Brand awareness is a core part of a successful integrated marketing strategy. Generating ongoing awareness ensures your target audience recognises your brand, products or services and lays the foundation for further tactics including paid social media and PPC advertising.
PR is a fantastic tactic to increase brand awareness and visibility amongst your target audience. Through creative content and thought provoking stories, PR professionals are able to amplify a brand’s key messages and position them within the media.
Over the past few years, traditional PR has changed quite significantly, with the increased demand for digital content. Pre-digital, traditional PR focused on crisis and reputation management and generating brand awareness through those all important column inches.
As traditional PR activity evolved and expanded to adapt to the new marketing landscape, digital PR was formed. It marries print and online placement, relationship building with journalists and online influencers and online content creation – all of which support a digital marketing strategy.
Many aspects of traditional PR feed into a successful digital strategy and vice versa – ensuring both tactics work together provides a more robust and holistic approach to successful marketing.
Audience targeting
As a brand, it can sometimes be difficult to understand your audience – who they are, what media they consume and how best to target them. Utilising the online data from your website’s Google Analytics and social platforms can provide vital information to help get to grips with your audience. These insights can then be used to narrow down the types of online sites and print publications your audience is reading, to ensure your digital PR content is featured in the right titles.
Supporting SEO
Implementing a successful digital PR strategy will ensure your brand is featured across online sites regularly. As your brand gets featured with backlinks it provides a boost in traffic to your own site. Backlinks also improve your brand’s search engine optimisation (SEO) – as content is published on high authority sites, linking to your website, your brand’s SEO ranking improves. This makes your business more visible when your audience searches for your target keywords.
High authority sites include the Mail Online (DA: 94), Metro.co.uk (DA:93) or FT Online (DA:94). Many of these sites have a significant reach and are well-established and trusted by their readers.
Featuring on these sites regularly provides potential customers with a sense of reassurance – if such well regarded sites are happy to showcase your brand, it indicates credibility and trust.
Content creation
Traditional PR focused on generating creative stories that grabbed the audience’s attention through print media. Digital PR takes that principle and amplifies it further, creating unique, creative content that can be utilised across a range of media platforms.
PR professionals undertake in depth keyword research to ensure a brand’s content includes the search terms and keywords that your audience is using or your website is ranking for- this targeted approach ensures your brand’s content is more visible, helping to further build awareness.
Successful content creation generates brand awareness, boosts traffic to your site and provides engaging content to utilise across your social media channels.
Influencer marketing
Online influencers can have large, highly engaged audiences, which are the perfect platform to showcase a brand’s creative content. PR’s liaise with online influencers to create authentic branded partnerships which help to drive website traffic and increase brand credibility and trustworthiness. The content created by influencer marketing should also link in with your brand’s social media strategy.
Integrated approach
In our experience, it’s key to use an integrated marketing approach, especially as your target audience is being influenced by more tactics than ever before.
From social media to e-newsletters, magazines and online reviews – understanding which platforms and types of media your audience consumes is key to creating a successful integrated strategy to support those all important conversions.
Jam has extensive experience in building successful integrated marketing strategies for a range of brands. Our dedicated team takes the time to understand your business to build a bespoke strategy to support your company objectives, overcome industry challenges and creatively target your customers.
If you’d like to discuss how we could help your brand, please get in touch.
