Creating a powerful public relations and marketing plan is key to your organization’s success. But how do you do so effectively? Here are five public relations tips for you to learn how to become a great marketing specialist.
- Stay up-to-date
The startup world is moving in a general direction, and information is being exchanged more openly than ever before, especially in digital marketing. Regardless of your experience level, you should always learn something new. To keep ideas relevant, stay up-to-date on a diverse range of topics within your industry.
Keep an eye on digital marketing and media agencies for guidance. Social media is the best tool to track these companies. Make sure you follow brands on Facebook, Twitter or Linkedin.
“Google Alerts is a great and free tool for staying up (to) date. Set up alerts to track what’s happening in the market or if competitors get mentioned online. It’s also a great way to learn, just enter your industry keywords and choose to get the best content. You will receive trending articles by thought leaders daily to your inbox. e.g. At TrackDuck, we’re focusing on inbound user acquisition strategies. Google Alerts keeps bringing useful tips with keywords ‘inbound marketing,’ ‘SEO’ and ‘sales enablement.’ Spend 15 minutes experimenting with different alerts and the news will come to you.”
– Eddy Balcikonis, CEO of TrackDuck
- Create effective campaigns on social media
Social media provides your customers a platform to engage with your business. Facebook, Instagram and Twitter are slowly becoming stronger and more influential, and companies can take advantage of this by creating campaigns on each platform that best suit their brands.
By using each platform, you can effectively increase brand awareness and engage consumers using social sites they visit every day. To get better results, you should identify how a platform works for your brand. By setting some kind of key performance indicators (KPIs) and later following them, you can see whether it is worth investing your time and money or not. Don’t forget to identify your target customer, too.
Related: Use Public Relations to Grow Your Business
- Build your brand through blogging
Blogging will get your message out to potential customers and investors. There are two ways to do so: blog regularly on your own site, or become a featured guest blogger on other media outlets. Appearing on other respected and relevant blogs may convert those readers into customers.
Blogging is always about engaging in conversation, as it makes dialogue with the consumer easy and allows consumers to get to know you. By establishing a relationship, you can influence how people feel about your business, ultimately leading to trust for your brand.
“Well-written articles demonstrate your company as an industry leader. By posting topics which resonate with your market and show your knowledge, you are marketing your skills for your business, service or product, too. Tell your customers why you’re in business and how you can help them.”
– Tomas Slimas, co-founder of Oberlo
- Use content to get more attention
Make your content a priority in order to stand out from your competitors. A great example is an infographic. Visual information is oftentimes more appealing and attention-grabbing, especially over just plain text. Visual content is more engaging and attracts a much larger audience. If you wish to set your brand apart even more, video content is the most engaging of all.
- Use media releases
Media releases or cold emails are an essential part of any public relations strategy. Media releases usually contain short, but compelling documents about your product or service.
A press release is a good way of communicating with the media and building your reputation. In order to attract media channels, you need to have a good strategy regarding how you structure and draft the announcement.
“We usually write short emails with bullet points in order to make the facts pop the first second when the email is opened. This worked really well for us in the past and we encourage everyone to skip long text and focus more on facts popping out.”
– Jacob Laukaitis, co-founder of online coupons site ChameleonJohn
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Make sure to research which media outlets are the best fit for your product or service in order to reach your target audience more efficiently.
Public relations knowledge leads to great results, but passion and a positive attitude are the key factors to becoming a great marketing expert. Good luck promoting your next product or service!
