Don’t Discount Traditional PR
We’re presenting at a regional conference today and I’m listening to a PR presentation. Public relations has taken a hit economically, but the PR agencies that have developed strong relationships with major media are thriving. Our agency has partnered with a firm, Dittoe PR, for over a year right now and we’ve had incredible results.
One of our clients had a new site and zero authority online, but needed to generate a lot of demand. Dittoe PR was able to target industry magazines and webazines (online publishing outlets) and get articles in dozens of them in the first month. The coverage helped us to advance their search engine ranking and increased the visibility of their brand… resulting in higher click-through rates on their paid search advertisements.
Press releases are also an incredible opportunity. Combined with search optimization, a recent press release we distributed nationally for a niche company received over 1000 views, a 4% click-through rate, and over 30 strong backlinks to their domain. The benefit here wasn’t high numbers… it was high numbers with extremely high relevance. The press releases were published directly to the right audience. The press release led readers back to a whitepaper and landing page where prospect data was captured. We also re-use the press release on the corporate blog… so it’s great content as well.
In viewing the return on investment, the moneys spent on traditional PR have had a very high return on marketing investment – in brand recognition, getting to influencers, direct and indirect traffic, and ultimately conversions.