5 Reasons to Consider Web PR

What is the business case for adding web PR to your marketing mix?

It's as simple as this: your brand lives online. People turn to Google as their gateway to the world. Our reliance on search engines has happened so quickly that we don't often stop to consider it. But look at it this way, when was the last time you cracked open the Yellow Pages? When was the last time you responded to a direct mail campaign or a print ad?

Your Brand lives on Google

The dynamic of marketing has changed. It used to be that companies marketed at us, and we responded to those offers and ideas that we found most enticing. That's just not how we behave as consumers anymore.

Now, thanks to the web - and specifically thanks to search engines - we are in charge. When we're thinking about a purchase, we do a Google search for a term related to that product category. We let Google (or another search engine) guide us to articles, reviews, corporate web sites, industry analysts, blogs and videos.

This behavior is so commonplace that most of us haven't even really stopped to contemplate the complete reversal in power that search engines have created. As purchasers we now hold all the cards. We look for products and services when we are ready, and we tend to ignore marketing messages that are pushed at us.

Here are 5 reasons to add web PR to your marketing mix:

1. You improve your search engine rankings (on Google, Yahoo and all search engines).

   Search engines are wildly complex beasts, but they universally adore content. They reward you for publishing content that is meaningful and valuable - but only if you distribute it broadly online. It's not enough to have interesting web site copy. You need to create and distribute articles, news releases and video to social media web sites that get tracked by search engines. If you're publishing content regularly, search engines will rank you higher.

2. You increase brand awareness.

   As we established earlier, thanks to the power of search engines your brand lives online. How you rank on Google should not be an afterthought or a small component of a technical strategy. It must be a primary component of your brand strategy - search engines are the most efficient and powerful venue for communicating your brand story. If your customers find compelling, useful content from you when they search for common terms related to your industry, your brand awareness will grow exponentially.

3. You're not at the mercy of reporters.

   Companies are accustomed to being at the mercy of reporters to get their stories out the market. This system of storytelling (known as traditional PR) is an engrained behavior.

   Most companies continue to spend considerable time and money to lobby reporters to write stories, and if a story doesn't grab the attention of the press it often goes untold (even if it may be of great interest to customers). Traditional media relations still has an important role in business, but now web PR exists to give companies far greater control over what stories get told. The web allows your company to be a publisher of content. If you take that role seriously and commit to publishing work that is solid, you can get your message out without depending on third-parties.

4. You can communicate frequently, easily and cost-effectively.

   Buying ad space or securing media coverage in major newspapers, magazines and on TV is costly, time-consuming and slow. Of course, these used to be our only venues of communication and so companies chose very carefully what to communicate and when. Stories had to be considered "big news" to be worth the investment of communicating.

   Now the cost and effort of communicating has been drastically lowered. With the right tools in place, you can post a quick story on your web site about an interesting idea for a new product feature that occurred to you this morning and seek customer feedback. You can quickly compose and issues a news release that contains information and insight that is definitely important to your customers, even if your local newspaper won't find it "newsworthy". Videos can be created, edited and posted the same day an event occurs.

5. Your web site becomes more interactive and interesting.

   Typically companies build web sites with the good intention of updating them all the time. Then weeks and months pass by with minimal updating. The content starts to feel old and irrelevant. All of those great intentions you had to publish articles, news, opinion pieces and videos go mostly unfulfilled. You've build a powerful venue for communication, but you don't have a communications strategy to go with it.

   Web PR fills that gap in your web strategy. It is the ongoing communications program that delivers content that is published on your site and across the Internet.

Building Brand Awareness

Brand awareness continues to be a primary goal of most marketing programs but market dynamics have changed so significantly in the past few years that many branding programs are no longer in synch with customers.

Shifting your brand-building strategy to incorporate more online initiatives will allow you to reach more people cost-effectively. It will set a new tone for your brand and it will establish you as a leader where it matters most: online.