Three essential for a Mequoda Internet Marketing System
The Mequoda guideline for using public relations to drive website traffic comprises three basic elements that are simple to understand and easy to accomplish.
- The Free Offer: Isolate a newsworthy idea and tie it to something free that’s available only on the website.
- Get Reviewed & Mentioned: Publicize the idea and free item via press releases, phone calls and other contacts to various news media.
- Maximize Website Conversions: Set up conversion architecture on your website that allows people to start a relationship with you, and perhaps, buy something.
All three elements must be exercised for the program to work. Omit one—any one—of the three, and the program will not achieve the desired results.
Interestingly enough, we see lots of publishers that still don’t understand how to integrate the Internet into their marketing operations when they’re successfully doing the first and second steps. And basically, that’s the old media/new media paradigm at work.
At the end of the day, publishers in today’s “new media” environment benefit from the PR efforts common to the “old media” environment of a decade ago plus the added benefit of a marketing relationship with the consumer. That marketing relationship, quite frankly, will very likely outweigh the combined benefit from all the others.
[text_ad]
Many publishers, however, still don’t “get it.” They continue to send their editors onto the morning TV shows or radio programs, for example, and may even drive viewers to their website but then provide no “call to action.” There’s nothing set up on the site to facilitate the all-important customer relationship. They fail to create a “capture event” for that traffic. And while that may be helpful for immediate business—e.g., boosting newsstand or product sales—the effect is short-lived.
On the other hand, those who do use public relations to drive people to a landing page on the website, where a mechanism captures their email addresses, are accomplishing the first step toward building a long-term valuable marketing relationship with the thousands of interested individuals who respond. The publisher, therefore, gains a robust database of qualified people who have shown an interest in the product and a desire to have a relationship. That’s priceless.
So an Internet Marketing PR program is only a Mequoda Internet Marketing PR program when it completes itself with the surrendering of an email address and the beginning of a relationship. Here are the three easy steps to achieve that result.
This article was written by Don Nicholas with the help of Jane E. Zarem in a series on PR & Earned Media 101.
