At a time when COVID-19 is challenging every business, digital marketing and tech PR can help continue filling your company’s sales pipeline. Both are critical components to the longevity of a brand, its revenue and its growth in new customers.

It’s important to understand the difference between the two and how high-growth technology companies can benefit from both.

What Is Marketing?

Marketing is not just creating a website. An integrated marketing approach creates a unified and seamless customer experience that meets their needs and expectations and increases sales – all while staying on point with consistent messaging and branding.

Marketers help their clients and their prospects by:

• Helping qualified leads discover a product or service
• Showing them how a product or service meets their needs and resolves their pain points
• Nurturing their journeys along the path to making a purchase
• Creating an inbound strategy that creates original, valuable content to attract qualified new business leads
• Developing creative content like blog posts, special landing pages, infographics, e-mail newsletters and white papers that create brand awareness and capture information from potential new customers when downloaded or clicked through
• Creating websites that are optimized for discovery by search engines (SEO) and drive qualified traffic
• Presenting a consistent brand persona on social media channels that increase awareness and offer quality content
• Developing, testing, deploying and managing pay-per-click advertising campaigns and other types of online advertising

Traditional outbound marketing is a one-size-fits-all, bullhorn approach that pushes out information whether someone is interested or not. Examples include TV and radio advertisements, billboards and telemarketing and cold calls from salespeople.

Inbound marketing, on the other hand, draws in potential customers and attracts them to a product or service with the offer of valuable information tailored to their particular needs. Digital/online marketing is now the headliner over traditional print because it’s a highly cost-effective and far more measurable alternative to heavy advertising. Marketing budgets typically have little room for expansion – especially now. With properly targeted, strategic and smart digital marketing, it’s easier to attract interest from potential new customers and the decision makers your company is targeting while ensuring a strong rate of return on your marketing investment.

What Is Public Relations?

PR is the voice of a company in the form of consistent messaging that ensures a company is positioned as an industry leader, thought leader and expert.

Technology PR professionals help their clients by:

• Creating strategic company positioning and product messaging that differentiates a company from competitors and resonates with members of the news media
• Developing relationships with reporters who cover a particular beat and leveraging those contacts to secure positive news coverage of a company, its product or service or its leadership
• Writing press releases to announce major new offerings, key company milestones and new funding and coordinating distribution to the news media
• Presenting a company’s leaders and staff members as thought leaders by securing publication of bylined articles about industry trends and topics
• Setting up briefings with key industry analysts who influence the trajectory of products and services as well as investments and acquisitions
• Identifying award opportunities for a company, its products and services and its executives
• Providing media training to company leaders and designated spokepersons about how to best prepare for media interviews and manage interactions with reporters
• Providing ongoing strategic counsel to respond to breaking news and emerging crises

With a strategic tech PR program — and the subsequent media coverage and industry recognition it generates — you can answer questions that potential new customers might have before they even enter your marketing funnel. PR makes sure that your company and its products and services are consistently “in the media conversation.” To increase revenue, it’s important to show prospective clients and customers how your company is a key player in the industry. PR is the backbone to messaging and provides the answers to why customers should believe in your offerings.

Together, an integrated digital marketing and strategic PR program will get your business seen, make it part of the lives of your target customers, attract and nurture leads and increase revenue. And while the two strategies may have the same goals, one or the other is rarely enough.

Read about our award-winning B2B Integrated Campaign that deployed digital advertising, digital marketing and PR for one of our clients that drove more than 1,000 new, qualified business leads and $500,000 in directly attributable revenue.

If you’re ready to take your fast-growing tech business to the next level with the help of a technology marketing agency, contact us today!