RISE PR IN ACTION – CONTENT CREATION AND CREATING A BLOG PRESENCE
Posted by Paul Allen on 7th October 2015 / 0 comments
I have written before about my love of writing. It’s why I first started out in PR and remains the part of the job I love most now that I’m firmly established a freelancer tech PR consultant.
When you are a freelance PR, it’s important to be versatile. Clients (mostly) tend to be smaller and require you to be more flexible in how you support them. So I have written everything from social media content to web copy, and whitepapers to bylined articles for clients…and just about everything else you could care to think of.
A recent project that I’ve particularly enjoyed is one for customer experience consultancy, PeopleTECH. As a company involved in digital transformation, the customer journey / experience and omnichannel, it was important to position PeopleTECH’s MD Mike Hughes as an expert in these fields and to demonstrate his knowledge, experience and expertise. This is how we did it.
Blog properties – internal or external?
Comms professionals have had much debate over whether a blog should be published on a company’s own website, or on a third party’s. I totally understand the thinking about keeping traffic on your own web property, but in PeopleTECH’s case I felt that the benefits from partnering with the right media title – credibility, ready-made audience, etc – would outweigh any reduction in web traffic.
Given PeopleTECH’s areas of specialism, the best media title was MyCustomer.com, which has the title suggests, focuses on all elements of the modern customer experience. We set Mike Hughes up as a blogger and community member on MyCustomer.com and set to work on creating a content plan.
The importance of content calendar
Following an initial briefing call with Mike, Rise PR agreed a content calendar to take us through to August (2015). The topics reflected Mike’s areas of knowledge and the sectors in which he most wanted to demonstrate knowledge (FS, retail, telco).
We pride ourselves on our ability to get under the skin of a client and really understand their business, and this was really highlighted with our content creation for PeopleTECH. Because we get up to speed so quickly, we can write efficiently and effectively, without the client having to handhold at every step of the way. One of the benefits of using experienced PR consultants, I would suggest.
Seeing the benefits
Every element of a PR or comms programme should be measured via business benefits. Some of the PeopleTECH content has been among the most viewed on MyCustomer this year, and we received consistent feedback from those that read and commented on it. People were also clicking through to the PeopleTECH website in considerable numbers too, so there was little discernible impact on traffic from hosting the blog elsewhere.
Finally, we always try and make good content work hard for a client. Some of the blog content we were able to adapt and use elsewhere, via bylined article placements in the press, so this was content creation that really made an impact for the client.
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