So what’s happening is you can laser target the
consumer from their behavior online and really start
giving editorial messaging to that consumer through
meaningful content that will interest him or her.
You can laser target them on their social media
channels, and because today’s consumer is trained
to tune off to or avoid ads, reaching them through
editorial content on social channels that is relevant
to them dramatically increases the chances of
converting your target to a customer. So the whole
industry has become much more sophisticated as it
pertains to reaching the target, and I think public
relations and social media have become much more
important within the marketing mix.
SMM: Why should a business try to integrate their
public relations or social media and their sales,
what’s the ultimate goal?
HG: The ultimate goal is to increase performance
in all of these different disciplines, while increasing
sales and expanding your customer base. That’s the
absolute ultimate goal of almost every business. If
you have a fully integrated approach between your
sales, public relations and social media, you will see
that, through information exchange in those three
different disciplines and through integrated
programs, you are able to implement more informed
and fine-tuned campaigns that will deliver a higher
ROI. You’re able to track your results in a much
more meaningful way and you’re able to coursecorrect by leveraging the information flow during
the implementation of the campaign. For example,
if a company is having a certain sales promotion for
Mother’s Day, it is crucial to act in an integrated way
on all channels to reinforce that messaging. You
would be surprised how so many businesses
overlook the power of integration and do not
communicate effectively between different
departments.
In particular, larger companies struggle to
communicate these sales promotions to their PR
agency, their social media agency or to their digital
team. Not because they don’t want to, it’s just
5 Strictly Marketing Magazine September/October 2014
because they either have become too big and that
conversation stopped happening, they got so busy,
carried away, and they just haven’t had time to sit
down and talk with the head of marketing or head
of PR and say, “Hey, we’re doing this, support us.
On social media channels, we can really push sales
events and promotions happening at the retail
channel locally or nationally. We can create a
geo-targeted social/digital campaign to support a
local sales promotion event targeting only residents
in that area. “ So it’s important that these three
different teams talk, especially in bigger
organizations. Smaller organizations get this right
sometimes and if executed correctly, it is manifested
in increased sales and fast growth. There is no big
trick here…it is all about integration and
communication. The overall yearly calendars
should include all these sales promotions and sales
events, calendars should be synched in every
department, public relations efforts should promote
and push these sales events, and social media
initiatives should push these events in an integrated
way with the traditional PR efforts.
Sometimes, information flow goes the other way
and public relations and social media tactics or
opportunities can also drive some of your sales
events while helping increase brand awareness. For
example, one of our clients, an international airline
company, was not planning any sales promotions
during Valentine’s Day - it wasn’t something on
their radar. We saw that in the airline industry,
Valentine’s Day was not really being leveraged as
a PR tactic, and we decided that we can really create
this wonderful campaign romanticizing the airline
and coupling with sales promotions during
Valentine’s Day so that some of the world’s most
romantic places could be featured and could be
made synonymous with the airline. Creating that
emotional tie with the airline and the consumer
through this universal theme appealed to the airline.
The company loved the idea, loved the concept, and
t