Similarities in PR and Content Marketing
Both public relations and content marketing efforts tend to focus on shaping the public perception of a company with a target audience. This can be done by generating more brand awareness, and credibility, as well as thought leadership. The best practices in public relations have always included a type of content marketing effort in the past, however, they used to be seen as separate from content marketing back then. However, these days there are more and more similarities between content marketing and public relations efforts. In the past, public relations efforts used to be restricted to earned media, however, these days they can incorporate paid and shared, as well as owned media as part of an overall PR strategy. That way companies can connect their public relations and their content marketing efforts to generate better results.
Functions
Both public relations efforts and content marketing campaigns tend to have a lot of similar functions, with the main one being able to create content to generate more engagement with potential customers and generate more leads for a business. That means both public relations efforts and content marketing campaigns need to be able to generate high-quality and valuable content for the target audience, that’s going to grab and hold their attention and convince them to begin their buying journey, and eventually convert by making a purchase. Most of the time, owned media and owned communication channels are very valuable elements to the way a company promotes itself. This was important in the past, and still is today as owned media is all of the media that a company has ownership over, that can be used as an asset, such as the research that the company conducts that is then turned into e-books, case studies, or white papers, as well as the company’s own blog, or even social media accounts. These days, a lot of owned media tends to be utilized as a part of content marketing efforts because the content is an important element of all public relations efforts, and companies can utilize it to highlight any positive media coverage that they’ve managed to generate to improve their reputation.
Examples
As public relations efforts and content marketing campaigns continue to get more similarities and merge into one another, public relations efforts have started to increasingly assume the functions and capabilities of content marketing, such as nurturing leads, search engine optimization, and more. Vice versa, content marketing efforts have also managed to assume some of the functions of public relations efforts, including sharing thought leadership content to improve the reputation of a business, and creating press releases that are distributed on the owned communication channels of a business. This can only be achieved if a company continually invests in both public relations and content marketing at the same time, to generate the best possible results from both types of efforts.
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Both public relations and content marketing efforts tend to focus on shaping the public perception of a company with a target audience. This can be done by generating more brand awareness, and credibility, as well as thought leadership. The best practices in public relations have always included a type of content marketing effort in the past, however, they used to be seen as separate from content marketing back then. However, these days there are more and more similarities between content marketing and public relations efforts. In the past, public relations efforts used to be restricted to earned media, however, these days they can incorporate paid and shared, as well as owned media as part of an overall PR strategy. That…