Happy Tuesday! Two days late with hectic projects, but not too far off my weekly goal. Sitting and forcing this because I also have a project underway that will take my entire night block and most of tomorrow. Today is also Maris Gras, and that is a blessing while pregnant….because Paczkis. Lately most of my time has been spent working on an Etsy based project and various admin tasks. The rest of today and tomorrow will be nearly exclusive to accounting based tasks. With today (February 16) being my official 37 weeks along, my nesting habit and scatter brain is in full swing, so having a few tasks that take the bulk of my time and I focus on just that is welcome. Outside of Pearl Lemon, aside my difficulty focusing, I am 1.5 weeks ahead of schedule in one class and a solid week ahead in the other class and am on par with being 2 weeks ahead in one class and 1.5-2 weeks ahead in my other. If I can stick to this plan, I just need to do my daily engagement and my final 1-2 weeks of class I can focus more on Pearl Lemon before I have Charlotte. My glasses finally arrived today as well, so that warranted an early afternoon break to ensure each pair was clean, flaw free, matched the prescription right and fit my face. I would already recommend for anyone that works from a computer to have blue light filter glasses whether they are prescription or not. My eyes after three hours of wearing already feel less strained and my usual afternoon headache is more of a dull annoyance rather than needing to shut all my screens down. I am slowly working up towards increasing efficiency of time used, but it is still more of a 7 or 8 rather than the preferred 8 to 9. Progress is progress though. It does help that my 3-4 doctor appointments per week has been whittled down to 2 a week, so there are two days with 2 hour windows that are back open to being functional. All in all though, my week has been productive and powering forward. Until next week. The post Weekly Team Member Update 46- Lydia Sims (Head of Internal Growth) appeared first on Pearl Lemon Placements. Via https://pearllemonplacements.com/weekly-team-member-update-46-lydia-sims-head-of-internal-growth/
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Hey Guys! This is Akhila – I’m the Research Analyst at Pearl Lemon. This is my 21st week and I’m back here to share my experience about this week. This week has been pretty busy to me with various tasks and also few additional tasks. I’m more focusing on the client project which must be completed by the end of the week but It extended Lol :p This week I went to barbeque nation to have my favorite stuff. It is distinctively attractive as compared with other dining options due to its DIY and cooked-at-the-table nature and the flexibility and fun of mixing and matching a wide variety of meats, vegetables, sauces, and condiments to create dishes according to each diner’s individual tastes and preferences. Lovee It :):):) As I was working on different tasks and needed to organize them. Our new research analyst named On and the virtual assistant is helping me out in a few tasks like data extraction for one of the Internal lead generation campaigns and also in a few of the other small tasks.
So, this week I was working upon -Facebook Backlinks -YouTube SEO, Optimizing the videos, scheduling the videos on YouTube channels -Daily process tasks(Operations) – Working on an Etsy client project, new listings, fixing the picture edits and updating them which is a bit of pain but I’m enjoying it – I made several looms on tasks for team members working with me – Figuring out the process for posting Deepak’s short videos in his social media – Talked with Lokesh on few tasks, launched Internal Lead Generation campaign with his help, sharing tasks
So, above were a few of the tasks I’m working on specifically and which are very helpful and knowledgeable. It’s all about my week and I will get back to you next week.Thank you all for reading my blog. Cya! -Akhila(Research Analyst)
The post Weekly Team Member Update 21 – Akhila (Research Analyst) appeared first on Pearl Lemon Placements. Via https://pearllemonplacements.com/weekly-team-member-update-21-akhila-research-analyst/ Happy #SinglesAwarenessDay hahaha Remember, when I said I wanted more responsibilities? Well, I got them! Last week I attended a PR training call with my team, and it was pretty exciting. I was already helping Heather with some PR email stuff, so I was aware of the general gist of PR, but whoa this was another level. (I will admit I have been slacking recently because I’ve had many shifts at my other job… Sorry, Heather ). This first training call was about how to approach any PR pitch, and it was kinda mind-blowing. Deepak is good at thinking of stuff off the top of his head. It’s really impressive. What I did learn was that PR is about angles. You can pitch for pretty much anything so long as you have some link to the topic – even a vague one will do so long as you can justify it. (Sounds like English Literature to me…) In any case, this will be a new challenge for me. PR is about communicating. It will be interesting to find out how to do that effectively, especially if I want to gain something. I’m not the most confident at the best of times, so it’s nice to have a team who believes in me. In other happy news, I have written my first internal content post worth 2k words for Pearl Lemon Leads! It’s gonna be published here so keep an eye out for that exciting development! I know I’ve been writing for like two months now, but guest posts do not provide the same level of satisfaction hahaha probably because they’re much shorter… The next month is gonna be very exciting as I will continue with my PR training and also branching out more into writing longer pieces for internal content, so keep an eye out for that. See y’all next time! Nelly The post Weekly Intern Update #4 – Nelly (Content writer) appeared first on Pearl Lemon Placements. Via https://pearllemonplacements.com/weekly-intern-update-4-nelly-content-writer/ Heather here What a week it’s been! You’ll remember I’ve been managing my first LinkedIn sales campaign (with mixed results). Well, this week persistence paid off – sort of. I actually sent our digital PR deck across to a number of people who are interested (and even schedule some calls – eek)! We’ll see what happens…
On Friday, we had some AMAZING training from Deepak and Federica about Facebook ads. I literally know nothing about this particular topic, and it was fascinating hearing them break it down into layman’s terms. Here are some of my main takeaways; FB ads operate via a funnel, just like everything else in sales.
Before you ask me what on earth I’m rambling about, I’ll explain:
Each of these represent stages of the customer journey from their first interaction with you or your product, to the closing of a sale.
Essentially, the top of the funnel needs to engage the client in a non-salesy way (yes I know that’s not a word). For example, if you’re trying to get people to sign up to Pilates classes, your FB ad could be a quiz question with multiple choice answers (TOFU). Once they click on this, it can take them to your specific page that you’re trying to promote (MOFU). The ultimate CTA (Call To Action) must lie in wait, sleek and stunning and impossible to resist! Maybe you’ll offer them a free session, or a discount on their first six months. Maybe you just want them to hop on a call, or subscribe to your YouTube channel… When you structure your sales funnel for an ad campaign, you want to make sure you’re clear as crystal on your CTA. Ad campaigns cost money, after all (although FB ads do seem to be quite reasonably priced). No point directing your hard-won traffic to your landing page and overwhelming them with all the information there. Instead, direct them to a page with information specific to your CTA (i.e Pricing plans, a Special Offers column, Newsletter and Sub button…whatever works for you)! The training was definitely more comprehensive than that – but those were the major points that stuck with me (meaning they’re the ones I am most likely to action in the future)! What else is new? Oh right…PR! This week, I’ve also begun training some of the newer team members to manage various aspects of PR. My main tasks, broken down, are as follows:
Most of these are relatively straightforward. Pitching, however, is an art form (and not a Classical one, sadly – think Dali meets Picasso meets Rembrandt)! Here we come to yet another one of my learnings from the past week:
I’ve spent probably 4 of my 6 months with Pearl Lemon figuring out the whole pitching process – what works, what doesn’t, how to say things, who to say them to etc. Even now, I’d hardly say I’m qualified to speak on the subject at all. Most days, I feel like I’m just winging it with my pitches and am always pleasantly surprised when we land a feature. Teaching pitching is a million times harder. Thank goodness Deepak is still around and willing to shed some light on the matter. He gave a very helpful training session on pitching which even I was able to benefit from! The whole pitching thing is a journey, and one that is continuous. We’re all constantly learning new ways and methods to tackle journalists and convince them that our quote deserves a feature. However, since starting a renewed push on pitching, I’ve seen a definite increase in live links – meaning it really is worth the legwork! Joe, one of our newest team members, landed his first media mention this week… One of many to come, I’m sure! The post Weekly Partner Update 20 – Heather (PR Director/Content Writer) appeared first on Pearl Lemon Placements. Via https://pearllemonplacements.com/weekly-partner-update-20-heather-pr-director-content-writer/ Hey all,
Time for another weekly update!
Right before writing this blog post, I’ve sent an email to the Pearl Lemon Academy team with details of everything we’ve built in the past few weeks.
We’ve finalised our B2B sales funnel and it’s now ready to be launched!
It’s quite satisfying to finally see live three landing pages linked together by an email campaign and two CTA buttons.
Here’s how our first landing page looks like: Giulia and I have been working together to build this funnel while Pearl was working on a soap opera email campaign for the B2C sales funnel. As usual, we’ve exchanged constructive feedback to help each other improve the work and now we’re waiting to hear the final thoughts. Fingers crossed Deepak and Pearl think the new B2B sales funnel looks as great as Giulia and I think!
One thing that I’m proud to say I’ve built all by myself is the toolkit that you see at the top of the first landing page (see the picture above). That is the entry product that we give our leads for free, as a way to show them who we are through something that we use on a regular basis.
I’ve picked 16 SaaS tools, took a screenshot to explain their key features and added them to some content I’ve written to give more context. I think it turned out pretty good – also shoutout to Sahil, the designer!
Another thing I’ve worked on this week is the email campaign that takes anyone who downloads our initial toolkit to the second landing page where we share more details about our Academy. To make things as entertaining and dynamic as possible, I’ve taken inspiration from email templates I found online and in particular from Jon Buchanan’s ideas. There are a lot of resources available online!
Something new I did this week is replying to a written interview about myself that will be published on one of the Pearl Lemon websites. This is something that the PR team has been doing to network with professionals of different industries while giving them visibility for free. It’s been working well, the questions are pretty entertaining and the project seems great even for those who built it!
In the HR department, I have mostly worked on optimising training materials especially for the new hires who need to learn how to use specific tools and how to put in practice strategies that anyone uses, no matter in what department they work in. Renovating training materials is something that we do every now and then as a way to raise the standards to be part of the team and boost everyone’s productivity and efficiency while streamlining the work process.
Hope you enjoyed my weekly update!
Will be back in a week or so
Ciao,
Federica
The post Weekly Partner Update 27 – Federica (Operations Director at PLA) appeared first on Pearl Lemon Placements. Via https://pearllemonplacements.com/weekly-partner-update-27-federica-operations-director-at-pla/ Hey reader, Happy to be back weekly in this blog section! This week was particularly productive for me, especially because I started reading interesting tips and recommendations of Jon Buchanan. I hardly recommend you give it a go too because what he writes is basically what everybody working in PR, Business and Sales experience. Reading these pieces of his work made me become more positive about the job I’m doing and give responses in a more reactive and genuine way. Generally, people don’t like cold approaches, they ignore emails and messages you send them straight away and they focus on something else. At Pearl Lemon Academy, we don’t want this to happen, so we’re trying to adjust our way to communicate, and we’re now going in the right direction, FOR SURE! Once, we’ve decided what we would like to achieve, we choose the target audience and we direct that to our traffic in a specific platform, at a specific time and, above all, we let them see what we want to. Before building any kind of content you want to create, always think about the next step and lead people to different places with the aim to learn your offer. Develop your style. Speaking about “our style”, Pear Lemon Academy is growing and it’s going to reflect our personalities and the hard job we’re all doing. I also went through a free guide which shows how to write a copy that elicits smirks, smiles and emojis. They can sometimes breakdown the humour when you have to be able to write a disarming email or posts or cold campaigns by a captivated content. You should be able to crush the competition and stand out from the crowd. Substance is important but style can give you an advantage to get your customers’ attention. People will look forward to reading your content. They will remember it Guys, I think that’s it for today! Enjoy your weekend, Ciao Ciao Giulia The post Weekly Intern Update #7 – Giulia (Digital Marketing Specialist team member) appeared first on Pearl Lemon Placements. Via https://pearllemonplacements.com/weekly-intern-update-7-giulia-digital-marketing-specialist-team-member/ Welcome to my second work placement update! I’m pleased to say that I’m on the way to meeting one of my goals while working under Pearl Lemon! The whole team was trained on how to use Page Optimiser Pro, a tool that you can use to make sure that your published content is up-to-date and can rank well on Google, even when it’s many years old. I’ve been using it to pre-empt some crucial features that I should include in the content I write before publishing it. The learning level at Pearl Lemon is the best thing about a Pearl Lemon work placement. For me, coming into this, I had recently graduated with a degree in history and had little ‘real world’ experience other than in retail, which was not what I wanted to pursue. As a content writer, I can apply my pre-existing writing skills developed at uni, but learn a lot more about the world of digital marketing and SEO too. Honestly, it was kind of a shock to the system writing and performing very purpose-driven tasks, as I’ve been frolicking in the world of academia and writing about amorphous concepts for the last three years. I’ve also really settled into my personal routine while remote working. If you’re a prospective work partner, it’s an excellent idea to pay attention to everyone else’s ‘working from home’ tips. Doing things like setting up a dedicated space to help compartmentalise your day, going outside for walks and changing rooms/location if you start to get cabin fever or brain fog really does work. What Is Coming In The Week Ahead:
One thing I want to do differently is to have more responsibility when it comes to the SEO side of my content. I’ve taken on some more responsibility by using Page Optimiser Pro, but I would like to make an effort to spot more patterns to improve my SEO practice even more. Ciao for now! Amy The post Weekly Partner Update #2 – Amy (Content Writer) appeared first on Pearl Lemon Placements. Via https://pearllemonplacements.com/weekly-partner-update-2-amy-content-writer/ Heather here In my last few blog posts, I’ve been expounding on my strategy for writing cold email copy.
This week, we launched a sales campaign via LinkedIn offering decision-makers digital PR services. It’s my first experience using LinkedIn (and writing actual sales copy). Normally, my digital interactions with external individuals is all PR-based. While there is an element of sales involved in this process, it’s mainly an intellectual property transaction (not usually money-based). Firstly, writing copy for LinkedIn outreach was a new learning curve. It has to be more conversational and much, much shorter than standard outreach copy. Luckily I had a lot of support in the form of Lokesh, one of our team veterans, who patiently walked me through the process. Some of the stuff I’ve learned: 1. Focus on the objective.
With LinkedIn, your word count is very limited. When writing longer copy, it’s fine to get creative – but there isn’t as much room for that here. Lokesh would point out that my initial goal (getting them to hop on a call) and the reason for it (to offer PR services) needed to be clear. I’m a huge fan of beating around the bush, adding lots of padding to my pitches and throwing in self-deprecating quips and winky faces ;). Learning how to ‘curb my enthusiasm’ and cut to the chase was definitely a new lesson for me. 2. “Character is important.”
These exact words were said to me by one of the people I reach out to on LinkedIn. He was less than impressed by what he considered my ‘automated outreach’ and pointed it out quite sternly. I couldn’t help injecting my reply with my usual mixture of self-deprecation (“Sorry you didn’t like the caps – guess I got carried away…will just stick to emojis from now on”), good vibes (“Really glad to hear things are going well for you on the PR front – it sounds like X is doing an excellent job!”) and shooting my shot (“This is what we can do for you though…if it ever sounds interesting, let me know”). He wrote back: “Character is important (as is demonstrated by your reply). Send X over your slide deck and we’ll have a look at it. I can’t promise anything but at least we can say we tried!” And then he even put a winky face! This was an important lesson – one I’ve already been learning but it was interesting to see it reinforced in the sales world. People appreciate the personal touch, a good sense of humour and the ability to laugh at one’s self. 3. Sales is tough – be kind!This is a lesson for me as someone usually on the receiving end of those irritating cold emails. Normally I’ll just delete them without a second glance. Occasionally, it’s a cold caller, or even a person on the street with a clipboard (pre-covid era, of course). I’ve always striven to be at least polite in my rejections. Usually a simple, “Thanks, but I’m alright at the moment” does the trick. Not everyone is polite. In fact, managing cold email campaigns at Pearl Lemon has shown me just how brutal some people can be (and how unnecessary it is to be so). Replies like, “Take me off your list at once – this is offensive and intrusive”, “Stop emailing me – this is harrassment”, and even “This is a crime in my country and yours!” …these are all from people I am approaching to offer an interview or collaboration feature! I literally want to give THEM free press. Oh well… But when it comes to direct sales, people can be even meaner. One person, in particular, stood out to me from this LinkedIn campaign. “Heather. Sending me generic automated templates, then offering me a generic slide deck, is weak. Try again. Actually, don’t even bother.” Wowsers… Fortunately for my frail ego, most of the people who replied either expressed interest or politely explained why they didn’t need our services right now. Others simply didn’t bother replying. All of those are fine with me! Going out of your way to be rude to somebody who is just doing their job is uncool. I’ve always believed this, but never really thought about it in sales terms. I do actually get annoyed by cold callers and the clipboard people (emails don’t bother me – one simple click and they are banished to Spam-land). But salespeople are real humans, and unfortunately, there’s not a lot of subtle ways they can do their jobs. They have to be direct – and be prepared to face a lot of rejection on a daily basis as a result. In conclusion:If you get hit with a cold email or caller out of the blue, think twice before you hang up or type out a scathing reply. Let’s make 2021 the year we all give each other a break and practice kindness. It isn’t rocket science! The post Weekly Partner Update 19 – Heather (PR Director/Content Writer) appeared first on Pearl Lemon Placements. Via https://pearllemonplacements.com/weekly-partner-update-heather-pr-director-content-writer/ Hey Guys!
This is Akhila – I’m the Research Analyst at Pearl Lemon. I’m back here to share my experience about this week. This week has been pretty busy to me with various tasks and also few additional tasks. So I’m in the process of learning and implementing them and It’s been five months joining Pearl Lemon. I was more into learning about backlinks are the links from one website to a page on another website. Google and other major search engines consider backlinks votes for a specific page. Pages with a high number of backlinks tend to have high organic search engine rankings. So, In the process of learning more about link building, how does it work and their advantages. As I was working on different tasks and needed organizing them. Our new research analyst named Oni is helping me out in a few tasks like data extraction for one of the Internal lead generation campaigns and also in few of the other small tasks. So, this week I was working upon -Facebook Backlinks -YouTube SEO, Optimizing the videos, scheduling the videos on YouTube channels -Daily process tasks(Operations) -Data for Plant Sumo Health and Wellness VC -Had a call with tenny and lokesh on learning the new tasks -Few admin tasks like data enrichment, warming up emails and more So, above were few of the tasks I’m working on specifically and happy to learn the new tasks which are very helpful and knowledgeable. It’s all about my week and I will get back to you next week.Thank you all for reading my blog. Cya! -Akhila(Research Analyst)
The post Weekly Team Member Update 20 – Akhila (Research Analyst) appeared first on Pearl Lemon Placements. Via https://pearllemonplacements.com/weekly-team-member-update-20-akhila-research-analyst/ Another Sunday, another blog post.
A few more posts and the rhythm will be back again. This week has been a bit of a blur, honestly the last few have and I assume the next few will as well. 30 days and counting until my due date, so I am rushing to keep up with Pearl Lemon and aim to get two weeks ahead in classes in anticipation of missing 3+ days while I will be in the hospital. This week has been alot of administrative type work. Keeping up with Dee blog edits and styling help with Kaushal takes a bit of time, but we have reached a point where I can edit them as they come in. Along with monthly invoicing related tasks. I am finishing up a keyword sheet and posting schedule today as well. This week has also ended up ensuring everyone is set as far as active accounts for campaigns, keeping up with client projects, proposals and the likes. I am beginning to grow tired much faster with a weird spurt of energy late at night that I debate using for class or Pearl Lemon. Once 10 pm hits, even if I am asleep, I wake up and have a high burst of energy for 2-3 hours and find it impossible to sleep. On the plus side, I finally was able to order new glasses as well. I am getting two pair of prescription lenses with blue light filter and UV protection…and anti-glare. Along with similarly treated sunglasses with my prescription. I am hoping this eases some of the light headaches and makes living behind a screen a bit easier. I have heard good things about blue light filter lenses for those that need a prescription or just the filter, so here is to hoping they are as good as the feedback I have been given. This week has taught me to remember how important breaks and rests are no matter how much I want to do. Once that tired point hits the level of effectiveness my quality of work struggles to keep up, so it is better to just shut the computer and take a break and get back later. Onward and upward though. Hoping that this week proves to be a bit more productive as I find my peak hours between my body trying to force me to nap. Until next week The post Weekly Team Member Update 45- Lydia Sims (Head of Internal Growth) appeared first on Pearl Lemon Placements. Via https://pearllemonplacements.com/weekly-team-member-update-45-lydia-sims-head-of-internal-growth/ |
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