SKC Insights

With the emergence of ChatGPT and all its hoopla, artificial intelligence is once again a hot topic, It’s now impossible to find an industry that’s yet untouched by AI, including public relations. Will AI replace PR, marketing, and communications teams at your company one day soon? 

In a recent interview, Jacob Puthenparambil, CEO of PR firm Redhill, was asked whether he thinks technologies like ChatGPT will replace PR. AI, he said, could replace some content production, but at the end of the day, PR is still a people-driven industry. AI is a tool, not a human and lacks the emotions needed when it comes to much of the business. Do you agree?

There are some challenges of AI in PR, but there are many upsides too. Let’s take a look at the top 3 of each—and how they might affect your business.

2022 brought us lessons of growth, resilience, and transformation as we conquered the challenges of a disruptive year. With another exciting year behind us, SKC has compiled our take on the top public relations trends and challenges for the year ahead. What will 2023 bring? Here are six trends to consider and leverage for your company:

New year, new goals! As you navigate the exciting journey of business growth in 2024, consider the invaluable contributions a marketing/PR firm can make to your success. We might be biased, but even visionary leader Bill Gates once said, “If I was down to the last dollar of my marketing budget, I'd spend it on PR!” Partnering with a PR firm adds a wealth of strategic communications expertise including proven marketing campaigns, knowhow, media and influencer connections, social media chops to grow your online communities, press coverage, reputation, and so much more! 

Ready to elevate your success? Here are six benefits of partnering with a PR firm in 2024:

We’re in the heart of best-of season right now, the time of year when everyone releases their lists of favorites from the past 12 months. 2022 has been a fun and results-filled year for SKC and our clients, where we’ve added a creative flair to many PR campaigns to help clients to stand out from the crowd. 

These are some of the highlights from 2022: 

So, you’re thinking about starting or sprucing up a corporate blog? Good for you! A company blog is a great marketing tool for connecting with prospects, customers, partners, and to build thought leadership. And with figures like these – 77% of Internet users read blogs and spend 3X more time on them than email in the US – blogs aren’t something marketers can ignore! But blogging has to be done right to be successful and effective.

Here are our 5 Do's for creating and maintaining a successful corporate blog:

“Death of Mr. Peanut,” a 2020 Planters campaign, is a great example of social media success. It began with a tweet: It is with heavy hearts that we confirm that Mr. Peanut has died at 104. In the ultimate selfless act, he sacrificed himself to save his friends when they needed him most. Please pay your respects with #RIPeanut. Within hours, even other brands like Dr. Pepper were spreading the hashtag, and the campaign quickly became a viral sensation. Planters later revealed that Mr. Peanut was reborn as a Baby Nut, and now tweets from the Peanut Jr account.

Planters’ viral sensation and marketing prowess has continued to this day, where it has leveraged social media to engage and build followers and customers. Here are 6 ways social media can bolster your brand:

Being a small business can be a challenge, especially when just starting out. Bringing customers into your business is the first step to growth, but how does one bring the customer in? The answer lies in marketing and leveraging available tools at your disposal. While taking the time to find everything on your own is viable, it’s time-consuming and wastes precious resources. This is where a CRM comes in.

A Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system is a great way to collect all your data in one place, allowing you to compile information from several sources, such as LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. By using a CRM, the time you would have spent on individual sites can be spent growing your business in other avenues. But what other benefits are there in using a CRM? Why should you invest in a CRM? Here are 6 great reasons:

Generating leads - both high in quantity and quality - is a marketer’s most important objective. A successful lead generation engine is what keeps the funnel full of sales prospects while you sleep. Surprisingly, only 1 in ten marketers feel their lead generation campaigns are effective. What gives?

There can be a lot of moving parts in any lead generation campaign and often times it’s difficult to know which parts need fine-tuning. To break it down, the best lead generation campaigns contain most, if not all, of these four crucial elements: an offer, a call-to-action (CTA), a landing page, and a form.

Here are SKC's 10 favorite tips and tricks for lead generation:

Once upon a time, companies large and small relied on an overwhelming number of tools to market and promote their companies. Marketers were inundated by clumsy spreadsheets, a plethora of e-newsletter programs, separate social media accounts, blog extensions, and analytics tools galore. Then along came marketing automation platforms – HubSpot, Marketo, Infusionsoft etc. – with a unifying automation approach that changed the way we do marketing forever.

Today, many companies are reaping the benefits of martech and marketing automation and their belief in it is evident in their spend, now expected to reach $25.1 billion annually by 2023. This spend translates to coveted lead generation and conversion for many marketers, with 77% stating that they convert more leads with automation. What have these companies gained by leveraging marketing automation? How have their businesses and marketing and PR processes improved?

Here are 5 ways HubSpot and other marketing technologies boost your business.

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.