Organic marketing is the best way to reach your target audience. In 2022, customers do not prefer engaging with brands that try too hard to get their attention and sell their offerings. Apart from a few sales promotion campaigns, keeping hard selling at bay while marketing your brand is advisable.
PR is the most organic of all marketing techniques used by businesses worldwide. Public relations help you disguise your promotional messages in public interest stories. PR lets you convey your brand’s essence in an organic way to build a favorable image in the industry.
Like any other marketing tool, PR has undergone significant changes over time. In the age of digitization, more and more brands opt for e-public relations. This version of public relations helps you promote your brand while driving digitization within your organization.
So, what are e-public relations?
What Are E-public Relations?
In simple words, e-public relations are online public relations. It is a modern marketing tool that involves executing a PR campaign on digital platforms. Instead of giving an article in a newspaper or broadcasting a brand video on television, e-public relations include using digital platforms like the web, social media, email, and more.
E-public relations replace newspaper articles with online PR articles. They replace television broadcasts with YouTube videos. The new-age PR helps you use suitable digital channels to carry your brand’s message. Ravinder Bharti, the founder and CEO of Public Media Solution, defines e-public relations as “an initiative to blend traditional PR with digital marketing.” In the age of digitization, online PR helps you stand out from the clutter and make your brand’s voice heard amidst the sea of similar businesses.
How Do E-public Relations Impact Your Marketing Efficiency?
In 2022, more and more brands are switching to digital ways of marketing their offerings. The two years of a global pandemic made businesses realize the importance of digital alternatives to traditional processes. Looking at the popularity of initiatives like e-public relations, it is safe to say that new-age marketing tools are here to stay.
Here are some important ways in which e-public relations impact your marketing efficiency:
A Wider Reach
E-public relations are not restricted by geographical locations. Depending on your target audience, you can use online PR to reach a much wider audience than traditional PR.
Let’s say you run an IT company in Mumbai and want to promote it to your audience overseas. Even if you work with a PR agency in Mumbai, you can build an online PR campaign to spread your messages worldwide. E-public relations give you unmatched reach as digital communication knows no boundaries.
Easy Tracking And Analysis
Traditional PR campaigns are often difficult to track. Here, the key metrics businesses rely on are ROI and sales. However, e-public relations help you track every beat of your PR campaigns across multiple digital platforms. From tracking website visits and social media engagement to seeing SEO rankings of your website/article, a number of different metrics help you track the progress of your campaigns.
Moreover, e-public relations help you analyze your marketing team’s performance. They help you quantify your results with data-driven insights. These insights help you understand the areas where your campaigns worked and the ones where they faltered. Your marketing team can use such information to enhance its PR campaigns in the future.
Cost-effective Marketing
One of the biggest benefits of PR over advertising has always been the cost involved. While advertising often asks you to spend a fortune to seek engagement from your audience, PR does the same organically at a much lower cost.
E-public relations further reduce your marketing costs as broadcasting your stories on digital platforms is cheaper than circulating them traditionally. In 2022, a single PR article can do the work of 1,000 newspaper columns. This considerably reduces your marketing expenses which can be utilized in other core business areas.
Moreover, cost-effective marketing helps e-public relations increase the ROI for all your online marketing campaigns.
Making The Most Of SEO
If you are dealing with online marketing, you cannot ignore search engine optimization (SEO). No matter how powerful, relevant, and stimulating your content is, it needs to rank high on the search engine results pages (SERPs) to catch your audience’s eyes.
SEO plays an important role in e-public relations. Your online press releases and articles should be visible to your audience to get the desired traction. SEO helps you structure your content in a way that becomes SEO-friendly and ranks high on the SERPs. This increases your brand’s visibility and makes it easier for your audience to discover your brand on the internet.
Riding The Social Media Wave
Today, everyone is on social media. Gone are the days when social media platforms were limited to sharing pictures and videos with friends and family. Platforms like Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, LinkedIn, and more have become profitable hubs for marketers looking for traction.
Including social media optimization in your e-public relations campaign helps you get significant engagement across suitable platforms. It helps you establish a direct connection with your audience without trying too hard to sell your brand. You can stay in tune with the ongoing trends and create engaging content on social media to keep your audience informed about your brand’s existence.
Moreover, you can enhance your social media presence by teaming up with suitable influencers. Getting influencers to spread their word on social media is bound to get you the traction you are looking for. In the age of digital media, influencers are no less than celebrities, and you can always bank on their credibility to get the desired engagement from the right platforms.
The Final Word
E-public relations have occupied an important position in the realm of new-age marketing and are not going away anytime soon. To make the most of the digital revolution and build organic relationships with your audience, it is advisable to include a blend of online and traditional PR tools best suited for your business in your marketing campaigns.