What better way to create an awareness of a new product if not by using the new media. New media can be portrayed as the ‘21st century’s god’ and, thus it may be considered as a lost for an organisation with no interest on embracing this new technology. This is due to the fact that everybody across the world connects with each other by using new media hence awareness of any products, services, or causes can simply be made within a minute. Ever heard of the phrase ‘the fall of advertising and the rise of public relations’? The phrase were created due to the scenario whereby many organisations nowadays has replace advertisement with public relations since public relations is more effective and cheaper compared to advertisement. Online public relations campaign is time efficient and publics can simply identify about the product or service once it goes viral in the internet.
This can be seen on a case study by Beverley Hills in 2006 on promoting and creating awareness of their new ‘Shielding Lotion’. Beverly Hills is a skincare company and has come out with numerous skincare products. One of their products is 21st Century Formulations which has a skincare lotion that called Skin MD Natural. After the successful of Skin MD Natural, they had formulated a new lotion under the Skin MD Natural which is ‘Shielding Lotion’. However, consumers had no awareness of this new product category by Skin MD Natural.
One of Beverley Hills solution is by creating an online campaign and it was launched to aimed and reaches the online consumers. Part of their strategies is by creating high search rankings on specific keywords and phrases, articles, blogs, newsgroups and also forums. Their main objectives were to create a new search term which was ‘shielding lotion’ as well as to gain search engine visibility regarding the research keywords and phrase on:
• Shielding Lotion
• Dry skin
• Dry skin treatment
• Dry skin lotion and
• Eczema treatment
The strategy on creating the awareness involved the following tactics:
• Undertaken the keyword research and optimized the website’s pages for the chosen words and phrases
• Created a news section of the site with RSS Feeds
• Written and posted weekly articles on the subject of dry skin and related skin conditions to their site. Evert article page was optimized by using the previous keywords that had mentioned before
As a result, all the articles that had been published were picked up in Google News and other syndication websites. There was no mention of shielding lotions on the internet in January 2006 yet today, when you type and search ‘shielding lotion’ in Google, you will get more than 20,000 mentions as the results. Moreover, if you search for ‘Skin MD’ you will get more than 40,000 search results. Apart from the successful of the search result in Google, Beverly Hills’ articles also were published in numerous websites and have been included in many leading physician journals for aesthetics and wellness. Furthermore, the news pages also appeared in Google Blog Search and the feed was selected up on more than 1,500 in other websites and blogs.
In a nutshell, based on the case study; this had proved that online campaign is more effective compare to the traditional advertisement. Despite creating awareness of the new product or service through online, publics can easily know and obtain information from the internet regarding the product or the service. With the emergence of social networking site nowadays, new media is one of the most successful tools and can become one of organisations measurement on creating awareness to the public on promoting their brand and their product.
Reference
Eight Case Studies Showing the Power of an Online PR Campaign. (2009, May 26). Retrieved May 30, 2012, from Social Magnet: http://www.socialmagnet.co.uk/2009/05/eight-case-studies-showing-the-power-of-an-online-pr-campaign/
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