NewsCactus Blog

Technology, more than any other thing, has caused the convergence of traditional advertising, public relations and marketing. Call it marketing communications, or claim it all falls under one of those three umbrellas, the fact remains: to be effective at securing customers or influencing opinion (and ultimately action), you need to master inbound marketing.

Inbound marketing is the process by which you drive traffic to your content, specifically online content.

There are many components to inbound marketing. Included among them are:

• Search engine optimization
• Search engine marketing
• Blogging
• Participation in online forums and communities; and
• Social media.

An online newsroom accomplishes many of these components, and here’s how . . .

The top 9 reasons why an online newsroom helps with inbound marketing

1. Press releases inherently contain keywords and appropriate information for your company or organization, product or service. This helps with SEO.

2. People are searching for information. Increasingly old print mediums are falling behind the Internet when it comes to locating desired information. By self-publishing your information, you provide it ‘straight from the horse’s mouth,’ so-to-speak. Your newsroom provides for both SEO and SEM.

3. If you have a good online newsroom, your news and announcements are tied to an RSS feed. That’s the same technology that powers blogs and makes blogging such a powerful search placement tool. Utilizing RSS in a newsroom turns your newsroom into an equally powerful search placement tool. Remember, it contains keywords and you update the information frequently. A press release a week will go a long way to position you at the top of online search results. This meets the blogging component.

4. If your online newsroom makes it easy for people to share your information, then you’re participating in social media. People should be able — with very little effort — to share your news through inbound links, tagging, or on social networks like Facebook. It also helps if they can print your press release with little effort and have a document that looks and feels like a press release with your corporate logo and contact information included.

5. Posting press releases makes it easy for brand champions to share your news with their online communities. It’s not so much about reaching that one top tier publication as it is about how deep your network is and how many individuals will share your information with their friends. It’s about leveraging your network. This is word of mouth marketing, and technology helps it work better than ever.

6. Online marketing strategy is no longer encompassed by a corporate home page. In fact, you ought to consider Google search as your home page. The more search results you control, the more likely you are to succeed at online marketing. Instead of utilizing your dot-com site as your main Internet presence, it should become a news portal — a place where you link to all your Internet properties — which can include your newsroom, blog(s), Twitter account(s), Facebook page(s), employees’ LinkedIn pages, Flickr account(s), YouTube account(s), online reference libraries like Digg and Del.icio.us, etc.

7. An online newsroom, like your main Web site, becomes a news portal where you link to all your Internet properties. This increases traffic to your sites.

8. A good newsroom will include multimedia such as images, photos, graphics, documents, video and audio files. With multimedia files associated with your press releases, you have a much greater chance of someone sharing your information either online, in print or in person. We live in a YouTube era where people want it all: words, audio and video.

9. Interactivity is key. A newsroom provides multiple ways to interact with your company. From viewing executive biographies and headshots, to linking to your social media sites, to sharing video about your latest product, the newsroom (like your home page) should be a place where your key constituencies can ‘touch and feel’ your company. A list of press releases barely scratches the surface of what an online newsroom should be.