Public relation or PR for a company in the digital platform and its digital promotion are both complimentary. However, you should avoid lumping them together. Because only when you look at these two critical elements of brand building for a company as separate entities, you can exploit their potential to the fullest. It is essential for the management of a company to understand the symbiotic nature of public relation and digital promotion. When you understand their balancing nature then only you can truly use their combined power to improve the brand awareness of your company in the digital landscape.
The PR of a company mainly deals with right messaging through a diverse mediums like a press release, social media, blog post, case studies, white papers, newsletters, social media content and business & social events. The digital marketing, on the other hand, focuses on creating new demands for the products or services and looking for new leads. To do its job effectively, digital marketing team uses interesting contents in all their strategies. They use content on the landing pages, social media, emails, blogs, advertising and even in audio and video formats. For the management, it is important that they allow a better synergy between the PR and the digital marketing teams for a greater punch in their overall brand building and marketing strategy.
The question is, how to bring together PR and digital promotion for great outcomes? Here’s how to do so.
Align their goals
The first thing to do in order to harmonise the efforts of PR and digital promotion is to make sure that their goals are aligned towards the same objective. This will give them the impetus to work more closely with each other. As the ultimate objective of both the public relation and digital promotion is to increase the sale of company’s products, it would be a wise move to include the PR department in the planning stage of content creation. This will enable PR experts to give valuable inputs on what kind of content should be marketed and will be useful in their own public relation planning. It will improve the messaging part of the PR and also give the digital marketing team clues on which areas they should focus more on their contents.
In addition, if the PR department is involved in content creation from the planning stage, they will be in a firmer ground to manage their own strategies that include the content so that their efforts are doubly effective.
Common strategies to follow
After aligning their goals, the next step will be to create strategies that both these departments can follow and avoid any duplication of efforts. This strategy could include messaging, content creation, content placement, using social media for buying signals and so on. In this way, the two departments can join their strengths for the better and more targeted approach.
As the competition in the digital field is increasing exponentially, it is important for a firm to utilize all its resources to get ahead of the competition. And the convergence of PR and digital promotion is a great boost in this direction!
