Blog

What Content Marketing Means
for the PR Industry

These days, public relations covers such a broad array of services that defining it has become harder than ever. With the rapidly changing communication landscape, our skill sets and attitudes have evolved along with it.

 

Consider how drastically the media industry has changed over the last couple of years. More than 17,000 newsroom jobs have been lost since 2007, and with the declining readership of traditional media, social and mobile technologies have exploded, shortening the news cycle and making brand coverage in today’s environment very different.

 

The shift from print to digital not only effects journalists; it’s changing how PR professionals and businesses interact with their target audiences. Instead of pitching journalists on a new product or organizing an event, PR pros are increasingly being asked to create content on behalf of a brand and raise a company’s awareness online.

 

As the media landscape continues to evolve, brands are spending increasingly more on content marketing, investing in creating their own message for the audiences they want to reach.

 

What is content marketing?

Content marketing is the process of creating high-quality content with the intention of building trust and community with your brand’s target audience. To make any content marketing campaign successful, you have to be able to accomplish two objectives:

1. Generating engaging, high-quality content
2. Promoting that material so it appears in the right places online.

 

So what does this mean for the PR industry?

• We no longer rely on just traditional media – as more and more companies transition their strategy to content marketing, relying on just traditional media and pure press coverage isn’t enough. Links, tweets, shares and tags are becoming essential to successfully reaching your target audience.
• All content is connected – everything we do is about content, whether it’s writing a press release or composing a tweet. From social media to planning an event, all content is connected and increasingly important when developing strategies for clients today.
• It no longer starts with the press release – with the influx of social platforms, we no longer have to rely on big media reporters to get your name or product out there. With a heightened focus on direct engagement, there is a move toward transparency in communication and greater direct engagement with consumers. A company blog makes sense for a lot of brands, communicating your message directly rather than through the filter of traditional media.
• New technology helps us tell your story – telling your company story is not new. What is new is the technologies that help us create, distribute and measure it. From Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and beyond, all of these platforms help us to communicate your brand’s message.
• A new set of skills – as the media industry evolves, PR firms are diversifying their offerings to better support their core function: telling a brand’s story. When we talk about “paid, earned, shared, owned”, we are talking about the strategies we use to support that content we’ve developed.

 

Kelly Howard