PR’s changing relationship – how digital’s picking up the slack

As an experienced inbound marketing agency, we’ve worked with brands from all backgrounds to deliver bespoke inbound strategies across a variety of channels to help them better identify and attract the people who matter most to their growth ambitions. Want more information check out our blog “Lessons from an inbound marketing agency”.

The public relations game has changed beyond all recognition, and we don’t need statistics to tell you why. We’ve seen it change first-hand across different sectors over the years. That’s not a bad thing, you understand. Thanks to the internet and influencer marketing, digital PR has emerging as a leading model in recent years. 

June update: Check out the end of this blog for some intriguing new statistics which back up our claims!

Here’s an example; a friend of ours used to write for specialist video gaming magazines before the recession. Magazines and game publishers’ PR typically had close relationships before the recession (as every magazine across the world tended to); however, an industry trend began to emerge as the recession hit.

With social media creeping into everybody’s lives and content marketing starting to take hold, a lot of PR professionals – in the entertainment industry in particular – realised that although keeping in touch with print publications was still useful, they could cut out the middleman and speak directly to their audience and the paying public.

Exclusives could now be marketed directly by publishers, product footage uploaded to YouTube, and relationships built over personally managed social channels. It wasn’t the death-knell for the specialist magazine, but it made their job of getting fresh content and keeping readers interested harder than ever before.

Traditional Vs. Digital

That’s a story for another day, though. What we want to talk about here is a little different; more about the emergence of digital PR. We also want to look at why so many companies are sticking with traditional PR methods and relationship building techniques, and how it’s affecting the way they do business and attract new customers.

Our opening example is a bit of an extreme one. Those were big businesses in a niche industry (some generating billions in revenue) reworking their existing public relations strategy to be more consumer-facing. It was a lightbulb moment for them and a natural progression; why edit a video of your latest game and send it to a PR agency to distribute when you could do it on YouTube yourself?

It’s a bit different out in the wild. Some businesses and PR agencies are entrenched, desperately clinging onto a more traditional way of doing public relations and are missing out on huge creative opportunities. The reasons differ. Some are scared of the transition to digital and some have flat out never considered using a public relations campaign.

Traditional PR can still get results, but the ease and – most importantly – the effectiveness of incorporating digital PR tactics into a campaign can totally change the PR landscape for businesses. If anything, modern PR techniques are more akin to digital brand building, helping create long-term positive brand impressions amongst potential and existing customers.

Image from: https://www.flickr.com/photos/ajc1/6735929719

Perfect public relations?

It’s fair to say that the role of a PR agency these days can be confusing. Different agencies follow different models and offer different services. While today we’re able to talk about a visible industry split into digital and traditional PR services, it’s easy to forget that no less than 15 years ago there was only PR; a middle-man service helping build relationships between brands, customers, and the media.

Pre-internet that meant focusing on outbound hustle such as cold-calling journalists, sending press releases in the hope they would get published, pitching to editors, socialising at events, and more. And, like most outbound marketing methods, it’s hard to gauge results with the traditional method. The PR company in question may have excellent links with a newspaper or magazine read by your target audience.

But if they manage to get an article about your company in a publication how do you know how many people it’s reached? How do you know if it’s had a positive impact on sales or improved their overall perception of your brand? A traditional public relations house may have the right connections, but is it able to provide the best results to grow your business?

More than likely not. They can’t influence calls-to-action or collect really sensitive publisher data for obvious legal reasons. Digital PR and brand building, on the other hand, not only opens up a huge amount of communication channels but also gives businesses the chance to collect key campaign data and encourage consumers to make instant purchasing decisions amongst other benefits.

The power of publishing

That’s not to say that traditional PR has no place – far from it. Traditional and digital PR can work together so long as they’re on the same wavelength. There’s nothing to stop a traditional team producing a fantastic, creative campaign and the digital team pushing it through a variety of targeted digital social channels.

Digital branding, though, fits into an online inbound marketing campaign better than traditional PR as game publishers discovered in our opening example. They don’t need middle-men anymore to build relationships when they can use digital inbound techniques to build stronger, long-term connections with both the media AND existing and potential customers.

Digital branding can also help you be far more creative with your campaigns and your audience, instead of leaving it in the hands of a traditional agency. Depending on the results you’re looking for you can produce a creative campaign with a consistent voice across various channels including social media, email, YouTube, infographics and blogs.

Information is the key word when it comes to effective digital PR. The amount of data available over the internet is astonishing and can give you huge amounts of creative inspiration to use when you’re promoting your business and your industry. It also opens the doors for collaboration, too, letting you attract and reach new audiences by partnering with bloggers, vloggers, and influential social media users.

A traditional agency may have good contacts in certain sections of the media, but you can build up a larger, more targeted list and build relationships through digital PR with a bit of research. You can also ethically collect consumer contact data to reach out to them directly on a regular basis to alert them about product offers, sales, competitions, and more – perfect with EU data collection amendments around the corner.

Don't get us wrong, the power of existing relationships is a beautiful thing, but the power to amplify, both with and without those relationships, no longer solely resides in the hands of the PR agency.

Most importantly digital brand building blows traditional PR out of the water when it comes to tracking and campaign success. A good creative inbound campaign will be able to track how many people have opened your emails, the amount of visitors that became leads, purchase information, traffic back to your website, the list goes on.

You can use that information to refine your tactics to get even better results for future campaigns. Something that traditional PR has never been able to match when you’re considering where to spend your advertising budget. Traditional and digital can exist and work together, but for the best results to grow a business digital PR and brand building are essential ingredients for the majority of successful inbound growth campaigns.

Some shiny new statistics to back up our claims

• 88% of PR professionals see digital storytelling as the biggest future PR trend. 
• Over 40% also agree that PR will become more aligned with marketing in the next five years.
• 75% of marketers plan on increasing PR budgets over the course of the next five years.
• 54% of marketers plan to moderately increase internal PR staffing over the next five years.
• 80% of questions were answered differently in a survey of PR professionals, based on respondent age.

So what do all these figures tell us? Well, more than ever, PR professionals are willing to recognise the importance of inbound marketing strategies, and are moving towards using these tactics themselves. Similarly, marketing professionals are waking up to the benefits of PR strategies, and adopting some of the industry's trends. It's official, marketing and PR are set to make peace!

However, the stark differences between millennials and managers within the PR industry can't be understated. The two groups find themselves on opposing sides of the fence in numerous situations, according to a study by the Institute for Public Relations. This demonstrates the importance of merging new ideas from PR young guns with the established practices of more senior staff - collaboration is key.

As an experienced inbound marketing agency, we’ve worked with brands from all backgrounds to deliver bespoke inbound strategies across a variety of channels to help them better identify and attract the people who matter most to their growth ambitions. Want more information check out our blog “Lessons from an inbound marketing agency”.