Success Strategies for Optimizing Online Press Release Campaigns
I was recently having breakfast with a good friend of mine who is in management with a large Brick and Mortar Company and the topic of Press Releases came up in our conversation. My friend questioned the real value of this medium and pointed out that Press Releases, while certainly apart of his company’s communication strategy seemed to have little impact or value on their business as a whole and were rarely picked up by major news publications. Well, in my last online press release campaign, I can honestly say we did not receive an enthusiastic call from the Business editor of USA Today or the New York Times or even the Grand Forks Herald for that matter!However, this recent Press Release campaign did result in a top 5 listing for one of my keywords in Google, multiple top 20 listings, strong placement in Yahoo and Google News, many new quality in-bound links and a significant íncrease in our overall web visibility. The campaign proved to be a roaring success in driving quality traffíc and gaining great exposure for our site, even though we were largely ignored by all of the mainstream news publications. So, how did we do it?
Before I outline the key steps we took in our own online PR endeavors, let’s first review the key benefits of an optimized Press Release campaign:
• High Quality One-Way Links to Your Website
A well-constructed Press Release campaign can result in multiple in-bound links from various sources such as industry-related websites, news and media sites, many of which have a decent Google Page Rank. Given that our business was launching a new website, we literally went from zero exposure to hundreds of one-way links and listings within a couple days.
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Rethinking Website Content: Content That Entertains
In case you’ve missed it, the Web has changed; it seems like just yesterday it was good enough to take all your brochures and advertising collaterals and convert them to digital format, add a little search engine optimization, throw-in a little PHP programming and bingo, you’ve got a website. And if you wanted to show how cutting edge your company was, maybe you’d add a little dash of Flash animation, or some royalty free music. Well here’s a bulletin from the frontlines, that isn’t going to cut-it in the new multimedia Web-business environment. Almost daily I receive emails from people asking me to review their websites and tell them why they can’t convert visitors to customers even when they are attracting significant numbers of visitors on a regular basis to their sites.
The answer is both simple and complex: simple, because these websites fail to communicate the company’s message in a meaningful manner to their visitors, which means no dialog is opened, and without a dialog, no business can be done; and complex, because the implementation of the solution requires a new way of thinking about communicating with your audience using sophisticated presentation techniques that put a higher premium on creativity than they do on facts, figures and old-school direct marketing tactics.
If you are looking for a mantra to begin any new website initiative or to correct an existing website disaster: Think Audience Not Customers.
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