Tuesday, July 2, 2013

More digital impact on your business makes more of online marketing

Introduction

Online Press Releases and Social Media Marketing combined are abundantly capable of increasing your revenue and engagement. Please allow me to go through some tips in a strategic planning takeaway for you to utilize at a later date.

Here I’d like to assist and help implement your ideal strategy using user-generated content. This includes monitoring positive and negative brand perception through tools such as Facebook, Twitter and G+, as well as increasing brand engagement all-round.

Working at The Genuine Gemstone Company, I experience the online marketing tools and channels for PR as part of our online strategy. My tips here will improve your brand placement online, even without necessarily over stretching the budget. 

Online marketing takeaway

Press Releases

Online press releasing activities include influencing media, communities and online specific audiences; you need to be making a sound through online channels.  You can achieve this via social networks, news search, discussion threads, search engines, and other online communication tools.

A useful tip to about press releases is that they essentially only work as a successful online marketing strategy if used alongside social media and your natural link building techniques. If you do not then you won’t reap the benefits of social sharing, engagement and redistribution that enable the spread of your marketing projects.

Planning an enhanced approach to your online marketing strategy is a critical place to make a start. There are SEO tools that can help, including Google Insights and FollowerWonk from Moz. It’s essential to manage your brand reputation and then monitor it, and then store data, create targets, ensure growth.
  •     Give out the social signals that reach the most users, post all PR out on Twitter and Facebook
  •       Create strong call to action or incentive to click troughs on the release to your website.
  •     Publish your work on authoritative site, like The Times; more positive for reads and re-circulating
  •       Follow the organic SEO rule of natural link building each month
  •    Create unique content every time you create an article; think of the user before the algorithm
  •       Vary anchor text as to not upset any search-engine algorithms
Social Media

Social Media is very good for engaging with other users on a channel used to connect with people. If you were connecting with journalists; especially those that target your industry, reporters, bloggers and influencers who cover topics in your industry then this would be a fantastic way of gaining social interaction and building up recommendations and exposure.

Start tweeting with them and engage, but don’t oversell your business or product, just ask about a particular topic that they write.

Create fun, interesting content, for your users to read and enjoy! Just by being creative, conjuring something, compelling, interesting, or even funny; people will naturally want to talk about it and share it with friends, or even do a write up about it with no pitching required.

Think of the great videos you have seen on YouTube and why videos get so many shares and likes. It won’t be because someone spent ages crafting an amazing pitch, to a journalist. It’s the content itself that was really cool, and that meant that it was popular with the public, who just kept on sharing it with their friends etc.

This can create a lot of links and traffic, and work as an effective tool in your overall marketing strategy.
  •          Get fans liking your posts, get popular and improve your Google authority
  •          Promote everything that your brand has to shout about through social media
  •          Cross promote with other brands and endorse affiliate partnerships on Facebook
  •          Make your Facebook username and Twitter handle your brand name
  •          Hash-tag and include your brand name in your Tweets
  •          Use competitions to draw fans, get them to post and interact for prizes
  •          Ensure your logo is your profile picture, and create a nice landing page banner
  •          Add your website's URL to your profile
Conclusion

"The company’s No.1 appearance in the Fast Track 100, is testimony to their skill and determination to succeed" – says Sir Richard Branson in The Sunday Times.

Being connected to our audience through the spots they will go to online on a regular basis, their emails, social media, browsing the internet. We may have a new promotion which includes a set of Sapphire Rings on GemsTV and it’s important that the outside world have an awareness of this.

So subliminal signals from channels such as Facebook, and email require our marketing team to create a promotion and ensure that it is maximising engagement and customer reach. Our marketing is completed with an on-site campaign to synchronise our campaign when the user visits us on our Gems TV and Rocks TV website.

Written by Edward Meeks, Online Marketing Executive at The Genuine Gemstones Company