Archive for the 'marketing communications' Category

How to maximise your investment in your website
So, you’ve invested money in your website and got it up to scratch, but you’re concerned about the number of visitors you are getting? For many small to medium sized organisations this is a typical concern. Here are some basic steps you can take to drive and sustain web traffic.

Website content:

• Ensure relevant, useful, high quality content with easy navigation to meet the needs of the all audiences you are addressing – with separate areas for each audience.
• Ensure the content is dynamic and changing. Not just the home page. Adding new information will freshen content and increase usefulness for returning visitors.
• Advice and downloads. Naturally enough your website probably only provides information about your company and the products and services you offer. But if you are able to offer free advice without comprising the service you offer (in much the same way as what you are reading now) you will give existing and potential customers more reason to visit your site and increase the potential value you offer as a supplier.
• For example you could develop a free guide about some aspect of your marketplace, launch this via a press release and provide a free download from your website to drive site traffic.
• Always ensure you have a facility to show or link to third party endorsement and media coverage – to build credibility

Search engine optimisation:
• Your web master should set this up to ensure your company name pops up in relevant online searches. It’s worth brainstorming this. Imagine yourself as a potential customer – what search terms would you be using?
• Google Adwords – these offer another option but in many cases this is an unnecessary investment for SME’s.

Company correspondence

• All communications from proposals, to invoices should include your website address. This should be built in to your procedures – an automatic action. You can vary the address you use, to steer visitors to your home page or specific areas of your website, where you might have seasonal promotions or special news.

Email signatures

• All employee email signatures should include a link to your website. Again this should be built in to your company procedures. And you should vary this at regular intervals depending on what new information you have added to the site. You could link straight to the home page, to the news section or to a specific landing page. Email should be set automatically to ensure this happens.

Online networking

• Using Linked In, Twitter and E-cademy is a great way to widen and sustain relationships with key contacts. Set up profiles for senior management and post regular updates and comments with links to the website for further info.
• For example on Linked In – post regular views and comments (weekly) and link to every news story you announce with a link back to the specific web page
• Linked In has many different industry groups. Join groups that are relevant to your market and use it to open discussion topics and invite comment as a way to increase your visibility, again with links back to your website.

Marketing materials, Email campaigns and Newsletters
• All your marketing materials, whether they are printed, digital, press releases or brochures should include your website address for further information.
• Regular Email Newsletters providing a digest of news and information linked to each relevant story will help drive visitors to site.
• Discrete email campaigns targeting specific audiences that you are trying to do business with should link back to specific landing pages addressing the services you offer, with onward links to other relevant area’s of your site, for example this could be a case study, or hints and tips.

The importance of PR – as discussed in the Economist

Other firms’ suffering has bolstered the public-relations business

Jan 14th 2010 | NEW YORK – From The Economist print edition

THE past year or two has tested the idea that all publicity is good publicity, at least when it comes to business. Undeserved bonuses, plunging share prices and government bail-outs, among other ills, have elicited the ire of the media and public—and created a bonanza for public-relations firms. The recession has increased corporate demand for PR, analysts say, and enhanced the industry’s status. “We used to be the tail on the dog,” says Richard Edelman, the boss of Edelman, the world’s biggest independent PR firm. But now, he continues, PR is “the organising principle” behind many business decisions.

According to data from Veronis Suhler Stevenson (VSS), a private-equity firm, spending on public relations in America grew by more than 4% in 2008 and nearly 3% in 2009 to $3.7 billion. That is remarkable when compared with other forms of marketing. Spending on advertising contracted by nearly 3% in 2008 and by 8% in the past year. PR’s position looks even rosier when word-of-mouth marketing, which includes services that PR firms often manage, such as outreach to bloggers, is included. Spending on such things increased by more than 10% in 2009.

Not all PR firms did as well as IPREX, a global consortium whose revenues increased by 14% last year. Many had to shed jobs, and some estimates show the industry’s overall revenues declining, although not nearly as sharply as those of most of the businesses it serves. According to a survey by StevensGouldPincus, a consulting firm for the communications industry, nearly 64% of participating firms saw revenues slide in 2009 and only 23% saw revenues increase, perhaps because businesses put their faith only in the biggest and most established firms.

PR has done well in part because it is often cheaper than mass advertising campaigns. Its impact, in the form of favourable coverage in the media or online, can also be more easily measured. Moreover, PR firms are beginning to encroach on territory that used to be the domain of advertising firms, a sign of their increasing clout. They used chiefly to pitch story ideas to media outlets and try to get their clients mentioned in newspapers. Now they also dream up and orchestrate live events, web launches and the like. “When you look at advertising versus public relations, it’s not going to be those clearly defined silos,” says Christopher Graves, the boss of Ogilvy Public Relations Worldwide. “It may be indistinguishable at some point where one ends and the other begins.”

PR has also benefited from the changing media landscape. The withering of many traditional media outlets has left fewer journalists from fewer firms covering business. That makes PR doubly important, both for attracting journalists’ attention, and for helping firms bypass old routes altogether and disseminate news by posting press releases on their websites, for example.

The rise of the internet and social media has given PR a big boost. Many big firms have a presence on social-networking sites, such as Facebook and Twitter, overseen by PR staff. PR firms are increasingly called on to track what consumers are saying about their clients online and to respond directly to any negative commentary. When two employees of Domino’s, a pizza chain, uploaded a video of themselves apparently sticking ingredients for dishes they were preparing up their noses, the firm responded by posting a video of its own online, of a senior executive apologising for the incident.

Blow-dried blogs

That sort of content is proliferating. A PR firm called Ketchum helped IBM start a blog about sustainability, complete with posts written by the technology firm’s executives. It also created cartoons on the subject that it uploaded to YouTube. Edelman recently worked with eBay on the launch of a web-only magazine, “The Inside Source”, which provides articles on shopping and tells readers what is selling well on the online retail giant’s website.

VSS forecasts that spending on PR in America will surpass $8 billion by 2013, with much of the growth coming from online projects such as these. According to Miles Nadal, chief executive of MDC Partners, a media holding company, investment in digital PR accelerated during the recession “and will go forward in perpetuity” because clients became more focused on measuring the impact of their efforts. The internet offers various yardsticks, from traffic to cheerleading websites to numbers of Facebook fans, whereas the number of people who see a conventional advertisement is much harder to gauge.

Perhaps the best indication of PR’s growing importance is the attention it is attracting from regulators. They are worried that PR firms do not make it clear enough that they are behind much seemingly independent commentary on blogs and social networks. In October America’s Federal Trade Commission published new guidelines for bloggers, requiring them to disclose whether they had been paid by companies or received free merchandise. Further regulation is likely. But that will not hamper PR’s growth, says Jim Rutherfurd of VSS. After all, companies that fall foul of the rules will need the help of a PR firm.