Public relations (PR) is about getting your name out on different media, whether it’s television, radio, or in newspapers and magazines. Businesses use PR to maintain a favorable reputation and cultivate a positive public perception.
Although it’s a traditional technique, PR remains an important facet to business to this day. For many brands, PR is a great way to maintain consumer interest without selling any particular product or service.
Digital marketing, on the other hand, means marketing your brand and its products and services through online digital channels. With digital marketing, you can connect with prospective and current customers on channels including search engines, online ads, email, and social media.
For a lot of businesses, PR and digital marketing are entirely separate from each other. More often than not, businesses have a PR team and a digital marketing team with distinct tasks, objectives, and budgets.
That being said, an increasing number of businesses are starting to realize the advantages of combining their PR and digital strategies. If you don’t count yourself as one of them, then don’t worry. In this post, we’ll walk you through everything you need to know about combining your PR and digital marketing techniques, why it’s necessary for your small business to do so, and the various ways you can go about it.
Why combine PR and digital marketing
Most businesses, don’t think about incorporating their PR and digital strategies. However, coordinating your PR and digital marketing campaigns can result in significant improvement to your reach, revenue, and your audience’s perception of your brand.
While it seems like PR and digital marketing are two distinct practices, they actually share some common goals.
The goal of PR is to tell stories and make your brand look good in the eyes of consumers. So why not leverage digital marketing to tell your stories? You can use content marketing and tell stories through your blog posts.
For a more direct kind of communication, you can use email marketing. Email is a great way to deliver stories that impact your subscribers. With email, you have the opportunity to use a variety of mediums including text (content), high-quality images, and even video. Email is also compact, which means your audience does not have to spend a lot of time checking out your stories.
Ways to combine PR and digital marketing
Back when there was no Internet, businesses spread the word about their brand through TV and radio. Fast forward to today’s Internet age and things are very different. Right now, digital is king.
But that doesn’t mean you have to forget about traditional PR. In fact, the best thing you can do is to integrate it into your current digital marketing strategies.
Here are some of the most effective ways you can combine PR and digital marketing for your small business:
1. PR, content marketing, and SEO
When it comes to small business digital marketing, one area of focus for a majority of small businesses is content marketing. It’s becoming a lot more common for businesses to also include a blog on their website.
In content marketing, the go-to strategy for businesses is to create high-quality blog posts that contain fresh perspectives on common issues, data-backed copy, and actionable insight.
Before you publish this kind of content on your website, though, consider pitching it as a guest post to other websites. These could be business-focused websites (ex. Forbes, Bloomberg, etc.) or the websites of experts within your specific industry.
Source: We Are Social
The speed and amount at which audiences consume content are staggering. Some businesses find it challenging to keep up with demand, so they welcome those who want to contribute content. This represents the perfect opportunity for you to bridge the gap between PR and digital marketing.
Creating high-quality guest posts for influential websites is about more than simply publishing meaningful content. You are also spreading the good word about your small business.
Each guest post that links back to your website increases awareness for your brand and helps you generate inbound links (or backlinks) that boost your SEO efforts. When guest posts on authoritative websites link back to yours, search engines like Google detect these backlinks and their algorithms improve your ranking on SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages).
Generally speaking, the more high-quality backlinks to your website, the better your SERP status will be.
2. PR, email marketing, and social media
It may seem like a cliché statement, but email marketing and PR is truly a match made in heaven.
With email marketing, you can create the best possible impression to your audience, grab their attention, and engage with them in a personalized way that few other digital channels can match.
Take, for instance, the welcome email. This is an email that you send to new subscribers as soon as they sign up to your mailing list. When done right, welcome emails can help you immediately forge a connection with subscribers.
The key to welcome emails is to avoid selling your product or service. Instead, offer friendship and make subscribers feel like you want to help them. It’s also a good idea to introduce your brand and tell subscribers what you can do to improve their lives or solve their problems. Focusing on these things in your welcome email is an excellent way to maintain a positive image for your brand.
A popular PR technique for brands is to do charity work for their respective communities. They usually announce these charity events by sending emails to their subscribers to inform them of how they can help.
Source: Delivra
You can do the same for your business. Organize a small charity event in your community and let your subscribers know what they can do to help out. It could be anything from purchasing tickets to the event to simply volunteering to help out.
Encourage subscribers to spread the word about these types of emails by placing social media sharing icons in prominent areas of your email like the header or footer. This can help you expand your reach with only minimal effort on your part.
Wrap up
Putting together the best that PR and digital marketing have to offer can help you create campaigns that are much more efficient and successful. After all, why spend twice the amount of time and money on two separate campaigns when you can mix them together for better results?
Whatever digital channel you choose to mix your PR strategies with, it’s important to think about your objectives first. What do you want to achieve out of your campaign? What you can do is talk to your PR and digital teams about their goals and figure out which ones can be aligned.
Keep in mind that you don’t have to go all out on your first try. Feel free to start small. You can always create a bigger and better campaign down the line once you start seeing success.
