Out of the Trenches

After years of slogging away in the PR trenches, I came to a startling conclusion. All the press in the world simply won’t reach enough of the target audience to push the needle forward for brands. Today the media platform is so vast, with so much content appearing hourly, that breaking through to enough readers to create awareness and elicit the proper response is beyond the call of duty for a well-crafted news article.

That is not to say that well-crafted news articles do not have their purpose and place in creating brand awareness. Earned media still creates unparalleled credibility with readers. It means the expectations of brand marketers won’t be met with PR alone. Today brand marketers have one key measuring stick- how much traffic did this story drive to my website. Yes, the number of articles in appropriate publications and the quality of message coherence across these publications are still important, but irrelevant to the brand marketer if it doesn’t spike website traffic.

So, PR practitioners are charged with getting a hyperlink established in each article we place to allow for ‘backlinking’ from the article to the brand’s website. Still, it’s not enough, simply because not everyone in the target audience is reading that publication. You cannot assume any different. So how do you leverage PR to drive traffic to a brand’s website without losing the credibility of earned media

The answer is to integrate with digital marketing. This approach broadens to the scope of how and where the story can be told, reaches the target audience on social media and other channels when they are not necessarily seeking news. Digital and social marketing can carry the credibility of your earned media article beyond the readership of the original publication. 

Driving your message across social media while pitching and placing media stories extends the articles to a new group of target audiences, allows you to judge the effectiveness of an article while carrying key messages. It also creates brand awareness among the journalists you are trying to reach. Of course, not all brands and situations are right for this approach, but overall linking the two disciplines will provide better results and move PR out of the trenches and in front of more of the target audience.