Digital PR in Thailand

It is worth beginning by saying that as we are now in the fully “post-print” era, whatever approaches we decide to take with regards your PR plan will full leverage the power of digital. When we say ‘online PR’, we are essentially just saying PR, as they are one and the same.

A comprehensive integrated PR program could include perhaps: press release writeups, a media FAM (familiarization) site trip, social media management, social media advertising, KOLs, a media roundtable (small face-to-face meet with a group of media) and one-on-one interviews with a few target top-tier publications. When we consider these activities which make up the overall PR plan, we note that several are traditional in the sense that they are offline (press releases, FAM trip, roundtable and interviews). However, we will fully utilise the digital and online channels available to us to maximise the reach, interactivity and ROI of all of these.

This means your press releases will be optimised for SEO so they capture strong reach online, the FAM trip will be video recorded thereby unlocking lots of content marketing opportunities, and your real-life engagement with journalists will result in content we will use every which way online and collaboratively through your owned digital channel push.

To answer this, we can essentially reply by saying, “anything that appears on your PR plan.” As all media stakeholders are online anyway, even beyond those that still print glossy or paper-based publications, all PR is basically digital PR. Rather than being an impediment, this unlocks a myriad of ways in which to leverage any content and comms produced, and repurpose it across all of our available channels.

This can work both ways, too. Imagine you are leveraging a well-known KOL at significant cost to lead your campaign messaging and connect to new customers online. Those photos and content created by your in-person engagement with that influencer is likely to drive activities where you affiliation is promoted to media stakeholders too, and that includes the traditional ones.

The blend to which we decide to try and balance online PR with strict digital marketing (such as paid adds and retargeting) will depend on quite a number of factors. Chief among those will be the overall campaign budget, the degree to which you are already using digital marketing programs and what kind of ROI they are delivering for you, as well as the owned content you have, how fit-for-purpose it is in terms of your search keywords connectivity, and all manner of other considerations.

Please contact us using the form and we can begin by explaining the wealth of services and channels available to you across the trad PR, online PR, digital marketing and social-led spheres, which may all form important parts of your overall strategy – and our delivery.

As touched upon in the previous point, the strategy may well encompass all manner of varied channel approaches. As strategy determines where we are aiming to go and in what timeframe, the tacticals (i.e.- component activities or deliverables) will form the stepping stones arranged in straight lines (or wide paths) as we move towards our strategic goal together.

A big advantage of using a digital-led approach is that it is very fast to see if a campaign is working and who we are connecting with. This is part of the reason why influencers carry so much weight in the modern communications plan; yes they are known and have audiences, but the great ones are already well-accustomed to furnishing paying (hiring) clients with the data and engagement metrics they need to demonstrate the value of the campaign, and if necessary, make adjustments along the way.

Digital-led influence strategies are also helpful in our planning as we can apportion budget/responsibility easily. For campaigns where budget is limited, we may seek to leverage micro or nano influencers so our comms goes further for less. In the days of traditional PR, this was more difficult in the sense that press releases went out and then you had to wait and see what kind of pick-up they achieved in print. Beyond that, it was impossible to see if people were actually reading those features or vising stores. Now though, even with a trad PR device like the press release, it is quick and easy to see who received it, how they viewed it, and how it tracks back to your website, social content, etc. We focus on providing results reporting which covers as many conjoint aspects of the program as possible, giving you a holistic and three-dimensional overview of what we’ve worked on and how it is performing.

We might consider that this is a backwards way of looking at the question. Whilst it is possible to create thought leadership blogs and other such owned collaterals which can bring people to your site very effectively, SEO is a great way to empower our PR also. In the example of a press release, a document which is written well, includes all of your keywords in sufficient repetition, includes valuable links and could even contain animated or video content, is likely to perform well when it hits the newswires.

With an integrated (i.e.- comprehensive) PR plan, all of the activities will feed into each other, creating critical mass for relevance, referral, search and action activation. This is why having a blended program which bridges traditional, social and digital PR is powerful, and is a natural key to unlocking far-reaching return on investment. We want your integrated program to be successful ongoing, not just in the campaign period, as we always think long-term in our approach to client collaboration and service delivery.

As a result of the pandemic, events, activations, launches and press conferences have moved online. Far from being a hindrance, the industry has actually found that efficiency benefits can be achieved through fully remote activations. We are now able to invite journalists to press conferences from overseas markets, for example, where previously there was no real point in inviting them. We are able to offer interactive product tutorials via webinars, which are effective at creating engagement and for media consumers are massively more helpful than static online how-to’s or PDF brochures.

Re COVID specifically, the pandemic has shown us that the need to be agile ad responsive is a lasting behavioural change; one that is not going away any time soon, and one that plays to the strengths of highly agile PR firms like Gemini. By drawing upon our best practices achieved from supporting our clients during times of difficulty, we are essentially fostering resilience, as well as discovering smart new ways we can collaborate with partners and clients.

It also, somewhat ironically, has made us even more attuned to the digital-led transformation of the PR industry generally; the world had moved almost fully online just at the point where such a facilitation was necessary. And we continue to learn and adapt to whatever COVID pandemic – and the new normal – decides to throw at us.