At Fentons we have been working with our clients to help them integrate social media into broader marketing communications plans, rather than looking at online activity as a stand-alone activity.
This integration is essential in ensuring that you are 'singing from the same song-sheet' to your target audience, regardless of whether they are viewing information on your website, reading a brochure or talking to one of your staff.
On a recent Inside PR podcast, Martin Waxman talked about this very issue with search marketing and social media expert Lee Odden.
Lee spoke about his new book, Optimize (yes the US spelling), which looks at how organisations can take an editorial approach that ties in all elements of their marketing strategy.
So what does this mean for a public relations professional, a communications manager or a marketing manager who is looking into social media for their organisation?
Think of it this way: The reason we optimise our websites and our online content for search is to make it easy to find for our target audience. So if our audience is using certain words to find our products and services, then it makes sense that we should be speaking to our audience in the same way.
Let's put this into practice.
Say your organisation deals with advice for the parents of children in the early years. Parents are not likely to be going to Google and searching for the following:
• advice children in the early years
They are more likely to do searches such as these:
• parent advice
• parent support
• parent tips newborns/toddler
Carry this same logic over to your media strategy. Instead of giving your spokesperson a message such as:
"I would encourage any parent with children in the early years to log onto our website."
Try:
"If you have a newborn or a toddler we have some great parenting tips on our website."
By aligning your messages with the keywords that your target audience will naturally search for, you are helping your audience make that link between the information they need and your organisation.
Don't know what search words people are using to get to your website? Ask your web guys, they should be able to give you a Google Analytics report that shows how people are finding you through search.
The trick to integrating your communications is making sure that all the different parts of your organisation that speak with end audiences, whether they be target audiences/customers or stakeholders, are all speaking to each other and more importantly - speaking the same language as the people you are trying to reach.
Image: Rafal Olechowski/Shutterstock