I am often amused by people’s fascination with getting themselves on page one of organic searches – as an agency we have never tried to achieve this – rather it has beeen a pleasant and surprising side effect of what we consider as “just doing the job right”.
To the point where we have clients with from 100 to over 200 keyword searches that we check 3 monthly and find them on page 1 of organic searches for anything from 50 to 100 of them. It is quite a buzz to put in an industry relevant search term and find our client on page one 5 times - the client is pleased too!
There seems to be confusion over what is important and what we are trying to achieve – yes it is great to get your own website high up the listings – but there are a number of other considerations:
1. 3rd party listings gained through PR, Content Marketing and Social Media will get listed much more easily and more quickly because the directories and journals are more valued than a single manufacturers site – and their listing for you will still take people to you. Such listings will also keep out your competition. We frequently find our clients listings appearing on page 1 a number of times eg 3, 4 or 5 times for a single search string. These listings seem to get picked up very quickly and to stay relevant for many months.
2. Your blog is likely to get higher value than your website if you are keeping it active – not only does a blog get picked up quickly it can be quite a stable listing.
3. Your website can get up the listings supported by the value accrued from your total activity and traffic. Once there it is usually quite stable if you maintain your online activity.
Following the success of our early 2011 program of seminars, registrations are invited at www.id-marketing.co.uk/free-seminar-registration for a free seminar on 23rd September on the subject of “Industrial PR and Social Media Marketing”. We are delighted that these free seminars are proving so successful for the delegates, since all seem to go away with a much better insight into the roles of PR and Social Media in the industrial marketplace – which is very different from the mainstream perception – and since we are an active and experienced company we are passing on what we actually do and what we know works – not just a theoretical training.
The seminar will cover the basics of Industrial PR and how to do it for yourself – press relations vs. public relations, keywords, directories, printed and internet media, press releases, features, building a database, web profiling, with “hands on” exercises. Other topics will be Marketing for Industrial SMEs – building a cost effective Promotional Pyramid – blogs, newsletters, website SEO, video, advertising, exhibitions and social media – with a guest Social Media Manager from our associate Lesley Whiteman Social Media Agency.
We believe that PR is cheaper and more effective than ever, PR is the cheapest promotion a company will ever do and that based on a solid foundation of PR a company can build the other major elements of online marketing, content marketing, social media, exhibitions and advertising into a worthwhile long-term investment that will protect a company through the downs and leverage growth in the ups of the economic cycle.
One day free PR seminars are planned for September and October 2011 at a quiet relaxing venue near our offices in Bedfordshire, with complementary networking lunch and free car parking. To register for the September seminar please go to www.id-marketing.co.uk/free-seminar-registration
I have been talking quite a lot about the difference between Public Relations for B2C and Press Relations for industrial B2B companies – so it was good the other day to get a comparible perspective in the form of this link.
Also of course may I refer you to previous items in this blog plus our main website.
Like it or not, if you have a presence on the internet, you have a global presence – I know that Google is becoming regional – but your material is still available to any English speaker that cares to search.
This may be a pest if you really don’t want to sell outside the UK but for most businesses it is a chance to reach new markets at no extra cost. How cool is that? And with a little extra effort you can access all the internet media of the English speaking world as well as much of the rest such as Scandinavia and the Middle East that uses English as a language of convenience for business.
Check out cost effective B2B internet PR here.
PR integrates – a company PR program is at its best when used in an integrated way with other promotional activities. It is really a question of getting the balance right:
- without PR no balance
- with only PR no balance
- with PR, website, newsletters, advertising etc then a balance can be achieved that meets the information needs of potential customers and existing customers while enabling the client company to focus on its core business of supply. It is simply a matter of recognising that information transfer via its marketing activities forms a vital part of any customer service package.
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An old chestnut that keeps coming up is the idea that it is possible to identify the origin of a sales enquiry which led to an order. This is a search for a single promotional action which if only we could identify and repeat it would lead to 100% promotional efficiency – in short a magic bullet for sales.
To mix my metaphors, it is like the holy grail – unreal and unobtainable even in these days of information technology – we simply end up drowning in data. But as we know each sale results from many points of contact and each buying process is dependant upon different criteria, so I believe we would be better off searching for the patterns of actions that most often lead to success and becoming skilful in negotiating them to our hoped for endpoint.
See how we do this – and how we can answer other questions on PR and on Blogs and Social Media.
Basically a P.R. brief is background information together with notes about the approach or direction of your marketing “message”. So this could include technical data, brochures, website addresses, photos, diagrams, sales profile, application possibilities, what does it do, for whom, how does it do it, why would they want it?
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Lets indulge in a little navel gazing for a moment here … We can recognise that in the industrial world the initials P.R. are loaded with the negativity of tabloid newspaper journalism – yet tech P.R. is a very different service. So what other label would be more accurately descriptive?
- how about “Product update via Publications”
- or “Information publishing activity”
- “technical data broadcasting”?
- “promotion free at the point of publication”
- “low cost publicity”
- “asking people to print material for free”
All in some sense correct but none quite gets there does it? So let’s continue to call it P.R. – more ……
Short answer – because it fills a need for information.
Expanded answer – because P.R. disseminates “needed” information widely and at relatively low cost to an audience who are keen to find it. P.R. then often provides a starting point for interested engineers/buyers looking for solutions to engineering/cost problems. So not only does P.R. “work” in a functional sense, it also works in a business sense. More here.
In considering the function of PR within marketing it is first worth considering “what is marketing?”. Personally I take the broad view – it is anything a company does which is directed toward its customers, so it comes into product specification, presentation, distribution, sales, etc etc. In which case PR is just a small part of that mix, lying alongside advertising, exhibitions, telesales, websites etc.
PR therefore can be considered in comparison with these and in value for many terms can offer tremendous promotional return per pound spent. In fact it is my experience it is the cheapest most cost effective promotion a company can do – I would say that of course but many others have found the same. By considering PR as one of a number of essential promotional steps, a company can then build more expensive activities on top of that.
So we can consider one appropriate structure for our marketing/promotion expressed simply as something like:
- In-house sales
- data sheets/photography
- PR
- website
- Advertising
- Sales engineers
- Exhibitions
In fact this is often experienced as a recurring loop with constant adjustments to accommodate resources, targets or market conditions. See how we can help you move through this process.
