The New Rules of Marketing & PR
How to Use News Releases, Blogs, Podcasting, Viral Marketing & Online Media to Reach Buyers Directly
by David Meerman Scott
At one time, the only realistic way you could reach potential customers was to use expensive advertising or try to get media publishers to pick up on material placed by your PR firm. Today, the World Wide Web has completely changed that dynamic. It’s now cost effective and practical to speak directly to your customers and establish personal links with potential new customers for a fraction of the cost of the traditional big budget advertising campaigns. And with that, the rules of marketing and PR have changed forever.
The real marketing and PR challenges in the years ahead will be to:
- Stay at the cutting edge of the various Internet-based ways of communicating with customers.
- Identify your new audiences.
- Craft compelling messages and see that they reach the right people.
- Lead customers into the buying process as willing participants rather than as bound hostages who resent the interruption.
In all, the future of marketing and PR lies in finding new and better ways to harness the power of the Internet more effectively as it continues to change and evolve.
Before the Web, the only way you could get your organization noticed was to buy advertising or convince a journalist to write about you. Telling your organization’s story (via the Web) is new, because until now, you’ve never been able to reach a potential audience in the millions without buying advertising. For people all over the world interacting on the Web, the old rules of marketing and PR don’t work. Today, all kinds of organizations communicate directly with their customers online. According to the Pew Internet & American Life Project, 73% of American adults say they use the Internet. In order to reach the individuals online who would be interested in their organization, smart marketers everywhere have altered the way they think about marketing and PR.
–David Scott