In any market, a strong web presence is a necessity. Public relations managers in today’s technologically advanced environment must understand that the days of writing a single press release and calling direct to promote business is over. It’s no longer about the one-dimensional advertisement featuring a sale of the week, it’s about the brand that’s behind it all.
Brand Visibility Then
Not too long ago, a single advertisement in the local newspaper was all you needed to let your city know about your business specials. A nice sign out front was all you needed to increase visibility, and a simple website with a few pics and an address was everything you needed on the web.
Brand Visibility Now
In today’s “always on the move” environment, brand awareness has gotten a bit complicated. There’s still advertising and business signs, but multiply that by social media marketing, location-based marketing, and search engine marketing. Getting people to notice your company sales has evolved into inviting people to interact, engaged, and help grow your brand.
Brand Interaction Then
By placing your advertisement in the local newspaper, you were engaging your audience on one level and completely limiting yourself to a very unique demographic. Hopefully you did at least some homework before placing that ad and determined that newspaper audience was also your target audience. There was no interaction, someone saw your ad and moved on. If you were lucky, maybe they “shared” that information by word of mouth by telling a friend or family member. But for the most part it was a very one-dimensional, static interaction.
Brand Interaction Now
Today, if you’re public relations team is properly managing your brand, it’s multi-dimensional and incredibly interactive. In many cases, your audience does the work for you, growing your brand visibility all on its own.
With the constant personalization of Google searches, the more that a web user clicks on your website, the higher your website will rank in their specific search results. Without even realizing it, your audience is increasing your brand visibility for you.
Every single time you post a new topic, status update or blog onto your Facebook page, you are increasing brand visibility. And, as each of your friends “Likes,” “Comments” or “Shares” your post, this audience is increasing your brand visibility and doing the work for you.
As your public relations team enhances the visitor experience on your Twitter page, you will notice that ‘Followers’ are ‘ReTweeting’ more and more of your stories and ideas. If done properly, Twitter can increase brand visibility to unrealized audience niches, untouched markets, even out-of-town, out-of-state, or out-of-the-country!
Brand visibility and brand interaction goes together like peanut-butter-and-jelly, where there’s one there has to be the other. It wasn’t always this way. Things might have been simpler back in the day, but today the possibilities for brand visibility are truly endless. As your brand becomes more interactive and engaging, your marketing becomes multidimensional, and your audience becomes your best advocates, you can sit back and watch your brand shoot through the roof. Of course, then that takes us to brand monitoring, but we’ll save that for another day.