By: Jacob Hanson
It’s hard to believe that the new year is already almost upon us! With the holiday season comes so many wonderful things, including setting (if you haven’t already) some SMART goals for 2018!
Have you decided how you will use PR to increase the return on your marketing investment next year? We have seen members of our client family dramatically increase their marketing ROI through data-driven storytelling and PR. Below are three ways we are getting results for their brands:
- PR can increase search engine optimization (SEO). One of the most valuable benefits you will see from investing in PR is the SEO power that comes from having articles published about your company, brand, or products. These articles create powerful backlinks from the publications where your story is posted. Most, if not all, education trade publications enjoy an extremely strong website domain authority, meaning that they are likely to show up in top search results. By consistently garnering links from these sites back to yours, your content will be recognized as authoritative by Google and other search engines, which leads to higher page and site rankings.
*Bonus: Be sure you make it extremely easy for your readers to find more information about your organization, products, or content. Try to link to specific blog posts on your site that relate to the article. Or send readers to a landing page that requires them to submit information through a form to receive valuable content. This provides an opportunity for top-of-the-funnel visitors to enter your marketing funnel, and allows you to see more information about your prospective customers.
- PR content can speak to your buyer personas. Articles published through your PR efforts should be written to attract your buyer personas, or ideal customer profile. By aligning the focus of an article to the challenges of your buyer persona, you ensure that your content strikes the right chords with the right people. Plus, if a number of your customers struggle with the same challenges, you can safely assume that many others will benefit from the same solution that you offer.
*Bonus: Talk to your sales reps prior to putting together your PR strategy. They are your clearest view into the problems your prospects and leads are facing. If they are consistently hearing one or two similar challenges, use those as the topic of an article. Find an end user who would be willing to be interviewed for an article to detail how they (along with your solution) solved this issue. Not only will you attract the right visitors to your site, but your reps will have the ability to leverage the content with prospects.
- PR content can be promoted after it has been published. One easy way to increase your marketing ROI through PR is to promote the content outside of the original publication.
If you place an article in a respected publication and position your story correctly, the content should live on for quite some time. A published article is third-party validation of your point of view and/or the quality of your content. Don’t be afraid to leverage it for weeks and months (or even years) to come!
How do you do that? Just as it’s important to understand your buyer persona’s challenges, it’s also important to understand where your potential customers get their news and how they engage with Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Instagram, or LinkedIn. Share the article or pieces of it on these channels to entice folks to visit your site!
*Bonus: Ensure that you are tracking all of these activities to determine where your highest ROI is, where you time should be spent, and more. PRP helped one member of our client family connect these “PR analytics dots” to trace more than $500,000 in revenue generated from a small handful of articles. They leveraged the content on various social channels and discovered that not only were these social posts driving the right traffic to their site, but the conversion rates were much higher than for other traffic.
Want to go deeper? Download our Quick Start Guide to Data-Driven Storytelling to keep your efforts on the right track!
Thanks for sharing!
