How Online PR Supports Inbound Marketing

Building a sound online public relations strategy is vital to bolstering your company’s web presence, improving brand awareness, and developing two-way rapport with customers and stakeholders. At the same time, successful organizations are seeing the light when it comes to the benefits of inbound marketing:

• Lower costs-per-lead
• More qualified leads
• Enhanced tracking capabilities

Back in the day, public relations relied on things like press releases, bulky press kits, spokespersons, and PR campaigns. Now the question is, “How do we integrate an aggressive online public relations strategy with today’s inbound marketing tools such as blogging and social media?”

Find Your Online Public Relations Goal(s)

To build a strategy, you need a goal. This will put you on track to determine exactly which web marketing assets can serve you best. Just remember that any good PR campaign requires search engine visibility (keywords and more keywords!) and two-way communication.  

Using Blogs/Social Media in Your Online Public Relations Campaign

Develop a list of Internet resources to use and people to target. Resources would include:

• Twitter
• Facebook
• LinkedIn
• foursquare
• Usenets and newsgroups (e.g., Google Groups)
• Discussion threads
• Chatrooms, etc.

Your people list would include:

• Prominent bloggers
• Promoters and enthusiasts
• Reviewers
• More traditional outlets such as magazine and newspaper editors.

Send "the Message" of Your Online PR   

Determine who is interested in your product or service and go after them with focused messages. Figure out what makes your company better and/or different from competitors and emphasize that in your media outreach:

• Highlight anything innovative about your company
• Release a “white paper” on your product line or services
• Create infographics
• Post informative videos
• Utilize RSS (Really Simple Syndication) feeds.

Press releases are still an integral part of online public relations...

So those first 250 words of your release should be geared for web links and keywords, written in simple, direct language with minimal jargon. And remember those sound bites—140 characters for texts; the more Twitter-friendly you can make that release, the more exposure it’ll get. 

One Company's Highly Successful Online Public Relations Campaign

A Beverly Hills-based skin care company created a new kind of lotion that needed its own search category. They optimized their website for carefully researched keywords, added a "press room" to the site, wrote blogs using the new keywords and syndicated them through an RSS feed using PRESSfeed. Over 1500 sites have picked up those releases and today, the new product category receives 20,000 mentions while the product itself gets over 40,000 results on Google!