Moving the needle

What is it?

PR or Public Relations is the act of promoting a product or service through media channels. It’s done by creating stories those media channels can share to create interesting content for their audience. Not surprisingly, it’s largely about relationships and money - but it’s also about timing, messaging, and audience - or in industry terms, finding the best “angle”. 

As a discipline it is still largely reliant on mainstream media. However the industry is seeking to pursue a more digital approach these days, because the reality is these worlds are starting to blur into one. Many PR agencies have built out digital capability across Social Media, Websites, PPC or SEM, and even SEO. 

How can it move the needle?

A great PR strategy can help you achieve broader coverage. Done well, it leads to more awareness of your brand. Increased awareness can build trust and attract new people to search for you. 

A good PR strategy may also lead to recommendations as commentators, bloggers, thought leaders and influencers talk about you. It also may encourage people to link to you on Social Media or from their own websites. All in all it reinforces your value proposition in the marketplace.

What is it?

Brand and visual brand often get confused.  Fundamentally, your brand consists of:

• Your identity and purpose - what you’re in business FOR
• Your story - who you are and what makes you tick - to create the human connection.
• Your message - a clear set of statements about who you help and how you help them.

How can it move the needle?

Clarity about your brand drives all your marketing. It makes it clear to any contacts who you help and how you help them.

With real brand clarity you can engage with your audience - they will WANT to engage with you.

Visual Brand

What is it?

Effective visual branding helps people identify you across a variety of media. It will normally include:

• Name and a logo and/or a symbol. 
• A colour palette. 
• An obvious visual style. 
• An approach. 
• A language. 

A good brand will be presented consistently online and offline. 

Visual brand enables your instant recognition with an audience. Done well it will be part of an experience and help create a memory in the mind of the customer. 

“Half of the nerve fibres in our brains are linked to our vision and, when our eyes are open, vision accounts for two-thirds of the electrical activity in the brain.” Kate Raworth, Doughnut Economics

Without a memorable brand identity, it’s hard for consumers to understand what you represent, let alone whether they should start a relationship with you. 

Great visual branding enables you to walk comfortably in your shoes. It gives you swagger.

How can it move the needle?

With search engines (especially Google) seeking to deliver a more relevant and visual user experience, branding drives engagement. It enables useful communication across online channels.

Done well it should be the linchpin of all communications. It should provide a more meaningful experience of your product or service across the web. It will support the value you are generating and be the consistent foundation through which you deliver that value via imagery, video, and the written word. 

What is it?

Content comes in many forms. And its effectiveness is dependent on your brand clarity.

Visual, written, or audio  - content holds the internet together. It’s the building blocks of the web. It’s the primary way we engage our audience. It’s the bit that PEOPLE are actually interested in (not bots). 

The two key forms of content within your website are:

• Ephemeral content - like blog posts and articles.
• Evergreen content - like landing pages, white papers and slide presentations.

A balance of both types, monitored and kept up-to-date - is the foundation of a content strategy.

How can it move the needle?

In an ideal world, a piece of content is that pot of gold at the end of any search query online. Not surprising then, moving the SEI needle is largely reliant on quality content.  It's so important in fact that we decided to build it straight into the SEI Method. This way, you can focus on content from the ground up. So the first 4 actionable areas to tackle to move the needle on your online presence are Story, Message, Brand THEN Content.

(“Content first” is fraught with danger - because you won’t be consistent and trustworthy if you don’t know why you’re making your content and who it’s for.) 

Once you have good content, make sure you keep it fresh, consistent and relevant.  

Remember, the purpose of all content is to educate your customers on your products, services and capability while you help and entertain them.

“Always leave your audience wanting more”

What is it?

Your domain is your main home online. This makes it your most important online asset. Despite experts predicting that social media and other platforms would become more important than your website, websites are more important than ever. 

It’s your own online real estate that is yours to brand up and build out as you like. Domains can be trademarked too if you show that your brand deserves to call this URL your home. This adds another layer of protection to the upkeep of this essential piece of your online presence. 

How can it move the needle?

The age of your domain can impact how much search engines trust this place and it may even affect your rankings. 

As we talk about in our Longevity element, be in it for the long haul and take care of it. Make sure you renew the subscription and don’t let it expire and keep your login and password secure. Search engines especially Google now demand you have an SSL certificate even if you aren’t an ecommerce site. Not having an SSL will render you virtually invisible so make sure you have this in place too.

Your web developer will need to use the domain to connect it to your hosting, or in other words tell the domain where the files of your website live. It may also be used to run email services as well. Keeping your domain stable is critical, it may not necessarily move the marketing needle by miles but you also don’t want the needle dropping rapidly because you forgot to take care of the basics. 

What is it?

Email marketing enables people to subscribe to regular updates straight to their email inbox. Remarkably it's still a really valuable way of reaching your customers and has been that way since the 1990’s. 

Other platforms have come along as alternatives, such as Social Media platforms or Internal Communications programs (like Slack) but email has held its own.

The email inbox is a sacred place. If emails show up there in most cases we have given  people or companies permission to do that. The other emails get caught in spam filters or get deleted in a flash.

How can it move the needle?

Done well, email keeps you top of mind and reinforces your brand presence. In a world of distractions. Quality email interactions remind your customers of your value and in some cases can help them to better use your product or service. 

Email leads your customers to specific places on the web too. It might be an app download, it may be a specific web page or new offer. It helps you guide your best contacts to the places that you want to increase engagement for. 

More traffic to specific places means more search engine love.  Likewise, it means more time people spend experiencing your brand. Traffic volume is a signal to search engines that a page is active and engaging - so a targeted email can often help increase search rankings for that page and indirectly affect the rankings on your overall website.

What is it?

What your customers think matters. Unhappy customers could break your business.  To put it less dramatically, not listening to the nuances of your customers’ feedback could mean you are operating in a bubble and not improving your products and services. 

Reputation Management is the practice of taking care of your customer feedback. This needs to be an active process, it's best to not to find yourself on the back foot and be in damage control if you can avoid it. 

Stay in constant touch with your customers if they have given their permission for you to do so via email, text, or social media channels.

How can it move the needle?

Gaining visible feedback online will impact how much authority and trust your business gets. It’s this street cred that can not only affect your rankings but also the level of engagement you will have with your audience. 

Definitely have a Google My Business page, this is your local presence. Bing and Apple also have business pages. You should also explore the myriad of other credible directories in your country to ensure search engines see you as a current and consistent business. There are some major review platforms that are worth exploring too. 

What is it?

SEM stands for Search Engine Marketing. It depends on where you live, but SEM means different things to different people. Search Engine Marketing is often described as a discipline that covers both organic and paid marketing strategies. It encompasses a wide range of tactics that include SEO, PPC, & Adwords. 

At Terminology we consider SEM to be more about buying in influence, as opposed to earning it through organic means.  For that reason we separate it out on its own and have SEO as its own discipline. 

How can it move the needle?

Executed efficiently SEM buys in specific traffic to particular pages and is very campaign driven. It’s usually divided into:

• branded initiatives that lift the awareness of your brand versus non-branded and 
• more specific attempts at positioning a product or service with language that sits in a particular niche. 

If your brand is called TYPEWRITER you would highlight the belief system of the brand and tell stories that enable your audience to get to know the people and what you stand for. 

Your non-branded campaigns would lay out the features and benefits of using your product or service and show clear differentiation between you and other similar companies. In the case of TYPEWRITER you may sell miniature pink typewriters for elves that live in the north pole and target keywords like “miniature pink typewriters for elves”. 

Ideally you would carve out your niche or niches on the internet based on where your customers are located and the needs you have determined in your branding and marketing discovery process. 

Like email, SEM targets specific places on the web where customers can engage with you, build a relationship, and ultimately that leads to a value exchange and a transaction.

What is it?

Search Engine Optimisation is a discipline that seeks to maximise your online power. It’s divided into 2 categories: On-Page and Off-Page.

It’s about optimising your website and any other online asset you own versus other online properties that may trust you and link to you. 

Some areas of SEO have changed a LOT while other core fundamentals have stayed the same since the internet began. Some SEO tactics seek to trick or manipulate algorithms while others aim to support your online presence and help search engines better understand who and what you represent. The SEI Method was born out of the latter and encourages a more holistic approach to SEO. 

On-Page SEO is about helping search engines fully understand what your website is about. Consider it as a way to talk to the robots in a language they understand so you can get the keyword rankings you deserve. 

Off-page SEO is more about engaging your customers through quality content, useful conversations, and gaining inbound exposure via PR-like promotional methods.

How can it move the needle?

SEO helps you gain more relevant traffic to your site. The internet is after all a way of organising masses of niches. It’s also about delivering searchers a trusted result. This is the glue that holds the search engine experience together. It’s also about convenience and accessibility - particularly speed.

What is it?

Social media is an engagement channel - a place where you communicate with your target market. 

It could be anything from wedding flower pictures on Instagram to freewheeling discussions on Reddit. Which social channels you use are totally dependent on which platforms your customers are on.

Regardless of which platform you engage through, the principles are pretty much the same - creating quality content that engages your prospects and helps them get to know about you through social interaction - conversations that demonstrate:

• who you are
• what you do 
• who you help with which problems.

How can it move the needle?

The goal is to encourage new visitors to go to your website. Don’t get trapped into “social for social’s sake”. You’re conducting a brand awareness exercise. Your goal is to:

1. Get them to GO to your website - because you’ve created a memorable experience on the social platform they love
2. Hang around on your website because you’ve created a memorable experience on your website.
3. Share your social content to their friends because it’s so good.
4. (If you’ve done a good job, then you’ll become a trend-setter to be followed.  Which increases repeat traffic.)