6 Ways to Prevent and Control PR Crisis

Every brand wants to have a decent image in the market and does not want to deal with bad press, but we cannot stop the negative feedback from coming. It might be a disappointed customer grumbling about social media or a review website, or an argumentative worker accusing the company of a perceived injustice. These problems can easily burst out into a full-blown public relations crisis.

Each crisis might come as a surprise, but it is important for you to be ever ready. Every organization has a crisis management plan in place that involves every aspect of the organization—including HR, legal and technical. That strategy should also include media training for executives, pre-approved responses for public relations and social media.

Follow these 6 Guidelines if you want to stop a massive PR crisis before it happens.

1. Implementation Procedures:

It is crucial to generating idea before implementation. As we know that planning is such an important part of public relation so, it is useful to understand the different requirement of an event or campaign before implementing and executing it. Rustling into execution without proper planning can lead to failure.

2. Use Your Social Media Channels Efficiently

“An immediate social media response is key,” says Chris Britton

Social media can be your ally, allowing you to quickly disseminate information and bridge the gap between you and your client. It is essential for an organization to dedicate resources in monitoring social media 24/7, as well as a team to handle, monitor, review and follow activity on social channels without waiting for approval from on high.

3. Anticipate Every Possible Crisis

You can't stop a Public Relations crisis, but you can stop it from accelerating there are ways to prevent the situation. It is again crucial to get your plans in order, during the pre-phase, you should anticipate every possible crisis that could possibly harm the company's status and always have this two-word question in the back of your head: "What if?"

4. Follow a Crisis Communications

An organization should ensure, via appropriate policies and training that only authorized spokespersons to speak for it. This is particularly important during a crisis. It’s critical for every crisis communications team to have pre-screened and trained, to be the lead and/or backup spokespersons for different channels of communications.

5. Create a Diverse Workforce

Treat everyone equally like a family and also be objective, unbiased and humble. Put in all your knowledge and effort to get the best result.

6. Stay Calm and Flexible When Things Go Wrong

Don’t panic and always be ready to face the challenges. Learn to fail means learn to understand your mistakes and in every mistake, there is a chance of progress. So, whenever there is a crisis situation you need to identify what actions should be taken and accordingly you should work.

How to Use PR in the Sales Process?

The foremost objective of any enterprise is to convert the sales lead into returns in the least possible time which is not only crucial but is making the enterprises growth sustainable as well. Sales and marketing team has a substantial influence on the profitability of the business, but it usually does not happen to sales and marketing teams to incorporate public relations activities into the sales process. PR can be considered as a constructive tool to speed up the probabilities of closing sales which is a rare scenario and does not occur.

So, here are a few guidelines that my PR agency employs to raise the sales success for our clients -- and ourselves.

Persistence is the key to efficiency.

It is important to track the number of contacts it takes (specifically and on average) to close a deal.  You are required to be calm and should have patience; you cannot expect a response from just one email, context plus knowledge-based interactions, along with traditional hard sales tools, works here rather than a hit and run practices.

Before putting up anything it is essential to identify the audience and their interests, level of understanding, attitudes, and beliefs. Taking customer-centered approach is important because they are the skeptic people and they analyze, compare and evaluate things before getting into it. It is significant to have skilled PR professionals.

The PR industry is one of advancement, where new ideas are embraced and creativity is commended. It generates strategies which promote your client requires original thinking and inventiveness. Hence, creativity skills are therefore an essential skill for any PR practitioner. Digital skills are becoming progressively more important. Having a basic knowledge of social media, SEO and digital content creation can make you stand out from the pack. As the scope of PR widens, the industry is beginning to use the tools of other communications fields. In order to smoothly transition into the future, practitioners must be able and willing to develop these new skills and understand the relevant lingo. Act as a proactive information resource to raise your organization’s stature in the industry.

Proactivity is fundamental

Changing perspective and becoming proactive in approach requires anticipation of the future. We don’t just sit back and wait for our target customers to beat a path to our doors. We share the news we examine the surroundings in order to understand the challenges that are ahead and in a best possible way to create the promotional tactics required to succeed. Proactive public relations means defining the objectives identify the target audience early and establish the most effective ways to reach them. A proactive approach gives an organization more control over their public relations planning and enables them to set the agenda. They decide how best to present the image of the company.

Action, action and more action, communicate through the channels you already selected, make sure you monitor the media on a regular basis, ask people from the community about their thoughts about the organization. Hence, we take full benefit of social media. In fact, this is why it’s essential to keep your LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and other social networking sites current. Eventually, this not only turns those interested into followers but also drives traffic to your website and makes you a go-to resource for industry buzz.

Smart Strategies to Optimize Digital Marketing

 An effective digital marketing strategy can help you take the right decisions to make a company successful online. It offers a structure that gives a sequence to ensure inclusion of all key activities of strategy development and implementation.

Before getting into the task of digital marketing, it is very crucial to understand what your client wants and expect to receive from you. It provides the customer a right direction to reach the target audience with the right content. It is significant to understand your buyers' discomfort points so you can best address the problem, and can work toward building a better, stronger service or product based on what your customer wants.

Here are few digital marketing skills for your organization to flourish and achieve excellence:

Start with a strategy

No successful business aims everyone. You need to build a marketing system that focuses on a group or groups of people. This is the vital step in developing your digital marketing plan. You need to understand your customer so that you can plan effectively and deliver more value than other. Create a framework before taking action and effectively use the digital platform to get the best result.

Establishing key performance indicators (KPIs)

To examine the success or failure of your digital marketing effort, it is essential to establish the key performance indicators.

Search marketing is a pretty tough task and takes a lot of effort to do well. It is not instant. You want to target keywords that are popular with your target group. You need to do better than the companies that are currently ranking for the keyword phrase. A big classification factor is your domain and page authority which is what we call, off-page search engine optimization (SEO).

You need KPI in every step of your strategy:

Stage 1: Reaching Your Audience

1.        Advertising: Impressions, cost per click, cost per conversion

2.        Trade Shows/Events: Registration, attendees, satisfaction

3.        Website/Blog: SEO effectiveness, user sessions, engagement rate, conversion rate

4.        Social Media: Connections

Stage 2: Getting Your Audience to Take Action

1.        Website/Blog: Subscribers, backlinks, downloads

2.        Social Media: Engagement, conversions

3.        Leads: Quality, conversions

Stage 3: Converting Your Audience

1.        Website/Blog: Returning visitors, transactions (e-commerce)

2.        Leads: Cost per lead

Stage 4: Engaging Your Audience

1.        Website/Blog: Open rate, click-through rate, unsubscribe rate

2.        Social Media: Customer Advocacy

3.        ROI (RETURN ON INVESTMENT): Customer lifetime value, cost per acquisition (CPA), NPS

Leverage the most effective data.

Right data helps us to make correct decisions. You need to look for integrated systems and technologies that can provide a holistic view of your data. Examples of useful technologies to obtain smarter data include:

• Site Audience Comparison

• Digital Analytics Tools

• SEO Keyword Analysis

• SEO Rank Checking:

Integrate customer communications and experience.

Digital marketing is all about converting web visitors to profitable customers. You need to deliver the right message with the correct value proposition across the different channels and also you need to create a traffic building system to determine the effectiveness.

For instance, if a customer visits your website or leaves you a mail and constantly interacts with a piece of content on your site, you should be able to respond speedily with relevant recommendations.

Using social media for your business promotion Things you should know

In January 2018, the social media giant Facebook made the major updates in its newsfeed algorithms official and public. With the intent to bring people closer to each other, FB would display the branded or promoted content less in the newsfeed of users. And, we can see that FB is true and serious to its commitment till now. Open your FB account only to see your newsfeed flooded with the posts from your near and dear ones.

This had left social media companies in Delhi with all storm and stress. For a first few months, the SMO professionals, confused, kept on pondering how to use Facebook for brand-building and marketing. What would happen if other social media platforms adopt the similar strategy? Will it be the end of social media marketing and the SMO companies in Delhi vis-à-vis other states of India?

Keeping aside the perspective of social media services, the social networking platforms were initially developed to facilitate the smooth and easy communication amongst the masses transcending the geographical boundaries and several constraints. However, business started using them as advertising platforms for their benefits, which exploited the main purpose of social media — bring people and communities together closer!

How and what content is being served to the social media users is a matter of life and death for the online businesses. In such a vulnerable environment where your social media account can be shunned down within seconds if one step goes a little awry, a winning social media content strategy is a life savior for every SEO agency in Delhi.

1.    Only connect with them: On social media, you do not need to promote your services or highlight your USP. You have a website for that! You should only engage with them in a personalized manner; you can initiate the conversation with them on trending topics or general issues. 

2.    Too much artistry is just too much: Social media creatives should not be overly decorated or messed up; however, it depends on the particular business type. Simple and creative graphics with the minimal design is the new trend. So become a part of it to increase the brand recognition.

3.    Content which triggers the memories: You must tell a story which triggers the users’ memories or experience as this would make them more interested in your posts. For this, you have to identify the audience, understand their behavior, relate to their experiences and accordingly create content.

The future of social media is surely brightest than how it gleams today. People are, anyway, going to stay at social media and so do the businesses. The important point is how the businesses deliver their content and how people consume it. 

How to start a perfect PR campaign?

In this age of competition where many businesses are trying to gain the leads and win the customers, a lot of them are turning up to PR as the best medium for fulfilling their business goals. Public relations is an effective communication strategy which brings businesses move a step closer to their customers. Call it a one-to-one relationship between them that PR fosters or just a business awareness strategy, it’s a necessity for them! However, running PR campaigns successfully that help the brands improve their image, and expand their customer base is a major roadblock. Not everyone can get it done right. So we have jotted down a few tips how to effectively set up and manage the PR campaign for success below:

1.    Determine your goals

What for you want to set up the campaign? Do you want to showcase your products? Are you seeking enough media coverage to enhance your reputation? Or do you want to attract more investors for your business? It is very critical that you first decide the aim & goals of your PR campaign as it will help you strategize the Public Relations campaign accordingly. Further, you can establish media contacts, and pitch the selective ones who can help you attain the goals.

2.    Conduct a productive research

Once you are clear with your aim & goals, it’s time you begin an extensive research. You must research and identify who are your ideal customers, what are their interests, how do they interact with the different types of content, and to what extent your brand is closer to them. When you know all these things, you can better target the customers to reach and connect.

3.    Hop on your PR plan

Soon after you developed a complete PR plan, including the content distribution & coverage, you must start working on it at immediate. Start with preparing a list of the relevant journalists, and the interactive pitches to send them for covering your business story.

4.    Keep a track

You should keep a track on how your PR campaign is going on. It’s integral for you to know whether all your PR efforts are giving you any results or not. Suppose you opted for one of the PR companies in Delhi, but you want to target the audience in Punjab. In this case, you must keep track of the content being delivered to your audience; measure the impact of coverage you get from newspapers or online media.

Powering up the social media content with visual marketing

In laymen terms, Visual marketing is the art of creating photos, videos, graphics or even GIFs for various web portals. It is the key to seeking attention and getting information seen and shared by more and more web users. While marketing persuades the consumer to buy, visual marketing on the other end enhances this factor by increasing the tendency to recall, memorize and identify. 

Here are a few tips and tricks to empower the social media content with visual marketing:

Build Trust: Visuals create more promising image amongst the audience regarding a brand as compared to the text on the other hand. They’ll instantly get what you are trying to advertise through your online content. It’s not necessary to copy anybody’s style but what is necessary is to stick to a style and take it forward with all the audiences of the company.

Define your Brand Identity: Every brand has a unique characteristic feature to differentiate itself from that of other brands, sticking to that similar theme one needs to create visuals that further clarify the ideal message of the brand in the minds of its target audience. Remember, work with brand identity never ends; once you are done establishing your brand identity in the social media channels, it’s important to be consistent to stay relevant in the market.

Stay recognizable:  To stand out from the crowd the main idea is to stay original and innovative. The more you interact with the crowd with original content, the more close relation you will be able to create with them. It’s easy to earn likes on social media but to earn loyal followers and customers, the company needs to make true efforts for both online and offline channels.

Include how-to-do and other call-to-action elements: To make your social pages more engaging; inculcate information with graphics or videos that reminds them of the brand, each time they get a glimpse of it. This will make the people stay up close to the brand as they will get to learn something or the other each time they visit the page. To promote these how-to tutorials and call-to-action videos, one can even engage in the audience by sharing teaser beforehand, thus creating good hype well in advance before actually posting the real thing. Make sure to have catchy captions that are relevant to the graphics or videos have been shared and also to the message that the company is aiming to share.

Brainstorming your way to PR success

With the technological transformations and innovations changing the communications industry every now and then, it has truly become difficult to master the art of Public Relations (PR) and marketing. From the time of physically clipping client’s coverage in media, the PR industry has now reached a time where digital especially the social media is the new scene to share the client wins in.

As argued by many of the PR experts it’s the adequate blend of the team effort, creativity and strategic thinking. Crucial most elements in this powerful blend are the creative process which involves a lot of brainstorming, both individually and as a team. This brings out the best of all the intellectual minds and is therefore considered an important part of the overall Public Relations method. But at times, these sessions also lead to conflicts and chaos in the team. Therefore, to avoid any such mishap and to ensure benefitting responses develop out from these sessions, here are a few tips to keep in mind when organizing a brainstorming session:

Goals Identification: Absence of predefined goals lead to either of the two conditions: One, the conversation breaks down awkwardly. Two, the result isn’t satisfactory and is all wastage of resources. When sitting for brainstorming rounds be clear with the problem that needs to be solved, a clear-cut strategy which needs just the implementation tricks and tactics. This clarity will guide the entire process, thus avoiding any ambiguity while performing tasks.

Be ready well in advance:  Advance preparation never goes off waste; instead, it creates more scope for revision and enhancement of plans. It’s one of the crucial most factors of the brainstorming session to do homework well in advance and prepare the team with all the relevant data available in the latest reports related to the subject matter. This will prep them up to better analyze the competitive landscape and hence, allow the team to reach the greatest of their potential. Always remember, doing research about competitors and industry problems will help the team move forward at a pace much faster than that it would have been before.

Set a clear time limit: Brainstorming round surely is a time-consuming process and can’t be rushed up randomly. Still, the team managers need to specify a time limit to cover up things as quick as possible.  Don’t be afraid to get together with your team for the brainstorming rounds again and again as great ideas were never generated in one go and involved several rounds of a revised session. The managers have a crucial role to play; they need to ensure that all such rounds of creativity building are moving forward only.

Keep a track of the activities: One of the simplest and effective most approaches of keeping track of ideas, themes and important things is to jot it down either on a paper or a digital device which you keep with you most of the time.  This is true especially in the creative areas where one need to keep the flow of ideas moving in one direction only. Always remember the key idea behind brainstorming is to develop tricks and tactics that translate into winning PR pitches and campaigns.

PR Industry is nowhere to go and will continue to grow rapidly

With the digital wave spreading all across the nation, the industries have switched most of their work from touch, feel and visit world to all virtual to keep up their competitiveness on a global level. Speculations are rife that with the digital booming, the downfall of Public Relations (PR) is to happen very soon. Thankfully, to the benefit of the professionals working in the PR industry, PR is nowhere to go and it will remain there till the very end of businesses. And, the recent PR industry report by Public Relations Consultants Association of India stating the industry value to double up and be at INR 2,100 Cr by 2020 confirms the constant growth of the industry and impending evolution of the PR industry in the coming future.

The digital has surely transformed the way PR campaigns and activities are happening these days but the fundamentals are still the same. Hence, instead of being dead, the PR world is still breathing and evolving with the advent of newer services like social media and digital platforms. While fundamental PR campaigns and activities will drive the future growth, other forms, such as social media, digital, and content-driven campaigns are going to be credited for nearly 25 percent of the revenues. Hence, far from being dead, the world of public relations is growing and evolving, especially with the advent of newer services like digital and social media.  

The growth predictions of PR industry are not just based on vague promises but are instead part of a deep and detailed research done after analyzing the status of various industries linked to the genre of Public Relations. The Information & Communication Technology tops the list of contributing sectors and is providing around 20% of the overall revenues accrued by the PR Industry. Firms providing financial services have contributions of around 12% while the third in contribution line is the consumer goods sector that provides nearly 9% for this sector. To clear the picture of past it’s better to take a step back and analyze the past performances and then take a step forward. The previous charts of the PR sector also registered an industrial growth of 13% in 2016 and 19% in 2017. This clears out the scene and provides a righteous view for PR experts. In fact, with more and more technological transformations taking place in public relations, the industry will continue to remain relevant and become innovative and creative in serving the diverse and dynamic needs of their clients.

In the present scenario, one simply can’t deny the PR practices and along with it’s also extremely important to rope in the righteous PR agency that carves out the best of the PR campaign as per the needs and budget and pitches in the right media channels to touch in the right audiences like that of industry leaders, investors, customers and VCs.

Creating intriguing PR campaigns with the power of AI and Human Sentiment Analysis

Artificial Intelligence and machine learning might be the technologies creating sensation across several industries in today’s world, but for the communication sector, they aren’t alone. It is’ the natural language processing (NLP) that is supporting them and has even made their essence relate to the world of Public Relations (PR) and communications.  

Simply defined, NLP refers to the ability of a computer program to understand, analyze and revert to the human language as per their literal rules. At present, there are several innovations like Alexa, Siri and Google Play that has made commands like “Alexa, add milk to my shopping list” and “Siri, call Mom” possible. It took almost half a century and several technological innovations to bring the machine learning up to this stage and hopefully much more is about to come.

But, now the question is, how can we tap into the power of NLP and AI to serve better in the PR and communication world?

Natural language processing otherwise includes a broad scope of abilities for the betterment of humankind, but it’s their power of identifying audience sentiments that have worked to the benefit of communicators. It has empowered the PR professionals in planning and executing impactful earned media programs in a way that has never been done before.  

Earlier for technologies, communication only involved simple logic-based algorithms that identified words as either positive or negative and left many terms as unclassified. But today, the time and technology have transformed completely changed; thus, equipping the automated systems with the power to adequately interpret the nuances of human communication and deliver the context and attribute of the words true to their meaning.

With a crowd and noise of too many in the media world, the idea to lead with PR strategies is not limited to the number of coverage but is also to identify the stories and news issues that will get the desired impact on the target audience. All-and-all this is a time-taking and tedious process but with NLP engine built in the automated systems, it becomes a quick work to easily identify sentiments from the string of texts brought in through any relevant channel.

When it comes to crafting intriguing earned media campaigns, the sentiments of the audience both with regard to the brand and around its coverage is of extreme importance.  This insight will help the PR professionals better demonstrate the client with the impact of their messaging, whether positive, negative or neutral on the target audience.

How to manage Public Relations crises when your reputation is at stake?

A data breach, violation of terms & conditions or simply the mismanagement of the products and services may cause severe damage to an organization’s image. Whenever a scandalous or a fraudulent act is disclosed on the company’s part, its PR department or the authorities should instantly be engaged in developing a full-proof plan for saving the brand image. Hold on! I don’t mean you have to open the door, walk straight to the media, and speak your heart out. Whether you are responsible for it or the other, you need not have an instant and immediate reaction to disclosure. This calls for some time which you utilize to investigate the entire case, analyze the reaction of public and media, watch out for probable solutions to the situation and then confront the media to save your reputation.

PR crises happen every day to every other organization. It’s just that we get to know about the biggest of all only to leave us with some worthwhile lessons. Just look back to a few past years and you will get to know what I’m talking about.

What you can do when your public reputation at stake:

1.       Look for a modest spokesperson who can convey the inside story to the public diligently. CEO of the firm will be more preferable!

2.       Trace down the origin of crisis and the consequences. Meanwhile, do not forget to brainstorm the ways to manage the situation.

3.       Hold an open session meeting with your trusted employees, advisors and other stakeholders for bits of advice.

4.       Publish a press release on your website with the assurance of problem resolution or proper investigation of the matter. Maintain a complete honesty and transparency in it.

5.       Do not waste time on preparing your “The Finesse” speech or presentation skills when the crisis is going worse outside. Utilize it well in making plans how to tackle it.

 The two big lessons I learned from two major PR crises in the history:

1.    Watch out for the right time and effective means to communicate

In 2017 September, one of the greatest American credit reporting agencies had faced major public relations crises when the data of nearly 148 million people was stolen. The stolen data included social security numbers, addresses, birth dates, and drivers’ licenses.  The company knew the data breach occurred much earlier but deliberately chose to declare it after months.

What was the company’s take on this: The Company made many mistakes in a series. Neither its own customer service staff nor the people affected were informed about the breach. Instead, the company created another Wordpress website with a spam-like URL to deal with the situation and asked customers to sign up on it if they had to know whether their data had been stolen or not. The sign-up for credit monitoring PR service required the users to give up on their rights to sue the company for the data breach. Also, it came into news that the company would offer this credit monitoring service free of cost for initial one year and would later charge for it. Later, the company waived this off when consumers started complaining and the media started bringing this to the limelight. The company took too long to come forward and apologise for not keeping the users’ data secured.

What was the impact: Millions of users lost trust with the company due to the delayed announcement, apology, solutions, lack of transparency, and careless attitude towards the crisis. If the company had a plan and waited for the right time to communicate with the users and media, the brand image could have saved. Their unsatisfactory stance towards the crisis resulted in a huge loss to their business as well as their reputation.

2.    Personalize the communication with the public & act in favor of them

Not a long time ago, the social media industry experienced a lot of criticism as a popular social networking site was claimed to be involved in a data breach. The private data of around 87 million users was stolen by a third-party agency to manipulate the electoral results in the US. A year ago, the company got to know about the act, but only lenient actions were taken against it. When the whistleblower broke off the news next year, the social media users doubted the data security and privacy policies of all social networking sites and had quit on their accounts furiously. The millions of users trolled the company on social media and severely criticized the company.

What was the company’s take on this: When the news of data breach broke off, the Company took a few weeks to react. Along with a sincere apology, it presented the complete narrative of data breach till the date on its website with accurate and precise details.  A complete transparency was maintained between the company and its users. On the lawmakers’ order, the CEO of the company testified the whole scenario and conscientiously took the responsibility. Later on, the company came up with a variety of tools, techniques, solutions, and everything else possible to effectively communicate with the users and let them know whether their data was stolen or not.

What was the impact: The users could not resist the repeated apologies made by the company for the grievances caused. With immediate effect, the company rolled out various tools and techniques using which users can customize their data protect settings. By giving the latch in the hands of users, the company made its site useful and secured for the users. Unlike the previous case we discussed, this company let the users know if their data is stolen or not with a simple, quick, and free process at their online help center. All these measures taken by the company in favor of the users regained their trust and have been slowly normalizing the situation. I call it a perfect way to manage the PR crisis.

Has print media lost its credibility against digital?

No doubt, online news media is now counted as an inevitable part of the mainstream media but does it mean that newspapers, in particular, have lost their popularity? Where reading news reports and articles is made easy with free and unlimited access across the globe, does print newspapers charged with pennies still matter? This can be best explained by expert PR consultants in Delhi who still prefer print newspaper more than online for wide coverage in this digital age.

•    Reach & Accessibility

Certainly, the reach of the internet is larger-than-life and extended beyond the physical barriers. It means any news can be read by global audience creating a universal brand identity quickly and easily. However, there are innumerable areas where internet is still not available, and they stay tuned to current affairs through newspapers only. Therefore, overlooking news coverage would simply hint at the loss of visibility you are having.

•    Trustworthiness

A lot of news websites are competing with each other online to reach the users as quickly as possible. For this, they require tons of articles, press & matte releases, and every other sort of content that helps them drive the users in lesser time. And hence, many publish the news lacking data or originality. This is not the case with newspapers. Many PR companies in Delhi believe newspaper coverage is far better than online as credibility and trust are communicated with print more than digital. The journalists and editors of the newspapers work following all ethical norms and investigation process and deliver only the worth content to its readers.

•    Brand Salience

The entire purpose of Public Relations is to foster good relations with the audience in general. And, good relations influence the consumer’s behavior when he is in a state of buying product or services. Unlike online media where a consumer skims over a hundred of articles, one article published in a newspaper is 2X effective in creating brand salience. After all, print media has a long-lasting impression in the minds of readers.

With all these solid reasons, we may decipher that the credibility or popularity of print media may have declined but not lost. In fact, the PR companies in Delhi are delivering the fine-tuned quality content on both online and offline platforms to the readers. For instance, if anything goes viral online, it will surely be published on the first page of the newspaper.

Trends and Blings of Digital Public Relations

Public Relations is a dynamic industry ceaselessly evolving with the time, space, technology and the publics. Long past the days when PR practitioners used to fax media advisories, press releases and media kits for gaining coverage. A lot more than this has now gone digital and the traditional public relations turned into digital public relations. And this “digital” is nowhere to be stopped with the emerging tech-advancements. Recently, novice modern PR practices of connecting to the publics adopted by organizations as well as a few PR agencies in Delhi and outside are spotted. What are they? Let’s dive in:

1.    Digital Flyers:

Flyers, brochures, and leaflets are often considered to be of use for the marketers, but now PR professionals have transcended this limitation. Digital flyers are now being used as media invites as it has become quite a cumbersome venture to grab the journalist or the audience’s attention online. Moreover, the flyers are released on social networking sites instead of approaching the individual journalists personally. This has greatly reduced the load of PR professionals.

2.    Live-streaming apps

Nowadays, traditional press releases are replaced by live streaming videos where the spokesperson directly informs the audience about service or product launch. In the opinion of PR executives, going live on Facebook or other live-streaming app is a life savior for businesses as this eliminates rumors and enforces customers’ trust. This is so because brands are clarifying the situation personally through direct interaction with its consumers.

3.    Influencer collaboration

Today, PR consultants in Delhi collaborate with digital influencers such as Youtubers, Instagrammers, and vloggers more often. In regard to brand’s niche, PR professionals pick the digital influencers who have relevant, if not large following and collaborate with them to tell the brand story intuitively.

4.    Virtual Reality

With Virtual Reality, PR professionals can easily convey the brand story to the audience by providing them the real-world experience. For example, if a business is organizing a CSR event, PR can craft the content using VR that realistically tells them its benefits. Then, the audience will stay tuned to the event as well as the brand. Using virtual reality in the industry of Public Relations will surely upgrade a step higher and personalize the communication between the publics and the brand.

5.    Social Listening:

The job of PR is to give the brand insights into the public’s perception and brand’s reputation. Therefore, it is essential for them to adopt social listening practice for serving the brand better. By keeping a complete check on the brand mentions, reviews, conversations and every other social interaction the audience is making, PR companies can tailor astute PR strategies. Also, an honest feedback from the consumers of the brand collected by PR firms would enable the brand designing their products and services aligned with consumers’ requirements.

When PR & Digital Marketing Combines, Your Business Rises Sky-high?

Haven’t we all heard that PR is not marketing, and Digital Marketing is not PR? True that! But what sets them apart? Both have similar goals- the enhancement of brand's overall visibility which will impact its revenue. It’s, of course, the medium or practices of the two that keep them distinct and distant. While PR works on earned media to get unpaid press & media coverage, digital marketing uses all three- earned, owned, and paid media to sell the products and services. To be more succinct, PR practices are useful in brand building and brand positioning; the Digital Marketing practices are effective in obtaining the business leads.

If you own a startup business or a mid-size, why not combine both PR & Digital Marketing to get best of both worlds for your business as well as customers? Suppose you are going to organize a mega-event of new entrepreneurs which will be attended by all industry newbies or veterans for storming ideas & strategies. To make this event a success, you will need more attendees and the press coverage in a newspaper or online media.

Will digital marketing be able to give it you all? By running paid campaigns on social media or creating a specific landing page for this event calling for participants won’t be much effective unless journalists talk about it. Press releases written by journalists for this event when published in newspapers or online media portals will subject your event to large audience base. Perhaps, your event is very industry-specific, but it may interest the influencers in other industries also. Won’t it add 5 stars to your event?

Let’s take another example; you wrote an outstanding PR pitch to journalists for covering the same event. As it has become a universal truth now that journalists are extremely busy reporters who do not have time to respond to all pitches, yours may go overlooked. However, journalists are active on social media channels such as LinkedIn and Twitter. Using the hashtag #journorequest, they post requirements for stories or case studies they like to feature. If your social media executive is very active on Twitter, he can easily grab the deal for you. All you need to do is track (not spy) the journalists’ social media activities and you might bump on an easy to cater requirement.

Another thing in common between the two divisions, that is, Public Relations and digital marketing is that both involve guest blogging. In digital marketing, guest blogging is done for link acquisition purposes whereas the article submission to online media is done for profile screening. The first one increases the inbound links to improve search engine rankings of a brand website, and the latter increases the visibility of the brand itself. Hence, the PR & DM efforts combined will double your business success.

Why Video Content Should Be At the Heart of Your Digital Marketing Campaign?

The way people consume the content is changing. They no longer are interested in reading the extensive articles or looking at plain demographics unless there is really important stuff embedded in them. Meanwhile, online videos are leading the businesses to not only attract viewers, but also converting them into customers. These catch the attention of the viewer, trigger their emotional purpose, feed their curiosity, and answer to their queries in a fraction of minutes.

If you own a social media agency in Delhi, you better know the supremacy of the online video content. More than 74% of the audience on social media clicks a video ad if the thumbnail stimulates their sense in first five seconds. Preferably, the online video content or video ad should be a cornerstone for each of your digital marketing campaign.

Here’s why:

1.      Video ads are not meant only to let the viewer watch and enjoy your content, but to make him a part of it. The involvement of a user in video ad help in brand recall, which is useful to you for your long-term goal.

2.      A video ad delivers better results in lead-generation and conversion if compared to the other content type such as an article or an infographic. Video is dynamic, creative, and acts as a stimulant to the “lean-forward mode” of the viewer. It means the viewer is consuming the content more attentively.

3.      Video content is more than a boon not only for the social media but also the private organizations which offers SEO services in Delhi.  The video content used for SEO purposes drives user engagement as well as help you achieve the higher ranking in search engine results.

4.      Brand integrations with Youtubers or the other media influencers through the means of videos strengthen the brand presence in both online and offline market. A video ad featuring an influencer would create a huge viewer base and increase the lead-generation prospects. Isn’t it better than the textual content?

Almost all of the social media companies in Delhi have adapted themselves with video content creation and distribution and start bidding on it for winning their clients. And with the pros discussed above, every digital marketer should include the video marketing in his plan of action for magnificent results.