Why PR and digital marketing are connected—and how to capitalize

If you fail to connect PR to social media and content marketing, you’re missing an opportunity.

Even before there were social media platforms to consider, it was always true that once you’d earned a media placement through public relations, you needed to share it. You’d post it on your website, maybe send it out through your customer newsletter, and share it internally with your employees.

Today, in addition to earned media, we have owned media, which includes content we’re self-publishing. Plus, we have social media, which makes it so much easier to share our media coverage and our content with all the audiences we need to nurture.

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Of course, this should be a significant boon to our public relations efforts. Alas, it doesn’t always work that way.

PR pros often hear this from clients: “Oh, we just need you to handle our PR. We’ll handle social media.” Or: “Self-published content? Oh, we just post that to our site. Visitors will find it if they need it.”

However, anything that’s generated by your PR efforts through earned media needs to be shared on social media, and any content you self-publish might not be found randomly, unless PR efforts promote it to help the people that can benefit from it find it.

It reminds me of the famous quote, “If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?”

Media coverage earned through public relations efforts or self-published content simply doesn’t go as far without amplification. It must be shared to get all the mileage you can from it—or, as influencer Andy Crestodina might say, to “squeeze all the juice from it.”

Besides, it just makes sense. You need content for your social media channels. PR and content marketing are great ways to help fill your social media calendar. One cannot function without the other.

The point is, your efforts can’t survive on their own. You can’t partition social media, content or public relations off in their own little corners of the world. Everything you do should be feeding into the PR/social media/content pipeline. All content generated either internally or through earned media should be part of that.

Here are the moments in this lifecycle:

• A PR placement is earned or content is generated internally (a customer story or infographic, for example).
• It’s posted on the website.
• It’s shared on social.
• A potential customer sees the social media post, visits the site, reads more of the brand’s content and starts following it.
• A few months later, they come on board as a customer, after following the brand on social media and seeing all the great content it shares.

See how it all works together? Integrate your PR, content and social media efforts for better results.

Michelle Garrett is a freelance writer and PR pro. Follow her on Twitter @PRisUs. A version of this article originally ran on her blog.

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