Minisode: How to Grow Your Audience Through Omnichannel PR Strategies – Podcast Transcript

SPEAKERS

Lexie Smith

 

Lexie Smith 

Hi, guys, welcome to yet another minisode I’m super pumped up for today’s topic, which is omni channel PR strategies, how to grow your audience through multi touch point campaigns. But the reason I am so excited is how this topic came to be. So a quick backstory. I had this incredible intern back in 2020. Her name was Emily for the PR bar Inc. Emily, who is a rock star has since gone on to pursue her PhD candidacy and is a professor at Texas Tech University. So I opened my email in early September and I had received an email from her saying, hey, Lexi, she was wonderful is very flattering. Like, you know, I really enjoyed our time together, yada yada, but the call to action or the ask was, I’d love for you to come present to my class at Texas Tech University. First off, hard stop. What a cool full circle moment. So flattering. I said yes without hesitation. And after learning a little bit more about her students. We came up with this topic again, which is omni channel PR strategies, how to grow your audience through multi touch point campaigns. So by the time this airs, I will have already spoken and given this lecture to Texas Tech, but today I’m going to give it to you. You don’t have the presentations slides. So sorry about that. I will do my best to give you a good auditory overview. So with that said, let’s dive in. First things first, let us go over the definition of a few things. First up omni channel omni channel marketing there actually was an episode that I did with Hannah Nia bez if you want to learn more and dive deeper into this topic from her lens point on omni channel marketing, but quick definition omni channel marketing is the integration and cooperation of the various channels, organizations used to interact with consumers, or in today’s case, the public with a goal of creating a consistent brand experience. This includes physical locations such as stores and digital channels, such as website or social media. Okay, so when I say omni channel, that’s what we’re talking about. The other thing I want to talk about is public relations. If you are new to the show, you might not know how I define PR if you’ve been here for a while. Well, here’s a quick refresher. I look at pr from the lens of what I call the six relations. PR is how we cultivate opportunities through strategic and authentic relationship building and maintenance with six different groups are target audiences. Now the six different groups or target or target audiences are real quick public. So our relationship with the public, we have media, customer or consumers. Others in our industry, commute community that can be physical or virtual, and investors. Now I have an asterix for company relations company is another type of relationship we can focus on. However, this also crosses over into the world of HR, which is why I have it as an asterix. So again, that definition is public relations is the art of cultivating opportunities through strategic relationship building and maintenance with the six key stakeholders. Now, the next thing I want to talk about is broadly and this was the topic of this is initially what Emily came to me wanting me to teach on how to grow your audience. That was the broad topic, I said, let’s get more specific let’s talk omni channel. So broadly speaking, how we grow our audience is through tactics or campaigns, okay. So what are different examples of how aware growth can happen? So what are different PR tactics, events, digital or in real life? sponsorships brand collaborations and activations the use of social media, community involvement or community relations, media placements, public speaking customer rewards programs, Influencer Marketing Review and referral campaigns. This is not all inclusive this list, but that is just an example of some of the places audience growth can happen. So, what is an omni channel growth strategy? It is developing a cross platform or multi touchpoint campaign. Okay, so let’s dive in. What does that look like? Here’s where I’m going to do my best job in giving you a visual for some of the graphics I have here in the presentation. So imagine a chart and up top on top of that chart, we have a circle. Circle one is your goal. So our goal for this use case is grow our audience, okay, how we’re going to select a tactic, again, a tactic is from that list that I just gave you. So below that tactic, we then have a branch out of outcomes that happen, and or sometimes more tactics to build on that outcome, which don’t worry, I’m gonna give you examples. So this all makes sense in a minute. So let’s talk through an example. Let’s say our goal is to grow online traffic.

 

Lexie Smith 

We choose a tactic we decide to go after press, specifically a digital feature, what are all the things that can happen from successfully securing a digital feature? Well, number one, hopefully, that outlet, and let’s give it us, let’s say Vogue, for example, let’s say it’s a digital feature in vogue, that outlet exposure is going to hopefully drive you traffic online, right? That is one outcome. Another outcome. Hopefully, in that article, your website is back linked, which without getting too nitty gritty into all of this, it’s helpful for your SEO, your search engine optimization. So basically, it’s helping your website get found, the more your website gets found, right, the more you can grow online traffic. And the next little caret arrow or prong here is we’re going to perform another tactic post this digital feature when, and we’re going to leverage this across all our different omni channel platforms. So we’re going to share this when on social media. We’re going to share this one internally with our team in our investors, or potential investors. We’re going to share this when in our newsletter, and we’re going to share it in our marketing materials. Now what do I mean by marketing materials? Okay, more arrows, by marketing materials are going to integrate it into our print collateral. So we’re going to add a part that says as seen in vogue, we’re also going to feature that vote logo on our website. And we’re also going to have a trade show banner because we’re pretending we’re a product based business here. And we’re going to put as seen invoke on that banner. So what you’re starting to see is this trickle effect, right? While we started with one goal. And we started with one tactic, we’re setting up a whole cascading strategy and set of tactics and outcomes that reach across a multitude of platforms. Right? We’ve talked about social media, we’ve talked about email, we’ve talked about print collateral, right now we’re in the physical world.

 

Lexie Smith 

So what I want you to begin to see is how well you start with one channel in one tactic. In this case, a press feature. We are sometimes organically and then furthermore, strategically crossing over into other things such again as website social platform, physical events, brochures and email. What this also means is that while our initial goal might have been just generally speaking, online growth or public relations, we’re also now addressing so many other stakeholders in PR, which is why I did that quick little refresher of the six relations. So now we’re also taking that one tactic and that one goal and through our omni channel strategy, we’re also hitting on community relations, customer relations, investor relations, media relations and a little bit of that Asterix company relations.

 

Lexie Smith 

Okay, let’s go over another example. Let’s say the goal so again, stay with me visual we’re starting with our goal is to grow our social media audience or customer base and the PR tactic or campaign we select to do this is a social media collaboration in form of a contest. Okay, so what are the things that can happen post this tactic? Well, one outcome hopefully is we’re getting cross brand social media exposure, we’re also going to be really smart, because we’re thinking omni channel here. And we’re going to promote that social campaign in our email, and so are our partners. So we’re getting cross brand email exposure. And we’re going to add another prong on to this. And it’s going to be a physical products giveaway. And we’re going to be sending the winner of this contest the actual product and asking them to share it on social media. So now all of a sudden, we’ve brought that product on social media, and we’ve put it in person into someone’s life. And when we do that, now, all of a sudden, that product is being exposed to the winners network, at least in real life. Hopefully, we’ve incentivize them somehow, virtually as well. We’re going to ask that winner for a testimonial of our product, we’re then going to leverage that testimonial and post it on our website. And we’re actually because this campaign is going to be so successful, we’re going to leverage this collaboration for credibility and a future media pitch. What media pitch again, more arrows, we’re going to use it in a digital feature pitch, a podcast feature pitch and print feature pitch. Again, here’s this example of a cascading strategy as thinking about all the different omni channel places we can hit with a single goal and a single campaign. Okay, so now I’m going to also talk through some really real life examples. So my co founder of my second company, ReadySet, coach, and I, we went after a byline and a popular industry outlet for us called Create and Cultivate. We had the former editor on here, Meghan bow champ. In Season One, I believe, if you want to tap back and listen to that. So we landed this byline, which already right was getting us exposure to Korean cool debate, it was giving us a backlink to our site. Beyond that, we created an omni channel strategy. So we share that win across all of our social networks. It was organically bringing people to our site, which we saw on the back end of our analytics, it also was having people book calls, sales calls. And we know this because on our sales call collection forum, we have a little section that says, Where did you hear about us, and we were getting a lot of Korean cultivates, we put that logo on our website.

 

Lexie Smith 

And we even leveraged this win by turning it into a free me a mini book specifically, that we then leverage to grow our email list. So again, here’s an example of us developing and using a multi touchpoint campaign for one tactic. Another example I have a client, her communities called girl get after it. And she is a product based business and a community.

 

Lexie Smith 

And she was featured in women’s health in a roundup, which again, that actual digital feature was giving her a backlink to her site, to which she saw evidence of in her back end analytics. And what I thought was really cool and unique is she created a real on Instagram, showcasing like the actual pictures of her analytics showing the traffic it generated her. So this in her mind was an example of her showing your speaking to her community as a founder and how exciting it was and that hey, press really does work. She also now features the fact that she was in women’s health across her website. And in her press feature, she sent out an email she did all the thing’s super, super smart. Okay, so another one I want to talk to a client of mine gets all the gold stars, she launched a conference and she did so many things for it. So first, she leveraged all of her own company channels. But then she also created new channels for the conference, such as a conference specific website, and conference specific social channels. Now, those tucked back to her business website, the bra network. She also learned a really big speaker, Rachael Rogers, if you’re familiar, and she leveraged that when in a second set of promotion outside of her initial conference promotions. So this is demonstrating how one topic we can find multiple news points in she pitched herself to podcasts, not Rachel, my client to talk about the conference give me a call to action that pointed back to this conference website. She posted in her own community which utilizes slack so she didn’t forget to tap into her existing community. IE, she did tons of newsletters. But she also went one step further and sent out personal partner emails actually received one, asking for people to help her spread the word, which she made a very easy list by creating graphics, captions, and copy that partners could easily copy and paste. So again, she has thought about this from all the angles and inorganic sense. One more example I’ll talk about here, a client of mine, for life landed a really big partnership. And things that you didn’t necessarily see behind the scenes that are worth talking about is this partnership, which her company’s site for life, it’s an app, and she landed a partnership with FICA, which is a thyroid cancer survivors Association. What you don’t see in her partnership announcement, which of course, she put on LinkedIn, on social media, when the partnership went live, is that this was a partnership that took a year in the making. This was a year of working on relationship building, keeping in contact through email and through phone. She was very proactive, she sent routine updates to the site got contact, she had letting them know what was going on with her company, she intentionally interacted with the key players on social media. Also, this partnership is promoted in her app, and via email. Okay, and this partnership is being featured in their in person virtual conference. So again, just an example of how one tactic, this partnership, right, is being leveraged across all sorts of channels. So what did we learn from all this? Me talking about you, right? Number one, we learned our PR efforts, often organically cross platforms. Therefore, it’s very strategic to develop an omni channel approach and strategy ahead of time to prepare.

 

Lexie Smith 

And knowing this, knowing that they’re going across platforms, we want to ensure our messaging and our experience across all of these platforms is cohesive, right? Another lesson, if we aren’t already, we should start to leverage singular tactics or outcomes across a multitude of platforms. This is extending the reach and shelf life of an effort or campaign. Again, I gave you tons of examples, but you can promote a press win across many different channels. Another lesson, we can strategically leverage our efforts to guide people along or through our channels with thoughtful call to actions. So an example here could be if a campaign of ours is living on Instagram, then how can we leverage the Instagram biotechs to get people to click on a link that then has them sign up for our email, right, this is very thoughtfully, using call to actions to guide people across our channels. Another lesson, when we develop multi touchpoint campaigns, we are often achieving far more than our initial goal. So while our goal might be broad or specific, and really dealing with one of those six key stakeholders, usually speaking, if we’re leveraging it, and we’re creating an omni channel approach, we’re touching way more than just one relation of PR. So some final thoughts for you, as we wrap up this episode, want to make sure that we have a consistent brand message across all our platforms? Also consistent brand visuals? We also want to think of who is where, what do I mean by who is where are you promoting a different price on your Instagram.

 

Lexie Smith 

But your clients can see Instagram, and they got you know, a different price. And now they’re feeling ripped off meaning as you go across channels, think about who’s where, where are your customers? Where are your investors? You know, if you’re going to talk or promote one thing on one channel, just be mindful of who might see it. Another thing to think about where do we want people to go, right? How are we going to lead them strategically across the multitude of channels we’re putting together? And then again, always ask yourself, have we leveraged a singular tactic across as many channels as possible? So then, just to let you know, I went into some live activities and some really, really awesome q&a with the class. But I’d love to hear your thoughts right. This was a mini mini masterclass without the visuals on omni channel marketing. I’d love to hear what resonates or if you have any questions. As always, feel free to shoot me a message Instagram is usually where I hang out at the PR underscore Inc. But you can hit me up and find me on LinkedIn or email as well. Until next time, cheers