10 Yetis Video Tutorial Feat Shannon and Kalli - PR Assets that work for digital campaigns

Shannon and Kalli recently sat down and went through the types of creative assets that can support a digital public relations campaign.

Types of PR Assets that work for Digital Campaigns

The Transcript...

Today we're talking about PR assets. A PR asset is anything that will make your campaign stronger or more newsworthy. We tend to use a lot of PR assets because we work on cross platform campaigns; including PR, social media, concept images and other things like that.

So first up: microsites. A microsite is a stand-alone website with a clear focus or activity that the end-user can do, usually a quiz that's going to have results that are shareable. The main reason that people use micro-sites is not just because they're fun, but they have great SEO benefits. Once you've had the site open for three months, for example, you can 301 redirect the link equity and send that through to your current website, to maximise on the search result benefits and get all the SEO juice. We find that microsites work best when they're not too heavily branded. People tend to be more likely to share them if the branding isn't too in-your-face.

Social Santa was a good example of a microsite. Users could log into the site and it would pull all their Twitter data together and tell them how many swear words they've used; essentially, whether they'd been naughty or nice. They could then share that result on their social platforms.

We're pretty good at all that sort of stuff, not least because we've won a couple of awards for them.

The next PR asset is video. The main thing we consider when we're producing a video is the fact that it has to be short and sweet, as long as it serves its purpose. People's attention spans now are non-existent, with Twitter feeds for example. As long as your video gets to the point quite quickly and is really fun or stirs some sort of emotion, you will get that 'viral' factor. If it will make you want to laugh, cry or want to know more, you know that you've bagged a good video.

Another way you can ensure your video will perform at it's best is to make it topical and zeitgeisty. For instance, at the moment, the Great British Bake Off is on, so if you want to jump into that audience, create a fun and related video and you'll smash it.

The good thing about using video as part of a digital campaign is that journalists are more likely to use a story if it has a video element, because they're quite 'sticky' and share-able and users are more likely to stay on their page for longer to watch them.

Social media: it's massive and has taken over the whole world. It needs to be part of your PR campaign. The way we work now, it is usually just part and parcel. We look at the campaigns holistically, considering all of the aspects we use and how best they can work together. Social media ties together the other assets, by sharing the content provided by different channels, which is another way to engage your audience and grow your brand. The humble hashtag is a great way to make sure people see something all at the same time.

Next up: images. If your digital campaign has really strong images to support it, that's going to work really well, because again journalists are always looking for pictures to include. People on social media are also always looking for images to share. You do need some really strong images, whether they're just images of stunts, concept images or facemorphs - anything like that works really well.

It's even better if the images are original. If they're branded, strong, visual content that people can relate to and aspire to, you're onto a winner.

Another great asset is research. If you have any really interesting statistics, figures or site data to support a story, it will work really well for digital campaigns, especially generating links. Another great thing about data is that you can regurgitate it into a visual infographic; that could be broken down and shared on social channels, it can be hosted on a blog. It's really strong as collateral when pushing out a press release, as well, because journalists like visual content providing they look really pretty. They also provide another great way to jump on the bandwagon of hashtags.

Finally, we come to whitepapers. It might annoy a few of you, but we're going to make this one fun. We're going to use a load of the industry wankwords now! So: Whitepapers - they do instill a lot of thought leadership; they demonstrate expertise, but they can also be used for data capture and email mining. You can stipulate that the user has to fill out their information, such as email addresses, before they are able to download the whitepaper from your website. This helps to increase traffic and also gives you more data to use for marketing purposes.

As long as you think outside the box a bit and ensure you make a really interesting point, those are the ones that work best.

Those are the top PR assets, which we think it's always important to consider. We've been 10 Yetis - you've been beautiful.

Toodle Pip.