Public relations and marketing activities work best in harmony and many businesses will naturally ensure that each are one in the same strategy, to get the most out of message integration across all available communications channels.
However, as the MarCom mix and PR strategies become increasingly digital-based, boundaries are becoming blurred, which means the linear approach to each medium doesn’t work as effectively as one that is fully cross-referenced.
PR activities, outreach through social networks and search engine optimisation (SEO) are three digital areas that can reinforce each other when used in an integrated campaign.
This has been predominantly been facilitated by the growth of the internet and the brand visibility that it affords; a continually growing on-line audience means that maintaining a business’ image is much more than traditional print orientated media relations, leaflets and event attendance.
When PR, SEO and social media work together, the strategic benefits include more efficient and cost effective working from resource point of view. Also it can make for more robust messaging as well as a flexible campaign that can react to opportunities quickly.
Leveraging the core PR skill of creating bespoke, engaging content can also be a route to obtaining backlinks to a website, whether through opinion, advice or news
Priorities
A press release, whether distributed on a newswire or sold in to individual journalists, has the opportunity to bolster rankings in search engines; businesses with an acute awareness of SEO often prioritise securing online coverage over print and broadcast.
A link to the company’s website can be both useful when it comes to the customer journey and a relevant indicator for Google when it serves up its search engine results pages (SERPs).
Leveraging the core PR skill of creating bespoke, engaging content can also be a route to obtaining backlinks to a website, whether through opinion, advice or news. Negotiating maximised distribution and visibility of an article or press release, that incorporates anchor or naked links, aims to boost direct website traffic but it also offers Google paths to continually find the website in question.
The more Google’s spiders lands on a site, from a trusted source to related material, the more it believes the content could be suitable for a searcher.
Additionally in this type of content and activity, it is integral to promote the brand’s social media profiles and to encourage people to become fans or followers; a link directly to the profile is hugely beneficial. Using the social networks’ audiences can also be a fantastic way of creating PR materials, from surveys to analytics, what your fans and followers say and do could make for interesting stories.
Looking at it from the social perspective, media coverage and articles can make up a large amount of network content and can provide starting points for engagement as well as material that is ideal for sharing.
Of course, promoting one’s own website content through social networks will increase traffic and hopefully customer base but you may be surprised to hear there is minimal SEO benefit. Google announced earlier this year that no follow links, which are links that Google does not crawl and are found on social media platforms, and their credibility are taken into account.
Various SEO experts have trialled using social links, only on Twitter for example, and have been able to see a direct correlation in a website’s upward movement in Google’s rankings, albeit for a few hours or days.
For the website content that’s interesting enough to post about, it’s back to using those PR skills; use a great blog post that is likely to be shared, tweeted, liked or +1’d as a form of link bait to increase traffic and visibility.
When Bing displays its result pages it also lets you know which Facebook friends have liked the webpage, which is great if you’re searching for something, more than likely to make a purchase, where a recommendation from a trusted source may help to make a decision.
Whilst Google+ is still in its infancy it is expected that social activity on this platform will be included within organic rankings before too long and vice versa, so social search and the level of integrated planning that is needed to take advantage of this is likely to continue to increase.
Where a brand’s strategy is not integrated in-house, campaigns are habitually fragmented and opportunities are lost, or, commonly, elements get divided and lose cohesion due to delivery by uneducated social media, PR and SEO agencies.
The hybrid approach, which creates an effective, continuous support network, conveys the true value of each element; PR, SEO and social media activities underpin each other to reinforce a business’ primary business objectives, which ultimately include bottom line sales.
Effective promotion and brand management requires interconnected and consistent timings, messaging, reaction, tone of voice and spokespeople presented via a combination of activities and processes in off and online PR, SEO and social media.
Brands which are committed to getting the most out of their communications should be endeavouring to get integration correct now if they hope to succeed in the evolving digital world of the future.
