How to Integrate PR Into a Marketing Campaign
It is undeniable that as the communications field generally becomes more digital, PR and marketing are increasingly intertwined. While some may see this as a...
Filter by Category
It is undeniable that as the communications field generally becomes more digital, PR and marketing are increasingly intertwined. While some may see this as a...
I won’t beat around the bush: I love my content calendar. It is so perfectly neat, organized and just generally amazing. I would be drowning in a sea of content without it....
The unemployment rate is currently at or near historic lows. This means that there are fewer people looking for jobs. This does not mean, however, that there are fewer job...
If you’re in the B2B world, then you know that trade shows are one of the best ways to showcase your company to industry leaders, potential customers and investors. Maximizing...
Congratulations! After hours of perfecting your resume, scouring the web for job opportunities, writing cover letters, taking AP Style assessments and talking to people on the...
Facebook contests are a great way to engage your followers, attract new ones, and start building an email list. The easiest, most straightforward type of Facebook contest is none...
It’s true that the more you write, the better you get at it. It is equally true, however, that no matter how talented you are, most copy is edited multiple times before it is ever...
As is the case with most industries: the data revolution is here, and it’s here to stay. The same is starting to be true for PR. A great way for a company to start using data to...
Here’s the thing: PR professionals are only as good as their clients are willing. A PR firm and its client are a team that works together. The more a client is unenthusiastic,...
There are few things more enjoyable to a PR professional than getting a small retailer into the local news. Be it a TV interview or a write-up in the local newspaper or an online...
It is undeniable that as the communications field generally becomes more digital, PR and marketing are increasingly intertwined. While some may see this as a survival-of-the-fittest fight between two disciplines, most professionals in the industry understand that using PR to support your marketing initiatives is almost a requirement for a successful campaign these days.
The best thing you can do to make PR and marketing work together seamlessly is aligning your public relations and marketing messages. If you align your message, it makes it easier to align your overall goals. This requires an understanding of who your target audience is, which often requires data.
Marketing data can give you stats like who the buyer is, but PR data can give you stats on where the buyer is. That is, PR can tell you what digital channels are driving the most traffic to a site. You can use this data to influence the content that the marketing department is creating and what social platforms they are posting it on.
Building and leveraging media relationships (a cornerstone of public relations) is a great way to drive traffic to your site (a cornerstone of marketing). A great way to do this would be reaching out to bloggers (or vloggers!) to review your product or service. Alternatively, you can also see if they’ll allow you to write a blog post for their site yourself. In either case, the post will contain backlinks to your website and therefore increase your site’s search engine ranking.
The more widely read the blog is, the better, because backlinks that come from sites with higher traffic have more weight in Google’s SEO algorithm. You can promote their post on your social media channels, which gives your brand more authority since you’re no longer the only one talking about how great your company is.
A PR pro would probably call this media relations, and a marketer would probably call this content or influencer marketing. At the end of the day though, you’ve generated more traffic to your site and that’s what matters most.
About Weslie Oeftering: Weslie is a student at The University of Texas at Austin and Swyft’s resident PR and marketing intern. She supports clients with social media, blogging, and tech PR activities. Swyft is a PR and marketing agency with offices in Austin, Houston, and Denver that provide services for tech companies all around the world who are seeking rapid, sustained growth. Some of their services include content marketing, social media strategy, as well as ad buys, email marketing, and media relations.