| | FEBRUARY 20209Align the Goals to Build a Consistent BrandFor an effective brand campaign, it is important to create intelligent content that promotes one's key messages. Customers, today, ac-knowledge the power of a brand and are aware of what it stands for and represents, making it essen-tial for the brand to link its iden-tity, values and personality to all of its communication channels, creating a consistent brand im-age that the audience can relate to. For instance, bringing in SEO capabilities not only augments the reach but also intensifies the mes-sages and ultimately captures the audience's attention. With aligned goals, marketing and PR have the potential to reach a wide range of audience amplifying this unified messaging and building a consis-tent brand. Multiple TouchpointsAs several businesses today enjoy an omnichannel presence, a cus-tomer's journey - from awareness to the final purchase - involves engaging with the brand through many touch points. To ensure that the brand offers a consistent expe-rience across all these channels, it is crucial to create a well-bal-anced communications strategy that makes use of both PR and marketing tactics in conjunction with one another. In order to cre-ate a compelling omni-present brand, it becomes essential to look at cross-channel campaigns. Sharing one's social media initia-tives on conventional platforms and on the other hand, promoting the outcomes of PR placements on social media, will synergize ef-forts on both fronts. For instance, an organization launching a new product can place related arti-cles in the traditional media and promote the same on their social media handles to drive a two-way conversation around it, leading to increased brand awareness.The Era of Influencer MarketingThe rise of influencer led market-ing has changed the communi-cation landscape and paved way for a new channel. The new-age influencers like media analysts, bloggers, product reviewers, and others can communicate a brand story by driving industry conver-sations and sharing opinions in their individual capacity. They possess the ability to connect per-sonally with their audience and shape their minds organically. An integrated communications cam-paign should leverage the power of these influencers by helping them imbibe the values and per-sonality of the brand, to convert them into dedicated advocates marketing the brand's products and building the right reputation in alignment with the PR strategy.Measuring Impact With an integrated communica-tions strategy in place, how would one measure the impact it creates on the brand perception? Digital capabilities and backend analyt-ics such as Google Analytics and other open source & proprietary measurement tools, and the en-gagement coming back to the company's website through refer-ral traffic gives a clear picture of how many people set eyes on the PR pieces and social media con-tent. These insights should be fur-ther used to understand the pat-terns and interests of the audience, as well as the effectiveness of the campaigns, to refine marketing strategies and build a 360 degree communications campaign that reaches the right audience. Being Authentic Today's consumers follow the brand closely, making it crucial for the organization to represent itself with honesty and transpar-ency. An authentic communica-tions campaign should embody the values and beliefs of the brand in alignment with recommended PR principles, and should suc-cessfully put-forth a relatable and identifiable image to its audience. Long-term customer loyalty and followership is always a result of staying true to your brand identity.Marketing, PR, and digital capabilities are all activities in-tricately woven together comple-menting one another. Successful-ly combining the story-telling, relationship building strength of PR with the sales focused, atten-tion-grabbing strategy of market-ing, and augmenting the two with digital capabilities, leads to an im-pactful and efficacious brand story that people care about and wish to invest in. AN AUTHENTIC COMMUNICATIONS CAMPAIGN SHOULD EMBODY THE VALUES AND BELIEFS OF THE BRAND IN ALIGNMENT WITH RECOMMENDED PR PRINCIPLES, AND SHOULD SUCCESSFULLY PUT-FORTH A RELATABLE AND IDENTIFIABLE IMAGE TO ITS AUDIENCE
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