To the Death of Cold Calls!

One of the key aspects of my placement has been not only creating a PR role that had not previously existed, but more importantly creating some brand value for the company and generating sales leads. It amazed me upon first entering the company that there was no defined PR or marketing strategy, and my first thoughts were, “how do they make any sales?” The Business Development Manager and sales team were previously really the only driving factor behind generating sales leads and operate predominantly though cold calling.

As a PR assistant, my idea was to help generate as much publicity and general awareness for the organisation as possible in order to have customers come to the company instead of the other way around. When I first joined the company, they were setting up a new website which we then launched in March and although mostly finished, as any website, it is a constant work in progress.

Over the almost 5 months I have been with the company one of my main jobs has been in creating content for the website, adding in keywords and generating a media presence. This included uploading all of my media releases to the website which has helped us to gain more coverage in google searches, a necessity as we have not yet committed to ‘google adwords’. Additionally I have added case studies, testimonials, news and photo galleries to give customers as much information as possible, not only generating traffic to the site but also trying to keep people interacting with our site for as long as possible.

Having a presence on the internet is crucial to our company’s success, particularly as we are a business to business organisation. Not only is important to have a functioning website, but it is also important to monitor how the website is being used and by who, something I have been covering each month in a monthly website and social media report. This report covers things like the number of hits we have received and the demographics and behaviours of the people that are visiting.

It has been really rewarding on a personal level to see aspects of the website that I have created or been responsible for receiving high levels of traffic, reassuring me that I have been on the right track with what customers expect. Not only this but it is also very satisfactory to see sales leads generated from contact forms on the website or to hear people say they have seen our website and ask us about specific programs. Hopefully in time the sales team will start getting more and more leads each month and maybe some day cold calls will be a thing of the past!