FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Phoenix, Arizona — Public relations and digital marketing teams often operate in silos, but integrating these two powerful strategies can unlock unparalleled advantages for brands.
By merging the credibility and trust-building strengths of PR with the dynamic, data-driven capabilities of digital marketing, businesses can create a cohesive and robust approach that not only amplifies their reach, but also fosters deeper connections with their target audiences. In this press release blog, we will explore the transformative power of aligning PR and digital marketing strategies, and how this synergy can propel your brand to new heights.
What is the difference between PR and digital marketing?
Public relations is a strategic communications process that helps brands create and maintain brand awareness and a positive public image through impactful storytelling and strategic mass audience engagement. Oftentimes, this includes strategies like media relations, events, community engagement, strategic partnerships and even publicity stunts that unleash polar bears in London. Traditional PR encompasses a broad spectrum of media channels, from print to television. Digital PR is a specialized approach that leverages online platforms to enhance a brand’s visibility and reputation.
Digital marketing, on the other hand, is a more targeted strategy aimed at delivering a specific message to a particular audience through carefully selected digital channels to drive a particular action. It is typically more focused on ROI and includes strategies like paid media, SEO, social media, email marketing, and more.
In a nutshell, PR focuses on building a brand’s reputation and awareness while digital marketing focuses on identifying and converting a target audience. Although these two strategies have different goals, deliverables, and success metrics, they can complement each other through all parts of the marketing funnel.
A dynamic duo: How integrating PR and digital marketing can better your business
Public relations and digital marketing strategies on their own are extremely powerful tools in your marketing arsenal. But fostering communication and collaboration between the two teams can amplify impact and drive efficiencies that would not otherwise be possible.
Bolster brand awareness
- Amplify PR content through paid channels: Public relations teams often produce great storytelling content. This might take the form of local news segments or long-form digital video content. The digital marketing team can cut down these video segments into bite-sized ad units that can be promoted across paid channels like YouTube or other digital networks. Putting some dollars behind this authentic, impactful content can boost reach across a wider audience and drive more engagement.
- Build social proof: Share PR achievements, like media mentions or awards, on your social media channels to engage audiences and create a positive brand image that can influence consumer behavior.
- Unlock earned media opportunities through paid media buys: If your digital marketing team is buying large amounts of inventory with a specific publisher, especially a local publisher, they have the ability to negotiate earned media (publicity) opportunities. For example, if the digital marketing team purchases a package of homepage takeovers on your local news website, they might also be able to negotiate a two minute on-air segment in the daytime news as added value for the PR team to facilitate.
Enhance credibility and trust
- Garner third-party validation: Earned media coverage through PR efforts is typically perceived as more trustworthy than paid advertisements. A strong PR presence will help improve the credibility of paid ads for users who are exposed to both.
- Manage an impactful influencer strategy: Influencer marketing tends to straddle the realms of PR and digital marketing, especially when shifting away from 1:1 influencer relationships into third-party influencer network platforms. This often creates internal friction due to a lack of clarity around who owns the strategy. But if your social media, paid media, and PR teams collaborate closely when working with an influencer platform, you can mitigate those potential friction points and run a more impactful campaign.
- Effectively manage your online reputation: Your SEO team works hard to manage your local business profiles. When customers leave reviews on these profiles, utilize your PR team’s communication expertise to craft thoughtful responses, especially to any negative reviews.
Increase engagement
- Strengthen your backlink strategy: PR efforts generate articles, video segments, and other online content that can result in backlinks from reputable news sites, improving search engine rankings. Your SEO and PR teams can work closely together to measure the impact of these backlinks and generate a strategy for future backlinks.
- Use audience research to create messaging that resonates: Digital marketing teams gather vast amounts of information about their target audiences through paid media performance data, organic search journey data, Valuegraphics surveys and more. PR teams can use this information to craft messaging and hone their outreach in ways that are more likely to resonate with specific audiences and drive better engagement.
- Apply PR narrative skills to create more compelling digital campaigns: PR teams are great storytellers. They can work closely with SEO content and paid media folks in your digital marketing team to craft compelling website content, meaningful ad copy, and more. A more compelling digital campaign will drive better engagement.
PR and digital marketing: Your full-funnel powerhouse
Integrating public relations and digital marketing strategies is a powerful approach that can transfigure a brand’s presence and impact. By harnessing the strengths of both disciplines, businesses can create a seamless, compelling narrative that resonates with their audience, builds trust, and drives engagement. Ready to take your brand to new heights by closing the gap between your PR and digital marketing teams? Give us a shout.
