Today’s marketing landscape is drastically different than it was a few years ago.
“Social media, smart phones, digital television and big data in general have led to fractured audiences and the end of ‘news as an event,’” wrote Patrick Coffee for PRNewser. “We no longer pick up the paper to read on the train in the morning nor say, ‘Honey, leave the dishes, it’s time for the 9PM news.’ We receive aggregated news, in real-time, customized to us, through myriad sources and formats.”
Coffee’s report is not some new revelation. We all know that the way we consume content today is different than it was even a few years ago. However, while we know content consumption habits have changed, few marketing directors have figured out how to truly take advantage of it.
“PR people now have the challenge to figure out how to reach their audiences without a single silver bullet,” Coffee adds. “Normalizing the results of their efforts and measuring how they actually moved the needle is a bigger challenge than it ever has been.
“From a client perspective, PR frequently looks like a cost center instead of a profit center, which is typically why marketing and PR budgets tend to be cut first.”
As Coffee said, there is no “silver bullet” when it comes to utilizing Internet and new media marketing. That’s why Paradigm Digital Group’s strategy of developing an Internet marketing strategy that is unique to your career college is so successful.
In his article, Coffee highlights some of the new media marketing tools being used to track the success rate of campaigns. They include:
Cision’s Digital Reach. Cision provides a proprietary unique visitors per month (UVPM) figure derived from social shares across platforms. The formula is based on a statistical model that we’ve developed which expresses the relationship between a site’s unique visitors per month and its social share counts. Using this metric helps give PR pros specific visitor numbers that truly reflect the way most people experience the Web.
Moz’s Domain Authority. How will a particular site rank in Google’s search results? Taking Digital Reach a step further, SEO is an important consideration for all PR pros and Moz.com has created a formula to help you measure exactly how likely a site is to rank at the top of results in their Domain Authority tool.
Google Authorship and Google Analytics. This concerns people instead of sites. If you blog on behalf of your brand or your client, make sure your Google+ page is linked to Google Authorship – you will have more SEO juice simply for telling Google who you are as an author. Additionally, Google Analytics can be your BFF whether you are talking about owned media or earned media. Did a media mention create a spike in traffic to your site? Which page? What messages were stickiest?
New Engine Optimization (NEO). We’ve all focused on SEO, and then Social Media Optimization (SMO), but now AirPR has trademarked and introduced us to NEO, describing the insights on how soundbytes and key messages are being embraced by media and influencers.
This list is of just a few of the tools used to track marketing reach. Tracking reach is one thing, but putting together a successful marketing plan is another. At Paradigm Digital we specialize in creating Internet marketing plans that are specific to career colleges.
If your career college or trade school is in need of a new focus when it comes to marketing, let Paradigm Digital help you explore your options and develop a plan that is designed to get results.