PR Planning using 30-60-90 Day Reports With your list of recommendations, you start gaining some insight into what needs to be accomplished. Auditing your industry might tell you that top sites all have articles or content about industry specific topics. The audit might also tell you that many webmasters link to these articles from their own sites and are actually promoting clients services through use of these articles. Online PR efforts would focus on setting goals and planning to achieve this same thing.

Online PR plan for Link Building Through Articles:

* In 30 days, five articles placed on thirty different industry websites * In 60 days, fifteen articles placed on 90 different industry websites * In 90 days, thirty articles posted on 180 different industry websites

By researching competition and developing a comprehensive plan, you know what it takes to achieve online PR success. By planning your goals and focusing on only what is directly at hand, you will more quickly start developing your PR image and brand identity on Web.

What is Secret to a GREAT PR Plan? Are you ready for secret to a great PR plan? Creativity. Great PR planning is satisfied through development of ingenious ideas. The reason most PR plans fail is actual absence of creativity. If you are a journalist you will understand that most of press releases that are received are like form letters detailing some obscure part of your business; XYZ Corp. Releases (some ambiguous product or service). The problem with this is while it may be news to you, it's not news to journalist or other thousands of companies who release this information every day to media and general public. If you want your online PR campaign to be successful, identify what need, issue or problem your product or service solves.

The sales sequence is similar to that of branded companies:

- The prospects know whom they’re dealing with.

- The prospects trust selling company, having dealt with them before at least once via traditional offline methods.

- The prospects are being offered some incentive to buy online.

- The company doing selling backs up its sales with good customer service.

If you’re responsible for online sales of this kind of company, and if you match your strategy to requirements above, then an effective online sales strategy should be highly feasible. The companies that failed were ones who didn’t give their prospects any good reason to shop online or simply had poor websites. Most companies of this type used web as another channel to help with customer retention and loyalty. The ones that did it best were ones that were most successful.

3) Non-Branded companies

Companies who do not have known brands and are not trusted at all can achieve sales conversions at same levels as branded companies. We found that by building levels of trust in prospect base via education and then selling product or service to educated, and therefore trusting, prospect base, same level of conversion overall can be achieved. The successful companies give away samples of their product or valuable information, in turn getting web visitors to give company their email addresses and permission to continue dialog. This allows companies to continue to educate their prospects.

The selling sequence is completely different from first two:

- Cold prospect (arriving as a web visitor) will not immediately buy because he doesn’t know with whom he is dealing.

- Prospect is educated by company through online content, email, articles, resources and free products.

- Prospect begins to know company and his appreciation of company grows.

- Prospect becomes a customer as he realizes value of proposition and trusts company.

- The company backs up its sales with good customer service, thus encouraging viral marketing and good word of mouth.

This is where most errors of judgment have been made when building effective sales channels through online means. Businesses have been copying what big companies have done, thinking that merely by having a website which does same as a brand name website, a similar level of sales conversion will be attained. Worse still, they have simply gone out and made poster sites with shopping carts with no thought as to why a web visitor would buy from them. Where companies tend to fail even using correct sales sequence is in not providing valuable enough information as education, thus damaging their reputations before they have even built them up. So, if your responsibility is to develop online sales strategy of a non-branded, unknown company, then our research shows that above strategy, while work intensive, does work.

Summary

One simple fact remains true no matter what kind of sales and marketing strategy is used. If buyer doesn’t trust seller, then sale will not happen. It’s been said that a prospective buyer doesn’t become a customer until he’s seen brand seven or eight times. While I don’t have a statistic to prove it, I am 100% sure this is why McDonald’s and Coca Cola have less work to do on their websites to get good sales conversion rates. By mentioning those brand names in this article, I have helped them with their marketing. You have a burger and a can of coke pictured in your head right now. If you’re a non-branded company, you have a great deal more work to do to earn yourself that consumer trust. But then who said sales and marketing was easy? Non-branded companies have more work to get customers offline, so why should it be any different online?