BREAKING THROUGH: GETTING YOUR MESSAGE TO YOUR AUDIENCE
Searching For Your Audience
By Gur Tsabar
Vice President, New Media Strategist, Ketchum
Imagine that your company is the focus of negative and inaccurate news. Now, imagine that – months later – existing customers, potential customers, shareholders, prospective investors and advocacy groups are still calling to chide and complain.
Target audiences usually are defined by a set of common demographics: male/female; young/mature; married/single; affluent/budget-conscious; and so on. But sometimes the main thing a "target" has in common is your product, brand, or company, and the latest news surrounding it.
So how do you reach them with public relations messages? The traditional methods are mostly mass communication. Not everyone who hears the messages cares. And not everyone who might care hears them.
Enter search marketing.
Most marketing and communication professionals think of search marketing solely as a form of advertising. But it also can be powerful as part of a public relations program.
Consider that Ketchum's most recent media usage survey showed that more people rely on search engines than on any other media channel, and you realize that consumers view sites like Google, Yahoo, AOL and MSN as virtual catalogs of all the information they might ever need. That makes Google the largest publication on the planet – one that attracts upward of 5 billion views a month in the U.S. alone. And that makes it a key outlet for countering negative news, announcing a new product, or simply enhancing corporate or brand reputation.
Each search query represents a customer, a prospective customer, a journalist or a blogger telegraphing to the world what it is that they want or need – effectively starting a conversation. A company or brand can earn its way into those conversations through paid placements that provide the precise information that fills those wants and needs. (Imagine an irate customer Googling for your company's e-mail address and turning up a press release that lays out the real facts and cools his anger.)
Professional communicators should understand this: Tie your public relations messages to the right keywords, and search marketing can put those messages in the middle of public discourse – in real time. Your target audience, in essence, will "search" and find you.
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