The battle between online strategies is often a subject of debate for marketers and many people have strong opinions on what works best.
The truth is that each online channel is a tool that has advantages and disadvantages when put in a certain situation and a wise PR practitioner will have all these tools at hand for maximizing the efficiency of a campaign.
Let’s see how HR departments can integrate social media in a PR campaign and use these tools together for great results.
Increase visibility on your social media channels
One undeniable truth that we keep on coming back to is that email marketing remains one of the strongest assets in online marketing strategies, even if some would say it is outdated.
It was recently reported that smartphones are used most often for email checking, and that together with social media PR practitioners can attain great success in the online environment.
Any business should have a strong email campaign and itâs highly beneficial to link it to social media channels as well. Include icons and links to your social media channels in the emails you send.
This way, you can monitor how great the reach between the two channels is and how many of your present customers are active and engaged on social media.
It is not enough to put the social media buttons and icons in your emails or PR campaign, tell the users what they should expect to find on your social media channels, give them a glimpse of what’s happening there and provide the links to your online entities.
Use social media to bring more subscribers to your newsletter
You can use social channels to grow your subscribers list by mentioning your email campaigns and sending previews of the next email only offer or discount you have (or any piece of news you will put in your newsletter).
In order to engage your customers to take action, point out any benefits they have by subscribing to your email newsletter, give them a reason to press the button.
The simplest way of mentioning your email campaign on social media channels is to provide a link to a sign-up page, but you might lose your customersâ attention if you interrupt their social media browsing.
Fortunately, social media channels have an integrated solution for this. For example, Facebook allows you to send your users to your sign-up page without leaving the social media page âyou can have customizable tabs on your business page that make the subscribing process very easy.
Twitter allows you to attach a card to your tweet – it consists of a description, an image you can add and a call to action âyou can customize a tweet that has a subscribe button and links the user to your email campaign in seconds.
Make all your online channels work together
The most effective is a holistic approach; integrating all your media channels and making them work together seamlessly. Itâs not enough to send users from one place to the other.
If their experience feels scattered and inconsistent they will eventually lose their interest in what you are doing online.
Use a common calendar for both your channels and where possible and advisable, promote your events through all your online channels.
Consistent information is desirable for users and you need to use these channels as tools for your overall strategies, not consider them separate entities.
A brilliant way of using email and social media together is to upload your subscriber list to your social media account.
You will get a lot of information from your customersâ profiles and youâll have the great advantage of putting a face on your clients, getting you to know them better and be able to target them better.
By making an online PR campaign and a social media campaign work as one, you are giving your subscribers more options: if they don’t like your emails they can only follow you on Facebook and vice versa.
This helps you reach a greater audience and not completely ignore social media users when crafting sensible PR. Build an online presence with social media, but use PR as well to drive traffic and compel visitors become payable customers.
