Marketing, Advertising, Public Relations, & Branding for the quick-read crowd was really a quick read over at SmallBusinessBranding.com. The part I liked best was the graphical explanation of marketing, advertising, public relations and branding. For a visual person like me, these pictures did all the speaking.
But that’s just the introduction of what I’d like to share with you. When you have a blog or website like FlyingSolo with more than 11,500+ readers and with a probability that a client might be reading your article, it’s worth putting some marketing and public relations (pr) budget to such a website.
How much of a budget you’ll need to allocate so that your article can be reached by more than a million visitors around the world? Around RM1500.
By advertising or having a blog to market your products or services, you’re establishing an automatic PR campaign for yourself. The next best part is that it enables you to get close to your customers through the communication in comments.
It’s the personal articles you write that most customers would be interested in. The knowledge and information you have that backs your expertise of the services you offer. The words you preach that backs your practices and philosophy.
By marketing your expertise and knowledge on your own battlefield, it provides you the automated chance for doing some PR work with comments. However, the hardest part of controlling PR in comments is when you start getting bad eggs.
It’s debatable whether bad comments should be deleted or left there so that it’ll boost your reputation even more. I’ve seen cases where a comment list grew up to 200+ in numbers just to fight over who is the right person and the person in fault. In a scenario like this, it’s advisable to close the comment down and apologize the need to do so in some professional manner.
End said, one of the current distribution channels being ignored by many local companies especially Small-Medium Businesses (SMBs) is the Internet. Main reason is they’ve yet to learn about the marketing and PR value found online excluding their websites.
So if you’re an SMB interested in finding more value to your current or new website, please do contact us.