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Retail giant taps iPressroom to speed delivery publicity content online
Summary: Minneapolis-based Target Corporation (NYSE:TGT) - with projected 2007 annual revenue of $59 billion+ serves guests at 1,502 stores in 47 states nationwide. In late 2005, Target selected iPressroom Corporation - for its best-in-class Online Media CenterTM Enterprise Edition product and proven expertise delivering marketing communications web solutions - to enhance the delivery of marketing communications content produced by Target's 10-person publicity department.
Situation: Despite its size and reach, Target needed to improve the speed of distributing marketing communications materials to media and the public across the country and around the world. With no online presence for marketing communications other than the company's eCommerce site, an About Target site and an Investor Relations site, the company was spending hundreds of thousands of dollars annual to print and mail hardcopy brochures, press kits, and CDs of photos to editors, journalists and other influencers. The process was time consuming and costly with potential for frequent opportunity loss; no photo, no story.
Solution: The strategy was simple; leverage the power of the web to reduce the high volume and cost of printing hard copy press kits, speed the delivery of new seasonal press kits to the media, and extend the reach of Target publicity online. Target's Interactive Marketing group together with Target's Publicity team strategically elected to outsource the project to a specialized firm with proven expertise in delivering news content over the web.
After careful consideration, a cross-functional team selected iPressroom to consult and implement their best-in-class Online Media CenterTM - Enterprise Edition online pressroom software application package that delivers one integrated suite of online marketing communications tools all built into a single powerful web-based dashboard.
iPressroom's Online Media CenterTM - Enterprise Edition provided Target with a proven platform to quickly deploy and easily manage a large volume of news and marketing communications content. The site ( http://pressroom.target.com/) has:
- Over a 1,000 pages
- More than a dozen content categories (including Community Giving, Fashion, Target Stores, Guest Services, Fashion, Sports, and more),
- High-resolution photo management
- RSS news feeds for all categories,
- CAPTCHA code protected media contact info.
- And the ability to aggregate content from lower level sub-categories up to higher-level main categories so visitors can easily search, browse and subscribe to the content they need wherever they may be on the site.
Non-technical content administrators can easily update and add content from any Internet-connected PC, but because of the high-volume of content from multiple sources (print separators, agencies, and internal team members), Target elected to take advantage of iPressroom's digital content management services (which include rapid response - under 1 hour - turnaround time).
The site is fully hosted by iPressroom's secure, high availability data center infrastructure and seamlessly integrates into Target's corporate site structure. The global header and footers are automatically synchronized with Target's other sites - so when updates to Target's global navigation occur, the site nav. is also updated.
Results: The Target Pressroom site allows the Target publicity team to quickly deploy seasonal press kits, photos, news releases and other media content to journalists within days, rather than weeks. Journalists and photo editors can now access complete product information online and request specific items and samples to include in critical editorial coverage.
Key Metrics:
- Reduced inbound calls to Target Media Relations by more than 50%.
- Seasonal press kit roll-out dropped from 3 weeks to 3 days. Target's publicity team was able to deploy, on average, more than 4 complete press kits per month - making critical photos available when press kits were not.
- More than 13,200 RSS feed subscribers per month. The site has multiple RSS feeds (one for each category and sub-category. For example, in the Fashion category, the brand GO. International has it own news feed). RSS feeds make it easy for visitors and journalists to subscribe to updates and search engines to index new content.
- The search optimized site averages more than 21,000 referrals from search engines per month for Target key phrases found and more than 14,600 inbound visits from externally referring sites. Technorati shows more than 300 links to the pressroom from blogs per month.
- More than 50,000 hits to photos per month.
- Increased site traffic. More than 32,855 visitors per month with most visitors averaging 5.3 pages per visit.
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