The future of offline media is clearly in jeopardy, Contract Journal being the latest casualty. The unfortunate truth for publishers of hard copy journals is that in house marketing experts and PR professionals around the world are fast coming to terms with the fact that the quickest, most efficient and cost effective way to get results is by online PR campaigns.

Some may think this is a recent transition but don’t forget, the internet was officially launched in 1989. If you were an early adopter in that year, you will have been using search engines and websites for two decades.

With that in mind, PR & Marketing firms that send out dozens of press releases to editors of hard copy publications instead of relevant online industry portals could be considered ‘old school’ and will soon fall by the wayside. Many people have gone so far as to predict that they will become obsolete by the end of 2011.

It is the ‘traditional’ PR and Marketing firms such as these that don’t fully recognise the value of publishing news online. For the more ‘internet savvy’ companies, publishing optimised press releases within relevant news portals online is a fundamental part of their online PR and search engine optimisation strategy.

Demand for results

Many companies cut spend and often on marketing when figures take a downturn.  For in-house Marketing Managers and Agency PR Professionals, the key to surviving the recession with your budget, and your job intact, is to demonstrate the clear value (and return) of your marketing efforts to the company (or client).  This is easier to do when you have invested in online PR & Marketing, than with more traditional mediums such as traditional PR, direct mail and advertising, but it is nonetheless important to both.

The difference in measurability between online and offline marketing campaigns is phenomenal. An online campaign will allow you to monitor results on a monthly, weekly, daily and even hourly rate and you can quickly track results of a well placed press release by simply checking your Google Analytics and using Google Alerts. Blog stats, web stats and subscribers per day can be monitored easily. Offline methods simply cannot be measured in such an intricate manner.

If you have a marketing budget and you have invested in a campaign, surely you are expected to monitor the effectiveness otherwise how do you know your money is being invested wisely? For those of you that haven’t allocated part of your budget to online PR campaigns then you definitely should have.

If you have gone to the trouble of having a website designed, you must already recognise the importance of doing business online. The question to ask yourself is ‘How will my customers find my website?’

The thing to remember is that people won’t necessarily stumble upon your website unless you appear on page 1 of Google. It is a common goal of many companies to strive to become ‘top of Google’ so that their customers can easily find their site when typing in the keywords that relate to their business. The main reason that companies have the goal of achieving Page 1 ranking on Google is to attract a higher volume of relevant traffic / enquiries.

Achieving page 1 status on Google involves employing a SEO strategy and the results don’t happen overnight. There is a quick, simple and cost effective method of driving relevant traffic to your website which will (in the long run) assist with the ranking of your site on the search engines and this is publishing optimised press release within a relevant industry portal (with instant press release distribution facilities e.g. Google News Publisher status).

By publishing optimised news within a relevant industry portal, you will already find that there is an established target audience eager to read your news. Make it easy for them to read more about your company from the press release by including search engine optimised links.

Employing this simple method will mean that you see an noticed improvement in the traffic to your website which (in simple terms) means more enquiries.

To start publishing optimised press releases, visit www.industrytoday.co.uk