Social media has started to influence millennials in a big way. These social network sites have digitized the traditional public relations and are embraced by bloggers and journalists with open arms. Newspaper, catalog, radio, television, and even websites have taken a backseat to these platforms.
The power to co-create the brand image of a digital business takes away the control from the brand and given it to the consumers. The playing field and rules have changed, lead by an accelerated shift towards a more connected culture. Here a few key points on writing content that best connects with your target audience:
Digital PR Strategy
Create a digital PR strategy in sync with your social media and content marketing campaign. The most important thing to do would be to take care that your website is mobile friendly, as a majority of your audience would try to access that site from a mobile device (phone or tablet).
There is nothing worse than a site that is not optimized for mobile devices. It is a nightmare if one has to go through it, and people will look for alternatives. Skip this, and you’re literally giving away your readership and customers to your competition.
Killer Content Never Dies
Make strategies to transform that magnetic content to various other relevant formats – whether it’s a blog, infographic, video or audio. Make the best use of that terrific story you have.
The Google Analytic tool can help you track the referral traffic and understand what kind of content best helps you traffic-wise or conversion-wise. Presenting your own content enables you to be independent, not relying on media publications to cover your story.
Search Engine-Friendly Content
Create an online newsroom of your brand – a repository of your content that can be searched, navigated easily, and will show up when people search for it. Understanding SEO is a great benefit to this. The content must be stimulating enough to enable you to reach out to your target audience in diverse ways.
Outreach Efficiently
Create a plan of how to distribute the information to the maximum number of people. Consider bloggers and reporters, and know how to form stories around your content. List the journalists who cover your niche and would be interested in your story.
Don’t be a complete stranger when reaching out. First, follow their blogs so that when they see your email, they at least know where it is coming from, and won’t delete it as they would for any stale pitching email.
Balanced Use of Social Media Channels
Explore any communication channels that your target audience use. Each channel will have its unique users and importance.
The social web will help drive people to your website; this is what is desired of the entire digital marketing strategy, to be able to get more website visitors, newsletter subscribers once the visitors check the blog, and eventually conversions when they make a purchase of your product/service. Utilize these channels to the full, they are more affordable than the traditional media channels. They will fit your budget and need like none other source of publicity.
User Engagement That Gets You Credibility
Make yourself available to the engagement that consumers build with your brand and use the feedback positively to your improvement. Real time responsiveness will add to the credibility factor. Remember, your competitors, in the same niche as yours are going to be lightning fast with responses. The better the service you provide, the better it will work for you and against your competitors. You may want to hire someone who could take care of the entire user engagement on your behalf.
Real-Time Transmission of Information
Make information readily available to your target audience real-time, rather traditionally broadcasting. People love to know whats’ happening around the brand they love to follow. They have their sentiments attached to your brand. Value this strong emotion and express gratitude for it. Real-time business updates will help you better when it comes to measuring the results, and enable you to alter your strategy if need be and plan better to attract more people than you initially planned, and justify ROI (return over investment).
Relations and Brand Influencers
Create valuable relationships and build brand influencers. Identify the demo-graphs of those brand influencers (who are trusted by your potential buyers) and you may want to consider targeting them in categories to achieve maximum results. Hyper-localized outreach will certainly do the trick for you. They would appreciate the fact you took the pain to draft a unique proposition for them rather some standard deal available to all. You could use the social web to understand the behavior, age, gender, education, interest, like, dislike, type of connection, location, and a whole lot of stuff about your target audience and would help you build the perfect and sophisticated strategy that is just as efficient as you may want it to be.
Hard Earned Conversions and Relationships
Create a strategy to accomplish those tough conversions. Even if a large publication covers you, chances of a person scanning your article, visiting your website, signing up for your newsletter, asking for a demo, or downloading an app, keep going lower and lower. This is when the relations will play a bigger role than you thought.
Relationships include the ones you, your brand, and your team will establish with your consumers or influencers, and also the ones you would build with the journalist during interviews. These relationships will help you find your initial brand advocates who are more than enthusiastic when it comes to standing by your brand and supporting you.
Naturally, there will be some critics too. Quality of your brand and the content you publish will be speak for itself and be enough for the rebuttal.
Being There
Show up to the audience. Even if you want a PR executive to work for you, make sure the communication is done on your behalf. When PR is so important to you, reporters and journalists would appreciate the idea of you getting the time to write to them to share your story. This will certainly get you unprecedented growth opportunities by exploring the insights into the reporters and journalists.
Reputation & Crisis Management
When you or your brand is searched for on the web, you want a corporate reputed image to come up. You would like that the bad comments and reviews about your brand get buried under the good ones. This will be taken care of by your reputation management strategy. In case, you fall short and a crisis occurs, you may want to have a crisis management strategy in place that will help you soothe an ongoing issue, not letting it become a catastrophe. Know your zero hour well.
Honesty Is the Best Policy
It indeed is. However painful the truth be, let it out! Always share the facts and be vulnerable. Be diligent. This relationship is an intimate one! Do the job and perform as your consumers would expect you to. Even if something goes wrong, be around to express your view-point. Your followers will want an answer and will appreciate your presence in those tough times.
Nothing adds to your credibility more than showing up when the world is all accusing you and against you! Facts and figures shared will certainly get you the much desired faith and trust of your target influencers. Look through the clutter and shed some light, do not let the conversation end up in a bin.
