PR and E-Commerce

Digital Marketing - Study Notes:

Tactics

The final marketing tactic we’re going to look at in this section is PR.

There are two key benefits of PR:

• It’s a great way of increasing awareness of your brand. If you can get coverage in different media outlets, then that, as I say, raises the awareness of your brand with a new audience of people.
• It links to the SEO benefit that we spoke about earlier, and that’s about the number of links that you can get from other people’s sites to your site. If you can create good PR stories and get good PR coverage that then links back to your site, then that can have a significant SEO benefit to your overall business.

So what are the different ways that we can make sure we get PR right?

Align your brand with any emerging trends

This is based on the premise that journalists and media companies are going to be covering stories that are in the news, in vogue, at that point in time.

And so your best chance of having your brand spoken about in relation to those issues is by aligning yourself with those key issues. So again, if there’s a particular movement of politics going on at this stage, or if there’s a particular focus on any major current events or any world news, if you can align your brand to those things at that time, it gives you a much better chance of getting covered, which, again, increases awareness and gives you a chance of getting links.

Position yourself as an industry authority

What are you, as a business or as an individual, best placed to speak about and do so with authority? Then people in the media and in the papers are going to be looking for people who know, in detail, about a particular subject, and if they are looking for that, you want to make sure that you’re well-placed to be the business that they come to.

Be friendly with journalists

A very good lesson in life, generally, is to be friendly, and in this case, be friendly with journalists. Because, again, lots of business is about relationships, and so if you can be a person that they enjoy doing business with, that they like speaking to, that gives you so much better chance of getting them to cover your brand and speak about the things that are important to you.

Send just enough swag

And very closely linked to this, a good way to make journalists like you more is by giving them some free product. People like free stuff, and this is also a great way that they can speak about your product with confidence, having tried it, experienced it for themselves. And that’ll make them much more comfortable and confident to endorse your product, to speak about it, to write about it, and it’ll also, most likely, make them feel more positive about you as a business.

Start with a grassroots approach to PR

Start thinking about all the different ways that you can get your product out to as many different people as possible, so they can start trialing and sampling your product. As the more people you can reach at a grassroots level, the better chance you’ve got of getting covered and getting PR going forward.