Helping you reach more people
“Ladies and gentlemen, meet the future.”
It’s actually a line from the movie Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, delivered by a bicycle salesman as he hijacks a crowd the sheriff had gathered to try and raise a posse.
We still use the same principle, of course; where there’s an audience, there’s an opportunity.
There are, however, so many audiences today that we can’t hope to address them all. We have to decide which are best suited to our sales, PR and marketing needs and for most businesses, online audiences should be a crucial target. Some of the attributes that make them so important include:
• Size – more people would are likely to see an article on a typical local news website than would see it in the corresponding newspaper.
• Relevance – online news is selected by subject by people who are genuinely interested in it, and it can just as highly focused geographically.
• Measurability – There are good ways of assessing the impact you make.
• Responsiveness – Audiences are more likely to respond to your messages in this highly interactive medium because it is so much easier to do so.
This is not to say other platforms and media are now redundant – far from it – but many have been overtaken in terms of their importance by their online cousins.
So it has become increasingly important for us to make the most of online opportunities, and there are many ways to do so.
Written material, from press releases to bespoke articles, can be worded in a way that makes them as attractive to search engines as possible, a process called “search engine optimisation” or SEO. Then, when they have been published online, people searching for something relevant through Google or one of the other search engines are more likely to find your article. And the numbers are potentially huge.
The promise of online audiences is now so compelling that almost all the written articles Effective Communication produces will soon be search engine optimised.
There are plenty of other things we can do with written articles too, from picking out key words and phrases for websites to use as tags, to changing the format in which we deliver them. Of course, when you are using the internet put your business’s messages across, you are not restricted to the written word. One of the biggest growth areas is in the use of video, which is now the preferred medium of many websites that appreciate its value.
Our experienced videographers make videos with a variety of purposes, from training films to sales tools and, of course, for public relations. While Effective Communication has led the way in making video more accessible and affordable to businesses of all sizes, another reason that it is so successful for our clients is the range of uses to which it can be put. While local media companies are enthusiastic about video, there is often a bigger, relevant audience to be found on specialist video websites with mass appeal, such as YouTube. And, of course, videos will boost traffic to our clients’ own websites.
Another important growth area is social media marketing, using platforms like Facebook and Twitter to reach your target audiences. They have vast numbers of users, though admittedly, most haven’t got beyond the “I’m on the train” stage or “My 10 favourite bands beginning with B are …”. As a result, some question the value of these for PR or marketing but remember they are still potential customers, or do you refuse to do business with former Bay City Rollers fans?
It’s just as that bicycle salesman recognised, where there’s an audience, there’s an opportunity.
The key to social media is to use all the different platforms in a concerted, focused campaign, rather than for just random witterings, which are just fun. Doing it properly means each platform cross-promotes another and they work together to amplify interest and drive visitors to your website. It’s a neat trick if you can pull it off.
If you’re still in doubt, the best way to demonstrate the importance of social networking sites is to imagine somebody wrote something bad about your business on Facebook. How would you feel about that? Of course, if they wrote something good, it would make a similar impact, albeit a positive one.
And this leads to my final point, that regardless of whether or not you are interested in the internet or in social media, you can not afford to ignore them. Whether you like it or not, your reputation is already being determined on the internet. The question is; are you prepared to leave it in the hands of other people?
Tags: Online audiences, online marketing, online PR, online reputation, public relations online, search engine optimisation, search engine optimisation of press releases, social media, social media for PR, social media marketing, social media marketing campaigns, using social media to promotoe businesses
