Article: Boost Your Marketing ROI Using “Marketing” PR

5 pages

Most leading human resource and employee benefits suppliers spend 20 percent or more of gross revenue on marketing and public relations, but how this money is allocated is dramatically changing – especially for progressive industry leaders who understand the effectiveness of online marketing. Print advertising, the once powerful oligarchy controlling most HR suppliers’ marketing dollars, has been on the decline, replaced by online marketing and PR activities.

This is driven by the fact that increasing numbers of HR professionals turn to the Internet when researching new products and services. As more buyers of HR products and services use the Internet to look for suppliers, the metrics of online publicity, website traffic and qualified sales leads are becoming the standard measurement for how marketing and PR departments are evaluated.

However, the shift to “Marketing PR” and incorporating Web 2.0 technologies like “social media” to marketing and PR campaigns is not universal for HR/Benefits suppliers. Many suppliers (and their PR firms) continue to spend thousands of dollars on traditional PR as if it were 1993 (before the World Wide Web).

So, how are industry leaders changing the game and driving more leads, generating more publicity and creating more website traffic than their competitors - with little or no additional costs? Many are allocating more dollars to “Marketing PR” tactics. Marketing PR is the combining of what are traditionally two separate departments, public relations and marketing, to one integrated front whereby all marketing and PR activities focus on reaching buyers directly. Marketing PR incorporates both traditional marketing and PR tactics with social media and other “Web 2.0” Internet technologies to support the measurable goals of online publicity, increased web site traffic, search optimization (SEO) and lead generation.