PR and content marketing share a common goal: to create a quality message related to our brand, relay and amplify. Because of this shared and common goal, there is much to be gained and leveraged by combining our PR and content marketing strategies.
Need more convincing? We’ve listed 6 good reasons on why we should be combining our PR and content marketing strategies.
Combining PR and Content marketing strategies facilitates idea-sharing
Amplify Content
Brand Message Consistency
SEO Optimisation
Building Influencer and Journalist Relations
Measuring the ROI of Campaigns
Combining PR and Content marketing strategies facilitates idea-sharing
It’s a PR professional’s job to know and even predict the latest trends across the spectrum of industries. This presents an opportunity for our PR agency or team to work with our creative and marketing teams for ideas on fresh content marketing ideas.
Content marketing and marketers can provide insights to PR teams on specific and niche market or consumer trends and insights. It’s a win-win.
Download the trendspotting & forecasting ebook and learn more about trendspotting and trend forecasting.
Amplify Content
Content marketing focuses on creating articles, webinars and other materials to complete our brand identity. With the help of PR acting as a vehicle to reach key industry influencers, our content and brand are able to reach their target audience in a truly influential and effective way.
The combination of PR and content marketing strategies will also help to get our content to a new and perhaps broader audience. We’ve already made investments in PR and content marketing so why not get strategic and squeeze out as much ROI as possible by a unification of PR and content marketing objectives?
Jane Hunt, head of marketing and co-founder of JBH – The Content Agency states:
“Journalists are looking for more than just press releases and data these days – they need content, content that really engages their audiences and provides more depth to the conversation. Ask the content team what content, whether it be infographics, gifs, video or listicles, will add weight to your story and provide journalists with more options to cover your story for their audience.”
Brand Message Consistency
All of our branded communications should be aligned to maximise and reinforce our value proposition, brand identity and brand personality. However, if our graphic designer inserts Pokémon gifs and content in his articles and our press secretary writes very institutionally, our tone as a brand will be rather inconsistent.
Our teams must develop a cohesive editorial line. There must be unity between the key themes and topics to discuss with a defined editorial calendar. This way we ensure that the content of our blog and our social networks are in cohesion with the public relations subjects we want to take ownership of.
SEO Optimisation
Content marketing executives have painstakingly built in specific keywords into their editorial strategy to improve the SEO of our site. However, press releases are widely reported on the Internet, and are therefore an opportunity for our SEO efforts!
By combining and becoming strategic with PR and content marketing, PR releases can be SEO optimised as concisely as our website. Content marketers can also specify to PR teams the importance and value of integrating back-links and links to our site blog or landing pages. In sum, optimise PR and content marketing strategies for ultimate SEO optimisation.
Jane Hunt, co-founder of JBH – The Content Agency tells us:
“This is often an opportunity that PR pro’s miss and it’s a real shame – especially for the client as a link from a relevant or high DA website is really important in helping the brand rank higher in a search.”
Building Influencer and Journalist Relations
One of the main challenges of PR is building truly strong relationships with key journos and influencers. Linking our content to our PR campaign with your brand message makes for an integrated, more impactful campaign. This will lead to greater success for your PR & marketing campaigns, which, ultimately means a better ROI and that’s the bottom-line.
Influencers can also be linked with the teams responsible for the content, who will offer their content to share with their audience. So our eBooks, infographics or items can be sent to influencers explicitly asking if they can relay, where appropriate.
Measuring the ROI of Campaigns
Generally, PR ROI is measured in terms of reach, impressions and AVE. But the content that our team creates can be directly linked to its impact on the brand and the sales funnel. Aided by a media monitoring solution, we can measure the overall impact of our PR, content and social media marketing campaigns.
By including relevant links to our site and tracking those links to our PR campaign, it becomes easy to know if our PR and/or content marketing campaigns generated traffic or sales for our business. If you’d like to know more about how Meltwater can help with tracking your PR campaigns fill out the form below!
It’s like PR and content marketing have been battling the same enemy but didn’t even know it—until now. Combining our PR and content marketing strategies is overdue, so get started now!
This blog was updated 14.06.2018 by Hannah Williams
