Hodges Starters recap: Beyond Boosting

You’re hearing a lot from me on the “Integrated” Public Relations model of earned, owned and paid media. It is a drum I will continue to beat frequently.

It is that paid piece that was the focus of today’s Hodges Starters event “Beyond Boosting,” presented very capably by Emily Shane and Kelsey Leavey. They and others at THP have gone above and beyond by self-teaching themselves and staying ahead of the latest social advertising tools on various platforms.

IMHO, any PR agency who does not have a growing expertise is the social ad space is only delivering half of the content equation to their clients. The subhead of the presentation is “What’s required to keep your content from falling into black hole.” Given the pressure that the social platforms have placed on themselves to make money, that’s exactly where most content is falling.

Emily and Kelsey nicely traced the 11-year history of social ads from “Facebook Flyers” to the more sophisticated algorithm-based tools of today. But the ”kick in the stomach” stat for most in the room today was as Facebook earned more than $3.59 billion (with a “b”) in ad revenue in the fourth quarter of last year alone, its organic reach for posts fell to just six percent.

If you’re not spending at least some money then few folks are hearing what you are saying.

While I won’t bore you by explaining all the tools Facebook and Twitter offer marketers, the key takeaways are you can target audiences by interest, message, – and it’s pretty affordable. In many cases you can tailor the audiences and remarket ads to folks you already have on email lists or to those who visit your website.

The keys are making sure your advertising is married to your content and that both are aligned to your marketing goals (website traffic, leads, purchase, likes, etc.). You can then start with relatively small budgets ($500 or less on each platform) to test those campaigns and build from there.

But the bottom line (as I’ve said before) is that we at THP view these platforms as much as advertising platforms as we view them as content platforms. That’s part of the beauty of the “integrated” model. The earned, owned and paid working together to achieve the broader marketing goals.

We will be talking more about this. If you think this is valuable to you organization Emily and Kelsey are happy to present to your group. Just let us know. We’re also kicking around a webinar on this topic so stay tuned.

And before you ask “what about LinkedIn?” Well there’s only so much you can fit into an hour so we’re working on that for our next Hodges Starters event for all you B2B freaks out there.

Please subscribe to the blog to make sure you don’t miss the announcement and date.

As always would love to hear your ideas and comments below.