My Marketing TrendsKelly Kressner, Marketing Specialist |
Being your own media is a concept I recently embraced after listening to a webinar by Marketing Strategist, David Meerman Scott. This concept is about utilizing today’s technology to increase brand awareness. For example, if you have a press release or compelling story you want to publish, you no longer need to hope that a news editor will run it because you can easily publish it online.
The birth of the Internet and social marketing has put the reins in your hands to promote your brand. If you’re looking to give your financial institution a little publicity, here are some of the latest strategies you can employ:
- Use an Online Press Release Distribution Service (i.e. PR Web, PRNewswire) – For a small fee, your press releases can gain a lot of exposure by appearing on online news services such as Yahoo! or Google or even industry websites.
- Start Your Own Blog – While it does take a lot of work to get a blog started, once you have determined the focus for it, it can lead to strong public exposure.
- Create a Facebook Business Page & Twitter Account – Both of these can be used as media outlets to promote company news, press releases, blog posts and upcoming seminars and events.
- Add a ‘News’ Section to Your Website – By adding this section to your website you now have a designated area dedicated to posting company news and press releases. This will give the search-engine spiders more content to crawl through, too!
How has your financial institution embraced new technologies to promote its brand? Share your story with us!
Feeling concerned about budget cuts and how other marketing tools may help to spread your marketing messages? Register for our FREE webinar, Let’s Talk Strategy – Layering Online & Social Media with Traditional Marketing. Tune in on Wednesday, April 22, 2009 (8:30am PDT, 11:30am EDT) to hear from the faculty of our educational partner, Credit Union Marketing University, key tips on how to weave online solutions including social media into your marketing efforts to stretch your 2009 budget. As part of our commitment to marketing education through CU Marketing University, we provide webinars free of charge. To register, click here.
You bring up a great point, Jeffry! (Also, you just gave me a great idea for our site as well.) By adding an RSS Feed to their press releases, financial institutions have a better chance to get recognized for the positive things they are doing!
Both a “News” section and “Press Releases” section of a website should have RSS feeds. It is very Web 1.0 to make people go seek out this information.
There are very, very few financial institutions offering RSS feeds of their press releases — unbelievably ridiculous considering how easy it is. And speaking personally, as an editor of a financial publication, it is extremely frustrating. I have to load up about 20 websites every month to see what new press releases they have. Sometimes, the stories are so old and outdated (considering the pace of news cycles these days, that can even be by a week or two), that I can’t run the story. However, if I had an RSS feed, I would have known the very instant they published their release(s).