[New Post] Content We Love: Toys”R”Us #PlayWithPurpose Press Release Delivers Fun and Funds

 

Blogs

Content We Love: Toys"R"Us #PlayWithPurpose Press Release Delivers Fun and Funds Priscilla Ramirez Who would have thought that having fun could be so important? Plenty of research and studies now show that a child's playtime is crucial to their development. Although playtime seems like a simple concept, it often doesn’t make it onto the priority list in this era of hustle and bustle. A busy schedule is not the only impediment, though. Limited resources for families facing poverty lead to less playtime for children, as does minimal knowledge of its importance. Toys"R"Us, together with Save the Children, aimed to tackle this issue with their fundraising and awareness campaign Play With Purpose. "To know that millions of children living in poverty do not have access to play – whether due to limited family resources or knowledge about the importance of play – is heartbreaking,” said Dave Brandon, Chairman and CEO, Toys"R"Us, Inc. “Together with Save the Children, and with the support of our team members and customers nationwide, we will strive to ensure all kids are provided opportunities to play with purpose." Play With Purpose launched on Feb. 17 and runs through April 17. To kick off the two-month campaign, Toys"R"Us distributed a multimedia news release that also serves as a central hub for their multi-channel communications — housing their live Twitter feed, multiple call-to-action items, and a variety of shareable visual assets. When packaged together, all of their release’s assets shine a bright light on the mission of raising funds for Save the Children's early childhood development programs in some of America's most underprivileged areas. By raising awareness and providing compelling information, Play With Purpose calls on readers to engage with the cause and donate. Toys"R"Us leveraged four key strategies to maximize their campaign's discoverability and drive interaction. Consider playing with these fundamentals the next time you need to promote your brand’s story. 1. Create appealing content. Delivering useful content that people will want to share is the most assured way to improve SEO and generate more media exposure and pick-up. This, of course, begins with a good understanding of your target audiences and the issues they care about. Toys"R"Us draws in the attention of parents, teachers and media by providing information that’s important to them, such as easily digestible statistics about playtime’s impact on development growth. 2. Maximize 'shareability'. In addition to being useful, PR content should be easily shareable for maximum exposure. Social sharing of both your text and multimedia assets is vital. When deciding on what sort of visual assets to include, keep in mind what tends to be shared on social and other channels. Toys"R"Us made it easier for their audience to spread the word by cleverly dividing their infographics into smaller, more shareable segments and including a video. 3. Launch a long-term campaign. Projects like #PlayWithPurpose that have so many moving parts are a golden opportunity for discoverability and brand recognition. By running the fundraising campaign over two months, Toys “R” Us built an ongoing conversation around the importance of play. The multimedia-rich release was the perfect way to launch this because it not only packed a huge initial punch, but also included video and graphics that could be re-circulated over the entire course of the campaign. 4. Inspire action. One of the most powerful ROIs for marketing content is generating interaction. Serious engagement requires serious calls to action. Throughout their release, Toys”R”Us weaves multiple CTAs throughout their release with a “Make a Donation” button placed prominently at the top, an embedded click-to-tweet, and rich media that can be viewed, downloaded and shared. All of these components in the multimedia news release reinforce the campaign’s larger message of #PlayWithPurpose, which itself is a call to action. Consistently implementing these fundamentals in your organization's content marketing strategy can help spur more attention for your brand. Download PR & SEO: Still Driving Discovery to get more tips that will help you develop and distribute content with purpose. Author Priscilla Ramirez is a customer success representative for channel and advocacy marketing at PR Newswire.

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Top 10 Ways to Make Your Content’s Call to Action Count

Blogs

Top 10 Ways to Make Your Content's Call to Action Count Amanda Hicken You've spent hours writing your latest and greatest piece of content.  You have a killer story, eye-catching presentation, and even a multi-channel promotion strategy to reach all the right people. But was it a waste of time and money because you forgot the one essential that makes your marketing matter? Your call to action. Every interaction you have with your audience is an opportunity to build and strengthen relationships. Because of this, every piece of content you create — be it a press release, podcast, blog post, email, website landing page, SlideShare, video or ebook – must have a call to action (CTA) that offers the relationship a next step. There's also the not-so-warm-and-fuzzy reason to include a CTA: It's the only way your content is going to collect leads and earn you money. It's not enough, though, to slap the same, tired CTA on everything. As the multimedia news release featured in our latest case study shows, your CTA must be an interactive and compelling part of your content experience to drive quality leads. Make your calls to action count by following these 10 tips. 1. Understand the action. The call to action in your media outreach is going to be very different than the CTA in your lead generation form. While an email pitch to journalists should be an ask for a conversation or coverage, your CTA encouraging readers to enter a contest or download your white paper is better phrased as a statement. Understanding whom you're targeting and what action you want them to take is the first step in determining your CTA's approach. 2. Limit the choices. The more paths you provide your audience, the less likely they will be to follow any of them. You need to make sure your audience can find their way without getting lost or confused. When writing your content, focus your audience's attention on a primary call to action. It is ok to offer a secondary CTA; however, you should limit the choices as much as possible. Although there are a few exceptions to this (blog round-ups, for instance), the majority of your content should point to a single path. 3. Highlight the value prop. If you want your audience to keep coming back to you, the path your call to action sends them down must be worth it. Consider the common CTA of downloading gated content. At minimum, you're asking someone to give you their name, email address, and other contact information in exchange for a piece of content. That content must offer something of quality that can't be found anywhere else. Furthermore, the CTA should emphasize what makes it irresistible. 4. Keep your promise. While the whole purpose of the call to action is to entice someone to do something, you can't put a CTA out there and not deliver on its promise. If you're promising an exclusive ebook, it can't be a 2-page rehash of content you previously published elsewhere. Be honest and upfront about what your audience is getting and what they have to provide in exchange for it. Fail to set expectations and you can expect your audience to be wary of any future promises you make. 5. Stress the moment's urgency. You don't want your audience to take action later. You need them to take it now. That sense of urgency is essential to your call to action's success. Your audience is presented with countless choices throughout their day. If you are lucky enough to grab a moment of their attention, you have to take immediate advantage of it. Use words like "now" in your CTA and make it simple for your audience to immediately take the next step. By the time "later" comes along, so will someone else's content. 6. Get to the point. Because you only have a few moments of your audience's time, limit your calls to action to 1-2 sentences. One sentence provides your audience a reason to take action. The other offers direction. Use active, instead of passive, verbs and avoid jargon to keep those sentences brief. 7. Enhance the experience with visuals. A visual cue such as a download button or banner will not just cut down your word count, it will also attract more attention than a text-only call to action. Don't catch your audience's eye for the wrong reason, though. Make sure the visuals you include are polished, consistent with brand guidelines, and the right size/shape for the platform they'll be published on. 8. Reinforce your message with repetition. If your call to action appears in something longer than a social media post, weave multiple mentions of it throughout your content. For instance, if you're publishing a press release or blog post, include the first CTA within the first 300 words, followed by at least one more mention in the middle or at the end. Your audience may overlook the first mention, but subsequent calls to action remind them of the next step. 9. Track, test, and optimize your technique. Not every call to action will be a home run. Use tracking links integrated with your website analytics to identify which CTAs worked better than others. Once you have a baseline, try testing different approaches. CTA format, wording, frequency, and location are just a few variables you can adjust to boost engagement. 10. Automate your follow up (when appropriate). Under no circumstances should you automate the replies to media inquiries; however, if the goal of your call to action is lead generation, make the process more efficient for your audience and yourself by connecting CTAs to your marketing automation software. For instance, hyperlink a selection of your CTA’s text to a landing page and lead generation form integrated with your marketing program. Doing this will enable you to spend more time promoting the landing page than worrying about whether or not your audience received the promised download, organizing the contact information they provided, and pushing any qualified leads through to your sales team. Make an even bigger splash by looking into whether it's possible to embed a lead generation form directly into the content. This will increase the likelihood of engagement by removing yet another step your audience must take. In PR Newswire's latest case study, we show how mobile point-of-sale developer Lavu used an embedded lead generation form and many of the above call to action best practices to surpass their lead generation goal by 200% and drive 2,000 views in net new traffic to their digital platforms. Download Lavu Generates Quality Leads & Increases Brand Awareness to see how they did it and get more tips on creating compelling content that inspires your audience to take action. Author Amanda Hicken is PR Newswire's senior manager of strategic content and managing editor of Beyond PR. Follow her on Twitter @ADHicken for tweets about marketing, the media, Cleveland, and comic books.

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