The effects of New Media on Marketing and PR

Another similarity between Marketing and PR is the increased use of new media to transmit messages to the audience as opposed to just sticking to the more traditional methods like direct marketing and advertising. Marketing and PR brands have to work hard to keep their brand one step ahead of the rest. One of the ways they can do this is to keep up to date with the rapid technological changes that allow them to target consumers in new and ingenious ways.

According to David Meerman Scott in his book- The New Rules of Marketing and PR,the new rules are all about breaking the rules and creating new roles in traditional functional areas.

We're now in a content rich,internet driven world. No longer are PR practitioners limited in where and how they direct their knowledge and perception management skills. Mobile phones, emails, news releases online, blogs, podcasting, viral marketing are all tools used by both to send messages out in a much faster way.

The frustration of relying exclusively on the media and expensive advertising to deliver an organisations messages is long gone. Mainstream media is still important but today smart marketers craft compelling messages and tell the world directly via the web.

The tremendous expense of relying on advertising to convince buyers to pay attention to your products is yesterday's headache.

E-Business is Big Business

An example is Tesco (a department store in the UK)'s e-commerce site which made £447 million in online sales in 2002,up to 26% in 2001. This led to a thirty-fold increase in profits from £400,000 to £12.2 million. Tesco's web shopping site processes around 110,000 weekly orders(Source:Ukonline for business)

Market research

The internet is great for looking at competitors websites and as a tool for customers surveys,market analysis and business reports

Promotion

Customers can find out about services and products via the website.

Search engine optimization

Getting in a good position on a search engine is vital.you need to optimise key words on the site and ask other websites to link through to your site-hyperlinks boost search ratings.The surest way of controlling a position on a search engine is by paying.

Overall, there is no doubt that online media is a major platform in reaching a wider audience. PR has been slow to champion online methods unlike advertising and marketing agencies who were quick to recognise the advantages of the online media and use it as a channel to reach consumers.

According to Simon Collister of Edelman PR agency, the threat to the PR industry is in measurement and evaluation. PR needs to go down a conversational route and see how word of mouth can be measured by getting clients/customers to talk with each other.

In all, the method used to reach consumers is based on the clients overriding strategy.