Content Marketing for PR

How to build brand visibility, influence and trust in today's social age

Trevor Young

• Publisher: Digital Citizen
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780648669616
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Public Relations
• Index: Business

Are you struggling to cut through the noise and convey your message to the marketplace?

Become your own media channel and tell your stories like a PR pro!

We live in a fast-paced, digital-first world cluttered with brands and individuals telling the world how great they are. It's no wonder consumers are so cynical and distrustful. They resent being interrupted with meaningless ads, pitches and promotional messages. They simply don't care about you or your business—because you haven't given them a reason to.

Meanwhile, marketers and PR pros are beginning to accept that many of the methods they've been using to reach potential customers and influencers simply don't work anymore.

Bottom line: Standing out, getting noticed and resonating in the marketplace is a growing challenge for businesses and organizations, large and small.

Trust and reputation have never been more important in business.

Learn how to harness the power of both public relations and content marketing to build recognition, influence and credibility for your business, organization or personal brand.

In this book, veteran public relations practitioner and marketing speaker Trevor Young —aka "The PR Warrior"—shows you how to strategically use content marketing for PR to:

- Humanize your company or organization

- Deepen the connection your brand has with consumers

- Grow your influence within the industry you operate

- Build familiarity and trust in the marketplace

- Connect with the people who influence your clients and customers

- Increase new business leads and sales

- Reduce the customer's buying cycle

- Make paid-for advertising work harder

Written for entrepreneurs, change agents, business leaders, marketers and PR practitioners, Content Marketing for PR is your essential guide to building a visible brand that's recognized, respected and relevant in today's noisy social world.

DO

10

First, Develop a Content Strategy for PR

The crazy number of online publishing platforms and tools at our fingertips today has made it dead easy to create multimedia content and to publish instantly, for free, on the web.

Now, some of what you produce might be really good. But if you want to move the needle with your content, if the goal is to impact a specific target audience, then a bit of thought and planning is required up front.

That said, you should also be conscious of overplanning: Don’t let your desire for perfection stop you from getting stuff done! I’ve seen many marketers and business owners spend so much time planning, they never actually get around to creating their content, let alone putting any effort into engaging with their online community.

In this chapter, we’re going to work through some basic, foundational steps aimed at structuring your content marketing for PR efforts. Follow these steps to clarify what you’re trying to achieve and how you might go about achieving it.

Please note: As you’ll see in this book, content marketing for PR is inextricably linked to social media, earned media and, to a degree, paid media as well. Often, when I create a broader, content-led communications strategy for a client, I take all of these other elements into consideration. For the sake of focus, I will allude to, but not dwell too much on them in this book.

Suffice it to say, if you are developing your own strategy, it’s useful to understand how content marketing threads back through the other keystone elements of PR and communications. Get it right and you put yourself in a better position to ensure your brand builds a consistent, multichannel presence.

MY BASELINE PROCESS (THE METHODOLOGY)

This process, outlined below, will start you on your way. It’s a pretty comprehensive framework, able to accommodate those who want to take a deeper dive and really think things through before taking action. However, some people, particularly in small business, prefer to spend less time planning and more time doing. In my experience, aside from the research components, a good chunk of this process can be completed in a solid workshop session and revisited and refined over time.

While all the components serve a purpose in aggregate, if you do nothing else, please ensure that you start by investing time in defining your goals (see “Pursuit”), the target audience (see “People”), their informational needs (see “Pinpoint”) and measuring the metrics (see “Progress”).

Planning Your Content Marketing for PR Process (in Summary)

1. Preparation:. Gather insights - Audit. Listen. Learn.

Part A. Focus internally

2. Panorama: Build out the “unbroken view” of your brand story, which represents the narrative of your business or organization, and the story you want to communicate to the world.

3. Positioning: Confirm the positioning you want your brand to have in the marketplace relative to your goals and the competitive landscape you operate in.

4. Pursuit: Articulate the overarching commercial outcome or goal that will guide you — consider it your North Star — and the supporting objectives that will help influence the attainment of that goal.

Part B. Focus externally

5. People: Define your desired target audiences: customers, clients, constituents and those who influence them.

6. Pinpoint: Identify the information needs of these audience groups. What’s of interest and relevance to them?

7. Platform: Agree on the core channels that will make up your communications platform and develop a mini-strategy for each one.

8. Package: Identify and develop the core elements of your content program: premium signature content, sub-branded media properties and day-to-day presence content, guided by the central pillars (Figure 10.3) of your content.

9. Promotion: Create a plan to amplify the content you publish.

10. Process: Outline how you intend to manage the content program, including apps and tools, governance, resourcing and more.

11. Progress: Determine the key metrics of your program and put a framework in place to measure them.

Let’s dig a little deeper into each element of the above methodology.

1. PREPARATION

ACTION: Take stock, do your homework and gather insights to better understand the space where you operate.

Any time you embark on a content-led communications plan, it’s highly advisable to start by listening to and observing what’s happening in and around your virtual world. I’m not talking about a cursory scan of the web but full immersion and discovery.

The goal here is to arm yourself with information about what, how, when and where your company or organization is publishing content, including on social channels. Concurrently, broaden your view of what’s going on in your space generally.

Most small-business owners probably have a reasonable idea of how their content is tracking if they’re involved with the process. So this shouldn’t be an onerous task. A large organization, though, might not have audited its content for some time, if at all. Here are some recommended steps:

1. Undertake a content audit.

If you are already producing longer-form content, conduct an audit to find out what has been working and what hasn’t. Establish a benchmark across metrics, such as web traffic, referral sources, number of downloads, social shares and more.

Review what has already been published. If you are publishing or disseminating content that is out-of-date or incomplete, it could very well be confusing people about who you are and what your organization does. If that is the case, consider deleting it. You can revisit this action once you’ve gone through the strategic process and have a clearer vision of what you want to achieve.

Consider auditing your key competitors’ content or lack thereof. Identify what they are doing, how well they are doing it and what impact you think their content is having. Do they have a consistent perspective and point of view? Are they establishing an informational foothold in a market niche or segment where you both operate? Do they look like they know what they’re doing?

If you haven’t been producing content and you’ve got a clean slate, a competitor content audit is a good place to start.

However, and I say this often, don’t get too hung up on what your competitors are doing. I believe people should run their own race when it comes to content marketing for PR. Your business or organization is unique, with its own goals, opportunities and challenges. For these reasons, it’s important that you don’t get suckered into copying what your competitors are doing but instead, run your own race. It would be more productive for you to be aware of what they’re doing so you can start differentiating your brand through the content you produce.

2. Do a social audit.

Given the critical role social media plays in content marketing for PR overall, it’s prudent to take a step back and review what your brand is doing in the social sphere as well.

Again, establish some benchmarks in terms of vanity metrics, for example, numbers of followers, levels of engagement and the like. Are people interacting with your brand on social media? Are they sharing your content, and if so, how much is this increasing the reach of your brand?

But more important: Look at the tone of voice, the consistency of output and the quality of the content you’ve been publishing. Is what you’re putting out on social channels doing your brand justice in terms of cohesive messaging and imagery?

You may want to extend your review to what your competitors are doing on their social channels. Rival IQ is a good tool to use here.

3. Connect the dots through social listening.

Social listening means observing and delving deep into the web. Doing this can unearth some terrific insights for your content. P...