Reach your target audience in European affairs!

However, how do you ensure that your online press releases are actually being read by your target audience? Do you manage to position your statement on targeted keywords and expressions in the SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages) – thus allowing you to drive qualified Internet visitors to your online press releases?

In order to increase your online visibility on key issues, it is essential to apply emarketing techniques to your communication strategy, i.e. integrating web copywriting and SEO (Search Engine Optimization) techniques with a strong CRM solution. Eventually, you can also incluse a short SEM campaign to ensure that your online press release is being read by the maximum audience in the right timeframe.

Apply « marcom » techniques to your online press releases

This strategic combination – often used in « marcom » (Integrated Marketing Communications) – gives you the opportunity to cost-effectively refine your target audience while expanding the scope of your online visibility.

Additionally, thanks to Web Analytics, you are able to precisely assess the impact of your online press releases – and thus monitor your stakeholder outreach and ROI (Return on Investment).

Our eMarketing agency has been specializing into delivering such services in European affairs. If you are interested by our services dedicated to European actors, do not hesitate to contact us.

A result-driven approach

eMarketing solutions provide measurable results as they focus primarily on the ROI (return on investment) from a quantitative and qualitative perspective. Indeed, the integration of Web Analytics ensure a continuous improvement of an eMarketing campaign and the generation of a comprehensive final impact assessment.

Example

As an industry federation for example, you might be willing to target a specific group of MEPs working on specific issues. While sending them brochures or press release can be very expensive, it is also not a guarantee that your position will be read. However, if you were to issue a targeted communication campaign online, it would not only be a cost-effective solution but you would be able to know if you have reached your target. This is also why you should seriously think about investing into online communication. This is actually far more justifiable than a costly press relation relations campaign.

What are social media?

Social media designed to be disseminated through social interaction, created using highly accessible and scalable publishing techniques. Social media are increasingly integrating integrated into eMarketing strategy to promote online a brand, product or service using SMO (Social Media Optimization), a specific branch of Social Media Marketing (SMM).

Are social media fitted for European affairs?

Though social media offer many opportunities for organizations  to increase their visibility, are they fitted for European affairs? I would present six practical examples to convince you that it is actually the case.

1. Blogs

A corporate blog is recognized to be a major communication channel tool either to manage internal communication or develop external communication. Especially in the context of the development of en EU blogosphere. Indeed, during the last five years, EU blogs have been progressively emerging. Being relatively fragmented in the beginning, the European blogosphere tends now to grow in importance and influence. It has now become very important not only to monitor EU blogs but also to engage with them. Obviously, the best way is to already have a blog.

2.Twitter accounts

Twitter is a free social-networking and micro-blogging service that enables its users to send and read messages known as tweets. Twitter accounts have been developing very fast during the last year. Surprisingly, it has also been adopted quite easily by European stakeholders.

Having a Twitter brings many advantages:

• Monitoring: The very nature of Twitter makes it an excellent tool to monitor the activity of key stakeholders (e.g. What does think the communication manager of the industry federation)?
• Social-networking:  Twitter allows you to engage into discussions very targeted to your interests and therefore get in touch with users that have similar interests.
• Knowledge management: One of the great thing with Twitter is that it allows you to share valuable resources and thus potentially discover a lot of things in your field of interes.

3. Facebook pages

Is Facebook fitted for European affairs? I would say it depends of the nature of the organization and the cause which is advocated. Obviously, for a NGO, it can be an excellent tool to organize an event or launch a cause. Generally speaking, blogs, wikis and social-networking platforms generate new opportunities to implement cost-effectively online grassroots campaigns and raise awareness about specific issues for NGOs. Regarding and industry federation, the ROI (return on investment) is not obvious! However, for EU institutions, it can be quite effective. See the European Parliament online campaign for the 2009 European elections.

4. LinkedIn groups

In general, LinkedIn offers many opportunities to recruit high profile candidates in European affairs. More important, the possibility to create, animate and promote LinkedIn professional groups offers many opportunities among which the possibility to manage a small community of experts on a specific issue. For industry federations which often have to deal with national members, it can also be an excellent internal communication tool.

5. YouTube videos

According to ComScore, video search on YouTube accounted for a quarter of all Google search queries 2008. More important, it also suggested that YouTube achieves a greater level of search traffic than Yahoo. If you were to consider YouTube’s integrated search a regular search engine, you would have to hand Google the top two spots for search engine traffic. As well as you have to continuously try to improve your search engine rankings on your key issues, you should never underestimate the great potential of YouTube.

6. Wikipedia articles

Have you noticed that Wikipedia articles, the worldwide online free encyclopedia built collaboratively, have excellent search engine rankings? That’s why, it is very important not only to monitor Wikipedia articles linked to your issues but also to eventually edit them accordingly to your interest. However, beware to always respect Wikipedia guidelines if you don’t want to be kicked out.

Reaching out a strategic online visibility and influence

As we also stated in our Brussels’ eMarketing Blog, it is impossible now to any European stakeholder to ignore the opportunities generated by the Internet.  Generating an online presence by creating a website is not sufficient anymore if one really wants to influence the online and aslo offline debate on key issues.

Positionning yourself on strategic key issues

• To take an example: Being well positionned on the keywords « sustainable development » on major search engines demonstrate your authority on this key issue and also bring online visibility to your own position. It gets even more obvious if you get well-positionned on the name of an European Commission Directive regarding this issue.
• Another example: Online advertising makes now possible to target very accurately Internet users on linguistric criteria, geograpical criteria (Region, Country, City, etc.) and more important centre of interests (EU Politics, Sustainable Development, etc.).

eLobbying

Reaching a strategic online visibility to influence the debate on strategic key political issues is called eLobbying. This strategy brings both the advantages of eMarketing and lobbying.

The fragmented nature of EU institutional structure provides multiple channels through which organized interests may seek to influence policy-making. The Internet definitely becomes one of this channel in the context of the development of the information society and of the knowledge economy.

Hence, the absolute necessity for European Union stakeholders seeking to influence the decision-making process to integrate the Internet in their communication strategy toward the EU institutions. Indeed, a well-thought eMarketing strategy is a  guarantee of presence, visibility and influence on key issues.