Why You Need an Online PR and Marketing Campaign

I was talking with a potential client the other day about the use of online PR, social media branding and search engine marketing for a business and she was quick to pipe in that she had just hired someone to handle this for her company. She hired a freelancer and gladly told me that she was very happy with the results as she had moved up on a page on a Yahoo search but since she did not really understand the use of the Internet in PR, marketing and branding that was all she could tell me. I was confused and told her so as prior to this conversation I had done a search engine marketing analysis on her and her business and found that the only entries I could easily find for her were negative. She assured me that I needed to look again as that had changed. Afterwards I popped online and did a quick search for her and her company. The results were bad, really bad. Not only is she and her company still hard to find, especially on Google, but the reputation damaging entries are still scattered across the first page of Google, Yahoo and MSN. The person she hired to build her brand online is not getting the job done and she did not even know it – in fact she thought he was doing a good job.

How did this happen? Usually this happens because a business owner tries to handle the online PR, marketing and branding themselves by joining every social media and networking site they can find. Simply joining Facebook, Myspace or one of the numerous other sites does not in itself guarantee any page rank results as that is not what they are designed to do. They are a great vehicle for capturing and cultivating an audience that you can share ideas with and promote to and used correctly this can increase website traffic.

I suspect though that this happened to the business owner because the professional she hired did not have a campaign. Instead this person seemed to operate on a shotgun approach of joining and linking to as many online groups and social media networking sites as possible knowing that some change had to eventually occur for the better.

Without a well planned PR and marketing campaign even a professional can come up short in the results department.

A true campaign must take into consideration the target public for what is being promoted, where this public hangs out online, the best online tools for use and must know which social media, online networking, blogs, newsgroups, etc. get the best result for the campaign being created. The person putting together the campaign must be well versed in both the standard tools of PR and marketing as well as the Internet itself and how it works. This is what an online PR and marketing specialist brings to the table – the knowledge to take all of these tools and put them together in a campaign that gets results. And that is why you need an online PR and marketing campaign – to ensure you get results.