There was a time when a company’s marketing team and PR team worked parallel to each other. Aware of each other’s presence yet never really crossing over. However, as the world turned digital, it became apparent that integrating digital marketing and PR made a lot of sense.
If you are yet to combine your digital marketing and public relations, you may be missing out!
Differences Between Digital Marketing And Public Relations
PR is used to increase brand awareness, create a buzz when launching a new product, form a positive brand reputation and deal with negative press. It achieves these goals by generating positive media coverage and creating relationships with industry publications.
The overall goal is to ensure the brand stands out for the right reasons to the people who matter including the target audience, stakeholders and potential partners.
Whereas digital marketing is used to directly sell a company’s products and services to new, existing and potential customers. It uses a variety of tactics, from search engine optimises to social media marketing, to convert web users into leads and convert leads into hard sales.
Similarities Between Digital Marketing And Public Relations
Although they are different practices, there has always been similarities between digital marketing and public relations. Both practices aim to boost brand awareness and enforce a positive brand image.
Plus, both practices aim to increase web traffic and use some of the same channels to do so, including social media and search engines.
In addition, digital marketing and PR often target similar audiences. The audience targeted by PR may be broader, but it still includes potential customers.
Benefits Of Integrating Digital Marketing And Public Relations
As both marketing and traditional PR have become accustomed to the digital world, the lines between the two have blurred. And the common goals between the two seemed to have aligned. Through integrating digital marketing and public relations, a company can:
Enhance Brand Consistency
The digital world is overflowing with businesses just like yours. To stand out from the crowd and strengthen your USP, you need a strong brand identity.
Integrating digital marketing and public relations can help ensure that, wherever it appears (on or off the web), your brand is consistent. This includes using the same logo, brand colours, straplines, messaging and tone of voice.
Reap The Benefits Of Collaboration
When your digital marketing team and PR team come together, magic happens. For example, marketing experts can provide analytics to help improve future strategies and campaigns. Whereas, PR pros can help the marketing team stay ahead of the game with current, exciting campaigns.
Improve Search Engine Rankings
SEO is a fundamental part of digital marketing. A lot of work goes into getting a company website to the top of Google. Anything that helps increase the company’s position on SERPs is great in our book. And this includes PR.
Getting an article about your business published in a huge online publication, or on the website of a leading industry, influencer can help boost your search engine rankings.
Build Positive Relationships
With the right contacts, it can be much easier to achieve amazing results with your digital marketing campaigns. And your PR team are sure to have positive relationships with useful contacts within the industry.
Boost Marketing And PR Efforts
Digital marketing tactics can be used to boost the efforts of your PR team – and vice versa. For example, a collaboration between your PR team and content marketing team can lead to truly amazing content that is sure to be placed in valuable online publications that will reach the best possible audience.
Top Tips For Integrating Digital Marketing And Public Relations
Here are our top tips for integrating digital marketing and PR:
Make The Most Of Content Marketing
As we just mentioned, content marketing can enhance your PR efforts. With the help of your content marketing experts, your PR team can create kick-ass content to pitch to journalists and publications. Plus, your PR team and digital marketing team can align their content calendars/strategies to ensure the same messaging is going out.
Target Social Media Influencers
Aside from targeting journalists, your PR team can also work with your digital marketing team to target social media influencers. Building a positive, mutually-beneficial relationship with social media influencers in your industry can work wonders for your PR. It can boost your brand awareness and encourage your target audience to trust your brand.
Take Advantage Of Back Links
Having a link back to your website on another website demonstrates to Google that your website is trustworthy and relevant – especially it the other website has a higher domain authority.
When pitching press releases and articles, your PR team can boost the SEO efforts of your digital marketing team by including links back to relevant pages on your company website.
Utilise Email Marketing
When it comes to PR, email marketing can be overlooked. But is an excellent digital marketing tactic that can be used to build strong relationships with your audience.
For example, if your company is doing something for charity (which is always great for PR), ensure you share it with your audience in an email newsletter. Plus, email newsletters allow you to tailor content to specific audiences, which can be incredibly useful.
Shout About It On Social Media
Aside from targeting social media influencers, your social media channels can also be used to showcase and amplify your PR strategies.
For example, you can create and leverage a campaign hashtag, share published articles onto your social media channels and create social media posts that are in line with the brands current messaging.
This article was created by ec-pr, a London-based B2B PR agency that make technology brands visible, valued and understood. They have a 100% track record of delivering clients with regular feature length coverage.
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