR veteran Breanna Welke has joined the team as a group account director. With previous experience in both agency and corporate settings, Welke brings 15 years of strategic communication and brand marketing experience to Bellmont Partners. Welke leads the agency’s consumer practice group and also brings her significant trade expertise to business-to-business clients.
“We are thrilled to welcome Breanna to Bellmont during a very exciting time for our agency,” says Jen Bellmont, Bellmont Partners’ chief operating officer. “With the addition of several new clients and projects, Breanna’s experience in strategic communications for a wide variety of brands is a great addition to our already strong team.”
Prior to joining Bellmont Partners, Welke served as the public relations manager for Marvin Windows and Doors, where she led the company’s public relations, corporate communications and social media initiatives for the premiere window and door manufacturer. Prior to her time at Marvin, Welke spent numerous years in an agency setting including St. Paul-based Kohnstamm Communications, GolinHarris Chicago and the Maccabee Group, a Minneapolis-based PR agency. During this time she had the opportunity to work with a wide range of well-known clients in the consumer packaged goods industry, specifically in the food and beverage category.
For more information about Bellmont Partners and its newest team member, visit www.bellmontpartners.com.
Friday, January 22, 2016
Bellmont Partners Adds Brusoe as Account Executive
Minneapolis-based Bellmont Partners is pleased to announce the addition of Cristy Brusoe to the growing communications agency.
Brusoe joins Bellmont Partners as an account executive after nearly six years as a media relations specialist at Lemke Anderson. There, she helped to craft and tell the stories of both national and local clients, in industries ranging from consumer foods to home products.
“Cristy is a fabulous addition to our growing team,” says Jen Bellmont, Bellmont Partners’ chief operating officer. “Her expertise further strengthens Bellmont Partners’ focus in a number of areas, particularly business and consumer media relations.”
Brusoe joins the agency’s Business and Industry Group and will serve on a number of business and consumer client teams. She also brings a personal interest in sports marketing to Bellmont Partners.
As part of her new role, Brusoe will collaborate with Bellmont Partners’ strategic partner, Schuler Publicity. Additionally, she is pursuing a master’s degree in leadership education – sports management at Winona State University. Brusoe holds a bachelor’s degree in journalism from the University of Wisconsin – River Falls.
For more information about Bellmont Partners and its newest team member, visit www.bellmontpartners.com.
5 Strategies for Effective B2B Marketing
If your organization deals in business-to-business (B2B) transactions, you probably understand the special challenges of operating in this field. Having a strategy for your online marketing is crucial to the success of your company.
Below are five tips for effective B2B marketing:
1. Understand and know your customers
Grasping the goals of your clients is the primary step in formulating a marketing campaign, whether you are dealing business-to-business or directly to the customer. Researching your market and understanding the needs of your audience is critical when planning a marketing strategy.
2. Utilize paid advertising
If you are not already advertising online, start diverting funds from your offline marketing campaigns and sponsor some paid online ads. Working with a competent advertising service will enable you to target your clients' specific geographic location, allowing you to make precision pitches to potential customers. Even if you have an online marketing campaign, it is worth looking into social media platforms to expand your marketing plan.
3. Understand and use social media
At this point, many businesses use simple tweets and Facebook posts to advertise their services, but this is only the beginning of what social media campaigns can accomplish. Each day, thousands of ads are broadcast to users and its easy for your message to get lost in the crowd. Using social media to engage with your customers helps establish relationships and allows you to better understand their wants and goals.
4. Have a mobile-friendly website
"Making a website that is mobile-friendly is important for any business. Business-level clients access many sites with mobile devices and having a site that is not compatible could cause you to lose a potential contract. Google Analytics will allows you to determine how much of your business traffic is coming from mobile sources and let you monitor the growth after you make your site mobile-friendly," said Dustin Heigl, marketing spokesperson for HotMelt.com and GlueGun.com.
5. Remember the importance of your online reputation
Online B2B competition is fierce. Having a good reputation is invaluable. Taking the time to engage with your clients and making personal connections will help your business in the long term. Clients want a company they can trust. Creating a marketing campaign that highlights your reputation will enhance your organization and create positive contacts.
Keeping all of these tips in mind when developing your marketing strategy will help your organization stay competitive in the B2B market. Harnessing the power of online advertising and using social media to connect with potential clients will go a long way in helping you understand your client base and provide the solutions they need.
Thursday, January 21, 2016
Wednesday, January 20, 2016
Minnesota PRSA Announces 2016 Leadership
The (PRSA) today announced that it has installed its executive leadership team and Board of Directors for 2016. Minnesota PRSA is the ninth-largest chapter of PRSA, the world’s leading organization for public relations professionals.
Led by new President Jason Sprenger, APR, president of Game Changer Communications, Minnesota PRSA is comprised of more than 400 corporate, agency, independent, non-profit and government public relations professionals from Minnesota, the Dakotas and Western Wisconsin. Through its programs and services, Minnesota PRSA delivers on its mission of engaging members at every stage of their careers with the knowledge, resources and connections to achieve professional excellence, driving ethical and strategic outcomes, and advocating for the profession.
Led by new President Jason Sprenger, APR, president of Game Changer Communications, Minnesota PRSA is comprised of more than 400 corporate, agency, independent, non-profit and government public relations professionals from Minnesota, the Dakotas and Western Wisconsin. Through its programs and services, Minnesota PRSA delivers on its mission of engaging members at every stage of their careers with the knowledge, resources and connections to achieve professional excellence, driving ethical and strategic outcomes, and advocating for the profession.
“It is an exciting time to be involved with Minnesota PRSA, which has been an integral part of the communication scene in the Upper Midwest for about 70 years,” said Sprenger. “Communicators in today’s global society must be empowered on as many platforms and channels as possible. Accordingly, we’re doing more than ever before to help our hundreds of members engage, connect with and learn from each other and the broader business community. We’re committed to ensuring that Minnesota PRSA and its members continue to grow, and that the chapter remains an essential servant to and resource for our community."
The chapter’s 2016 leadership consists of the Executive Committee and Board of Directors as follows:
Executive Committee
· Ethics Officer – , APR, Fellow PRSA,
Board of Directors
· , APR,American Academy of Neurology
· , APR, Weber Shandwick
· , APR, Prime Therapeutics
· , APR, Fellow PRSA ,
About Minnesota PRSA
Minnesota PRSA is the ninth-largest chapter of the Public Relations Society of America (PRSA), the world’s largest organization for public relations professionals with nearly 32,000 professional and student members. A strong, active part of Minnesota’s communications community since 1953, Minnesota PRSA’s membership is comprised of more than 400 corporate, agency, independent, non-profit and government public relations professionals from Minnesota, the Dakotas and Western Wisconsin. Through its programs and services, Minnesota PRSA delivers on its mission of engaging members at every stage of their careers with the knowledge, resources and connections to achieve professional excellence, drive ethical and strategic outcomes, and advocate for the profession. Learn more at www.mnprsa.com
Monday, January 18, 2016
Top 10 Online Tools for 2016 SEO Success
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) has often received a bad rap in recent years, ever since the large original Google Panda and Google Penguin updates shut down many of the obvious ways to manipulate or spam search engine results. However, SEO is as important as it has ever been and the truth is that you can argue it's even more important since there are no easy solutions. There is no spamming tags, no listing thousands of keywords at the bottom of a page, no location bombing, and no spamming keyword based backlinks.
Because of this a smart SEO strategy using the best tools available can help a webmaster create the best coding, the best content, and use the best practices available to make sure Google and other search engines see your website as the best option for a variety of profitable and useful keywords. With so many websites knocked out of the search engine rankings over the past few years, the need for really good quality websites that show their authority is arguably higher than ever.
Different studies show the importance of SEO can't be overstated:
- Over half of all purchase decisions start with an online search
- The first page gets more than 95% of all traffic
- Organic results get 90% of traffic (paid ads get the other 10)
- The top three spots in particular get well over half of all traffic (61% according to the last major study)
So with hundreds of SEO tools out there, what are the best ones to use? We're going go through 10 of the best free and premium tools to arm you with everything you need for any and all of your SEO campaigns.
1) The Google Keyword Planner
Found at:
The Keyword Planner uses Google's own search data and allows you to search for the traffic numbers around every keyword imaginable, and the tool can suggest dozens or even hundreds of related keywords that you might also be interested in. You can find the general national numbers for these keywords, or even use the tools to micro target a specific location or area and get those numbers.
The tool isn't completely intuitive, but if you play around with it for a day you'll see the many impressive features it has. In addition to this, because Google's Keyword Tool has been around for so long, you can often go to YouTube and find a tutorial to do anything you need in AdWords.
2) SpyFu
Found at: Spyfu.com
Some of the information provided includes:
- The words your competition is on page 1 for
- The search terms your competition just fell off of page 1 for
- Estimated levels of their traffic/organic clicks
- History of paid campaigns
- Sources of inbound backlinks (and numbers of them)
3) SEO Book
Found at: Tools.seobook.com/
SEO Book offers a range of free tools and has long been a great starting spot for individuals who were relatively new to the SEO world and needed some free tools to get started. You will need to create an account with SEO Book before you can access all of their tools, but creating an account is free of charge so you won't have to spend any cash.
Unlike many of the premium or more advanced tools that focus on one or two specific parts of SEO, it's good to think of SEO Book as a toolbox. There are tools for finding keywords, creating meta tags, page comparisons, keyword density analysis, and more. It's a good starting point for all your basic SEO campaign needs. There are even plug-ins available for Internet Explorer, Firefox, and Chrome to allow for easy access.
4) SEM Rush Paid Search Ranking & Analysis
Found at: Semrush.com/
If you don't mess with PPC advertising this tool isn't for you, but it's invaluable for anyone dabbling in this field.
5) SEOmoz's Open Site Explorer
Found at: Moz.com/researchtools/ose/
Have you ever wondered where your competition is finding the wonderful backlinks that are giving them authority, page rank, and allowing them to rank above your site? If so, this is your tool to even those odds!
Open Site Explorer is offered by SEOmoz and while free trial accesses are available, you have to be a paying member of Moz Pro to get continued access to the full tool. Open Site Explorer focuses specifically on the backlink side of SEO, which is alive and well no matter what some other blogs might (wrongfully) tell you.
This tool can really dig deep and find the source of all backlinks to a website, as well as link back to that source so you can see the actual page it comes from and how that actual link is formatted or given. This tool also gives information on the page authority and overall domain authority of the backlinks, giving much clearer picture of where the ranking juice is really coming from.
This allows you to do two main things:
- See the links your competitors have and thus find new links for your own SEO backlink campaign
- Take a look at the websites linking to you and spot possible bad or negative SEO backlinks to your site you can ask Google to disavow so it stops hurting you.
Found at: Mattcutts.com/blog/
This is as close to getting SEO and Google news from the horse's mouth as you get. While it's not a tool, per se, you would be amazed how often Matt very clearly lays out the changes coming up, what websites can do to make sure they're okay, and talks about where Google is going in the future with their algorithm changes.
In other words, subscribing to his blog and following any updates that are SEO or Google related will give you a leg up to see what tools will be especially useful coming up, what changes you need to worry about, and give you a head start on staying ahead or fixing problems before they punish your website.
7) Silktide
Found at: Silktide.com/tools/
Silktide is above all an analysis tool. This is a paid tool that allows you to put in a website and get a full review on every single piece of the site that can affect SEO from domain age to content, structure, tags, and even the social media footprint that links back to it. The downside is that this is a paid tool, and for many plans each search is going to have a cost to it.
The full detailed report can be downloaded in PDF form after it's generated, but any website is going to rank on a 10 point scale overall, just as each section will. 0.0 means the website is completely botching that ranking factor while a 10.0 is perfect.
This tool is more on the expensive side, but if you need a quick yet thorough analysis of multiple websites and what is (and isn't) working then this is definitely the way to go to get that information, save it, and work on each weakness to make it a strength – or see the obvious weaknesses of your competition and strengthen your own website to look better in that category in Google's eyes than they do.
8) Majestic SEO
Found at:
Majestic SEO has both a free membership that gives access to a fairly impressive array of tools to spice up your search engine optimization campaign, but the full range of tools (especially comparative tools) are only available with the paid membership. It is worth it for most people to try out the free tools first and see if they really need the premium comparative tools or not.
Aside from the basic SEO tools around links and keywords that many people offer, where Majestic SEO really shines is offering tools that can go a step deeper and show reports on the overall linking campaign of websites, the authority of certain links, and analyze backlinks to see what's missing or out of balance. These tools can also analyze the domain itself, and bring up domain, site, and backlink history you might not have otherwise found.
Add in one of the most respected overall databases online to interact with these tools and it's not hard to see why they are seen by many SEO specialists as one of the best paid options out there for premium SEO tools.
9) Raven Tools
Found at: Raventools.com/
These are paid SEO tools that can be summed up in one word: information. Raven Tools provides information, and lots of it. From links inbound and outbound to pages, domain expiration date, load time, total links, and more, Raven Tools offers an enormous amount of information in a simple no-nonsense display. Even the backlinks are easily broken down to show any .edu, .gov, or other authoritative websites that might be linking.
There are an enormous number of tools that allow you to really gather the information needed to run a powerful SEO campaign. Raven Tools is a paid service, but they also give you the option of a full 30-day trial that gives you access to absolutely everything, so it's worth giving a test drive to see if these tools work to meet your needs best.
10) Broken Link Prospector
Found at: Brokenlinkbuilding.com
Broken Link Prospector is a fascinating SEO tool that works at exactly what it mentions: finding broken links. You can search online using keywords for any broken links on any websites that come back based on related keywords or comments. Once you spot these broken links you can contact the owner of those websites offering a piece of excellent (and related) content you have that can fill that gap. This gets you a great backlink and also saves them by helping them remove a broken link (bad for SEO) and then they don't have to go looking for new content, either.
This is a paid tool with multiple levels of membership, so you'll have to sign up for an account and take a look at what level serves you and your campaign needs best.
In Conclusion
These 10 tools give any SEO campaign manager an amazing amount of information and options. You may not need all of them, but even one or two of these tools can go a long way towards helping you go from mildly warm results to getting the scorching hot results you truly want.
As the founder and CEO of PR Caffeine, Ryan Berkness specializes in getting businesses found on the Internet using search engine optimization (SEO), pay-per-click marketing (PPC), social media marketing, email marketing, website development and consulting business leaders on proper implementation of digital marketing. To reach, organize and facilitate growth in small businesses, Berkness operates as the vice president of the Small Business Advisory Board and is asked to speak regularly on a variety of digital marketing topics. He is the author of the book “Mastering On-Page Optimization: The Secret Sauce of an SEO System.”
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