When it comes to growing a business, many organizations look to either a marketing or public relations strategy to help reach the right audience. The overall goal of both efforts is to increase brand awareness that results in quickly growing your business. More often than not, when companies do both and take the integrated communications approach, it yields the best results.

Marketing & PR – A Match Made in Content Heaven

At the basic level, marketing is responsible for planning the company’s promotion, from pinpointing a product’s target customer, to researching the market and setting a budget for product launches. When identifying tactics, companies can use several marketing communications strategies, such as making sure your brand message is consistent, distributing newsletters, designing and creating content calendars and producing white papers and case studies.

These tactics, when used correctly, can help increase your overall brand awareness and company footprint within your target industries. Once complete, companies can analyze the metrics of the tactics to evaluate the success of their marketing efforts.

Incorporating PR into a marketing campaign can supplement and enhance an organization’s marketing push. By engaging the media, PR pros look to utilize press releases, news trends, social media content, upcoming events, blogs and bylined articles to create earned or free media opportunities that establish the company and subject-matter experts as thought leaders within the industry.

Fueling Content Marketing Campaigns

A Radius.com article discussed that many popular publications are not just using their own authors to produce relevant content. With the recent rise of content marketing, the role of PR has expanded to become even more vital to brands in all industries. Many publications are now welcoming articles from third-party contributors, which provides another vehicle to distribute the message. Through this natural extension of PR, organizations can help elevate brand perception and awareness through value-driven content that helps establish a mutually beneficial relationship.

Public relations efforts can successfully fuel content marketing campaigns by increasing brand awareness and lending credibility to a company and its products and services. It can also help increase traffic to a company’s website and generate leads that ideally convert into new customers – adding revenue to a company’s bottom line.

With the number of tools available to promote content, PR practitioners assume a great deal of responsibility for ensuring the client’s content is correct and relevant. As more organizations are looking to increase their reach among target audiences, companies are constantly looking for innovative ways to control the channels through which they provide information.

Change Your Way of Thinking for Better Content

Often, communications professionals are tasked with “thinking like a consumer” to understand what drives people to click on a specific link or share a certain piece of content. It’s equally important for PR and marketing professionals to think as journalists and editors, and move away from typical “salesy” wording.

For example, with content marketing campaigns, it’s more advantageous to switch gears from self-promotional materials to more compelling, thought-provoking stories that can offer true insight and value for the target audiences. By sharing content that is relevant to journalists, PR and marketing professionals can build meaningful relationships within the media that can be leveraged for future opportunities.

Traditional PR efforts focus on launching or promoting a new project, company or cause. Content marketing creates a steady flow of content – not just about the company, but also about the industry and news relevant to the company’s customers. Supplementing these content marketing efforts with PR – repurposing a white paper into a bylined article, syndicating a blog post or sharing an infographic, for example – can result in even more exposure for the organization and increase its brand awareness.

Don’t Forget to Be Social

Lastly, there is an increasingly popular trend of social media engagement being used to promote integrated marketing communications efforts. Tactics such as adding infographics to company websites, hyperlinks to articles in press release materials and embedding social sharing prompts on blogs can result in a far more engaging experience for the consumer versus the traditional static news release. These tactics can be used to drive traffic back to your website that can also help increase business opportunities and those all-important customer leads.

When all is said and done, the most effective way to amplify your client’s image is to establish them as a reliable source of content and build their credibility for earned media opportunities. By integrating both marketing and public relations approaches, it increases the chances that you will get an editor’s attention for media opportunities while simultaneously promoting your client’s content through marketing channels.

Do you want to combine your marketing and public relations efforts under a winning content marketing strategy? Contact Gabriel Marketing Group to get the conversation started.