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.

Align Your Message

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.

Leverage Media Relationships

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.