I like to talk with young digital marketing professionals under thirty who are discovering public relations and see their faces light up when they figure out that public relations is the best part of any organic digital marketing plan.
“What, you mean public relations isn’t some dusty old industry on the verge of extinction, cranking out newspaper articles that our generation doesn’t even read?”
No indeed, my digital marketing friends. PR is more relevant than ever, because we still manage to crank out those articles and get our clients’ names into websites, online publications and blogs – all for free. What you now call “organic references.” For our listeners who are unfamiliar with all these new digital-age terms, “organic” simply means it wasn’t paid for, so it’s not an advertisement, which, according to Google and other algorithms, confers real value by improving your ranking in search engines.
Anyway, let’s get back to this podcast’s topic and talk about “PR Money,” a practice that adds to our organic work. At NATA PR, it consists of allocating a limited budget to pay for the work we do with select influencers.
Then, if we get a strong response from their community, we’ll advise our client to take things a step further and pay the influencers in order to access their community. We respect the work that serious influencers do to build and maintain their community. By paying them, we can offer a discount code so they can give their community the option of buying the product at an “introductory price” for a limited time. So swiping up on Instagram, which sends readers straight to our client’s website, lets us measure the fans’ interest and the impact of these influencers.
Here’s a summary of the steps we take for our clients whenever we work with influencers:
- Choose influencers who match our client’s values
- Choose influencers whose community is engaged and who comment on publications
- Offer influencers our client’s product at no charge so they can try it out and share their comments (positive or negative) with us
If these first steps get results, you can move on to the following phases:
- Offer influencers a limited budget for a short campaign, aligned with their expectations, using a promo code for fans to gauge their community’s interest
- If fans purchase our client’s products using our promo code, we’ll know that they’re interested in our client’s products – then we can offer longer and more extensive campaigns and ask influencers what they think and what they’d like to offer their fans
- Propose a longer-term partnership over several months
Our unique expertise with influencers, who we develop connections with just as we do with reporters, is based on respect and understanding of the target audience. This is the key to staying in the long game – not just in the moment.
I hope that you enjoyed and were inspired by this little public relations break.
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