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.