SKC Insights

Public Relations and digital marketing have a common goal. Both want to increase visibility and awareness, but while one is about your relationships with customers and prospects, the other is more about your relationships with reporters and media outlets.

A healthy marriage of the two disciplines benefits each side — making each one stronger than it would be on its own. PR gets access to digital audiences beyond their traditional sphere, and digital marketing gets the experience of tried-and-true methods of communication. And you get a cross-channel strategy that can’t be matched that provides the following 5 key advantages to your business.

1. Amplifies Your PR Efforts

By incorporating digital marketing tactics into your PR activities, press releases, thought leadership articles, case studies, and press coverage can be spread and amplified through new channels. Reporters will be able to find information on your business through twitter or a google search. Backlinks and/or SEO key phrases in your press release can boost viewership of a piece of news to a whole new audience. Sharing contributed articles or coverage clippings on social media extends PR to your followers and beyond. PR materials are also a great source for content-hungry channels and for content marketing where you can chop up a release for a blog post or whitepaper.

2. Optimizes Your Digital Marketing

PR professionals have honed communications to a fine art. They know what piques a reader’s interest in a story or how to market a thought leadership article. Sometimes the difference between an email that is opened or not is a well-worded subject line. Bringing these skills to a digital marketing email or social media campaign can increase SEO and click-through rates. A higher CTR means you get more traffic. And, higher CTR pages tend to have higher conversion rates too. A website crafted by a PR pro might use similar media communication tactics, only with marketing, they’ll hone messages targeted to customers and prospects.

3. Harmonize Your Brand Voice

Breaking down the silos between digital marketing and PR lets the right hand know what the left is doing. In other words, your online and offline campaigns become less disjointed and your audience can recognize your brand’s voice no matter what medium they use to learn about you. Media and customers can be confused if your social media voice is very upbeat and modern, but your press releases sound curt and dry. Consistent brand voice is important in keeping your message clear.

4. Supports Your “Customers First” Approach

With digital marketing, the whole mindset revolves around solving the customer’s problem. This leads digital marketing teams to create informative blog posts and eBooks, and even start social media helplines. But when partnered with the relationship-building brain of PR, this style of marketing builds trust between your brand and your audience. One of the most important aspects of customer experience is trust. Customers simply don’t want to do business with a company they can’t trust. Like we said earlier, any and all PR makes for good digital marketing content, but PR is also about “mutually beneficial relationships.” PR pros know your audience’s pain points and digital marketing is the avenue they can use to fix them. One great example of this integration is American Express’ blog which focuses on helping small businesses grow with helpful tips on taxes, supply chain management, even business cards, just like SKC’s blog teaches you more about PR and digital marketing to help your business!

Digital marketing and PR are a match made in communications heaven, and when you launch integrated campaigns, the duo brings out the best in each discipline. If you are looking for a sounding board on the best ways to integrate PR and digital marketing, click the button below to talk with SKC, subscribe to SKC Insights, or follow us on LinkedIn, Twitter, and Facebook.