Media integration — that is relating marketing activities within one context into another — has become an increasingly important consideration in effective architectural, engineering and construction marketing communications.
In the “old days” (in quotes because really, these were only just a few years ago), you would focus your strategy within some expected cycles. There would be trade shows, for which you would prepare with booth set-up and design, and news releases to encourage trade media coverage. If you have an industry-specific down-market, you might advertise in these publications, perhaps with some brochures and direct mail marketing. There would be some overall relationship between these initiatives in terms of budget and brand themes, but they generally stood on their own power.
Now, of course, we have the added digital options including websites, social media, and search engine optimization. The other options still exist — especially relevant trade shows — but you need to think even more carefully about how the pieces fit together or you’ll spend a lot of money for limited results.
- Think of special domains/urls for specific functions/events/shows. Your URL would lead to appropriate landing pages within your site containing curated materials and offers relevant to the associated program.
- Leverage your site with blog posts with autofeeds to social media. This technique has become one of our favorite (and most effective) outreach tools. The original content generated through wordpress.org software (free), autoposts to relevant Facebook and Twitter feeds. ?Then, we’ve discovered interested readers (often the subjects of the stories) forward these feeds to their communities, resulting in true traffic surges.
- Related to the above, consider an effective eletter or eletters geared to readers’ interests. Again, you can set things so your content “refeeds” to the eletter and powers additional leverage.
- Leverage trade media publicity in “conventional” media across social media; also include copies as handouts in trade show material. (If it is video, you could rebroadcast it on your site.)
- Consider multi-media follow-ons to high impact events such as speeches and conferences. These can be packaged into white papers, videos, social media and more, and provide content for months of blog feeds (and related social media coverage.)
- Many of these leveraging tools are easy to adopt and don’t require great management or programming skills. In other cases, commercial media (such as our organizations) will provide the multi-media service as part of our offering. So, for example, you could purchase an advertising package with us that would include print display ads, magazine editorial content, social media feeds and links, website/url articles, and the like, and you can adapt all of these to your own promotional strategies.
If you want to see these processes at work, I encourage you to try an experiment for less than $400. We’ll generate four weeks of relevant website/banner advertising, along with email and social media feeds, and provide you the tools to apply these resources beyond our publications/sites at virtually no additional investment. Then you can track the results and see how everything together produces results greater than the sum of the individual components.
For more information, visit the publicity/media page on any of our sites (see cnrgp.com for a list of them) or email buckshon@constructionmarketingideas.com.
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