These days, public relations practices are heavily intertwined with an organization’s online presence. With PR campaigns, your online presence is crucial to being reachable, and getting your message across to your audience. That starts with your domain.
Broken down, PR campaigns are really just activities an organization directs towards an audience to help the organization reach a goal. A business, for example, might be looking to increase their sales or advertise an event. That business then makes a plan as to what they are going to say to their audience to reach the goal—and that is their campaign.
Here are some reasons why registering your own, custom domain could be the best choice for your online presence and reaching your campaign goals.
Make your campaign more memorable
Owning your domain gives you a better chance of being memorable to your audience—helping you reach your goal.
Make Your Campaign the Focus
When you register with a subdomain, you end up with their company name in your domain—something like yourcampaign.wixsite.com. Both the length of the address and the addition of the subdomain makes your campaign site sound a little less punchy. Customizing it with your campaign’s short, sweet title—or any related memory-jogs—will make it easier for your audience to remember and find online later.
Choose Your Top-Level Domain (TLD)
When you register your domain, you choose the TLD that best suits your brand. The classic .com is an easy-to-remember choice, if it’s available. Other options could point to your industry. If you’re a nonprofit— .charity would be a great choice. A public relations firm—.agency. You can even use play-on-words, or add some humor and personality to your online first impression. How and if you want to specify your campaign with an extension is up to you, which isn’t the case when using subdomain services.
Boost your credibility
In all public relations, it is crucial that your audiences trust you, and view you as a credible source of information. Tailored domains can help with that.
Show Commitment and Professionalism to Your Audience
By making the effort to register your own domain, you show that you committed enough to invest in your cause. Your audiences can see the difference between an owned domain and another company’s subdomain online. Choosing to have your own, and coupling it with the right TLD, sends them the message that your campaign is professional.
Prevent Confusion Among Your Publics
There may be already existing domains out there that are very similar to your desired name. Owning your domain minimizes confusion across websites, and confirms traffic is directed to the correct place. You don’t want people to be unable to find your campaign because of a subdomain tucked into the web address.
Take advantage of SEO and analytics
For the best campaign results, you’ll want to generate as much traffic as possible. By taking advantage of SEO and analytics, you can maximize your site’s hits and understand important data about viewers.
Benefit From Keywords
Certain words can be used to leverage SEO in a domain name. Keyword domains state clearly what the product or service on the website is, regardless of the business’s name. If your campaign is local to an area, for example, the city name would act as a keyword. A nonprofit running a campaign to promote their local sustainability event on Earth Day could title their domain “ChicagoEarthDay.com.”
When people search online for a specific cause, or for something in their region, keyword domains can be beneficial by bringing that traffic towards your page. Your clear domain lets them know just what they’ll find when they click through.
Gauge Your Campaign’s Audiences
With websites, you have a domain and a web host—sometimes companies offer both services, like Epik. Through your web host, or with services like Google Analytics, you can see insights on the traffic coming to your domain. This will tell you if visitors are new eyes or returning, how they found your domain, if they visited the home page or an inner page of the site, etc. This data is great to use as another metric to measure your campaign’s success.
And, if you have more than one domain, you can compare their traffic. For example, knowing that viewers are finding your campaign through your usual domain is valuable information—if you’re hoping to generate hits organically, it could indicate a change in approach.
What do I do with my domain when my campaign is over?
It depends. If your budget doesn’t allow for renewal, you can let the domain expire, remove it from your account, or consider selling the domain name on Epik’s Marketplace. There, you can buy and sell domains that have already been claimed.
There are reasons to hold onto your domain, though. If your campaign will be relevant again, use the same domain to prepare for the next campaign cycle. Let’s say that the Chicago nonprofit puts on their sustainability event every Earth Day—it would make sense to keep “ChicagoEarthDay.com” in preparation for next year.
Even without plans for your campaign to reoccur, it’s usually worth the renewal cost to keep your domain and redirect traffic to your usual domain.
If you’re ready to create your campaign’s domain, check out some of Epik’s tips for choosing the right domain name.