Role of Social Media in new PR outlook

Social media, once a newbie in the PR world has now overtaken the overall industry by storm. And similar to any hyperactive teenager, social media is moving ahead with pace, continually picking up skills and even skinning off its knees occasionally with some trouble technologies. But PR agencies must be vigilant and look out for the new opportunities to explore and the dangers to avoid with the continually transforming social media universe.

As per the statistics, 49 percent of today’s customers are depending upon the influencers’ recommendation to make their next purchase. This attitude of the consumers clearly explains why social media and influencer marketing program which were earlier considered an add-on feature have now become one of the most important tool of the PR Agencies.  It’s power to be a part of the PR mix stems out from its tendency of spreading amongst the audience. Messages spread through social media as quick as the meteors flying through the space.  There is nothing to stop them; they reach hue masses, often new and unintended audiences with an immediate effect.

Like said earlier, it has all grown up with time, the social media portals which earlier served like a place for friends to gather and share things of their interest is now an immense marketplace where businesses interact with customers, market their products and promote their brands.  CRM, advertising, growing databases and word of mouth or third-party endorsement are some of the exquisite features offered by social media. But while spreading the word through social media channels make it a point to align them with the PR pitches and other marketing efforts to ensure no conflicting information reaches the targeted audience.

Let’s talk about some prominent social media portals of today’s business that can help in your business’s digital PR campaign extensively:

Facebook is the most popular player in the game with strength of around two billion users. It can deliver extraordinary results with the exciting features of short video content, going live, or post personable videos and images. As a whole it works as a great advertising platform to reach highly targeted individuals both on its site and on other sites as well as part of its audience network.

For an eye-catching or visually captivating product, Instagram is the right choice. Unlike Facebook, the users get attracted more with the catchy images than from the catchy copies as here it is the image that they see first and text later on. Use it to create visual stories and showcase live events.

Twitter is another significant medium for driving traffic to your website.  As per the global figures, 47 percent of people visiting a Twitter profile also have a look at the website linked to it. Other than connecting with the prospective online communities, Twitter also works well for customer service opportunities and event engagements.

Another in the crowd of Social media businesses’ is Snapchat. But unlike its other counterparts, Snapchat connects well with the Gen-X. While small businesses might find it difficult to make it big with this tool, but the larger brands can leverage their advertising strategies and reach out to the younger demographics with much ease.

In the coming years, social media will witness consumer demanding the higher level of customer service along with a quick response. The number of phone users will also boost and surpass the five billion mark by 2019. Keeping both the predictions in mind PR service providers along Delhi & NCR need to transform their strategies and be ready to create more engaging and relatable content for the audience.

How to get organic reach on social media—Tips from Social Media Companies in Delhi

The content has zero shares, zero likes, and zero comments—the story of every social media marketer! No matter how engaging and spectacular content you post; there is only 0.1 percent chance of it being shared over 100 times. And, the ever-changing policies of social media platforms leave you no more prospects of getting organic reach for any of your posts, especially on commercial searches. In the opinion of the majority of social media companies in Delhi, attracting users becomes easier with paid campaigns, but equally tough with basic posts. And, even if you attract users, encouraging them to take actions such as like, share, and comment is no less than a Herculean task.

It might be Herculean, but not an impossible task you would say! Well, social media experts in Delhi are paid heavy compensation for some real reason. Here we’ve jotted down top 10 tips following which you can obtain maximum organic reach. Let’s dive straight in:

1.    Produce fresh content every day and skillfully share it on social media. That means you should map out the right time to post, relevant hashtags, and a right way to boost the post.

2.    Optimize all your social media accounts every day as a ritual. Every SMO agency in Delhi regularly does networking, create posts, and add new connections for their clients. That’s the key to their success.

3.    Tag your visitors through cookies to build a large base of remarketing audience. Try it once and remarketing would never disappoint you.

4.    Choose your audience wisely. Before even setting your social media accounts, you should clearly identify who should be your target audience and how you will be reaching them. If they are students, then what should be the ideal age group, where should they belong, which courses would they pursue, what sort of posts interest them, etc. When you know this well, you must start building a focused audience.

5.    The firms which offer social media services in Delhi have graphic designers and video animators right by their side. This is so because people are bored with same ordinary text posts and monotonous graphics. To spice up the content, agencies prepare compelling creatives and engaging videos to attract the users.

6.    Social media services are seldom limited to social media giants. You are not required to post only on Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter. Instead, the platforms like Reddit, Medium, Digg etc., are also useful in driving more traffic to your social media account and website.

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.