The time for setting budgets is almost here, 2017 is fast approaching, and with it all come major shifts in our PR departments. PR used to be all about gaining exposure and generating buzz for your company through the media, but with content and influencer marketing affecting it, PR must continuously adapt. To prepare yourself and your team, here is the first installment of a series on trends you must keep on your radar if you want to dominate 2017:
1. Earned media comes first, and paid amplification comes second.
PR efforts are increasingly important to your marketing team because marketing can put spend behind the media you earn to more successfully get the right eyes on the exact kind of press you want representing your company. If you focus on earning that media first, your team will have the chance to measure what works and identify when it makes sense to put dollars behind certain pieces of content. At the very least, I would create some documents to help promote your content, like this editorial calendar and content promotion checklist. As your content advances, these can as well.
It also builds authority more naturally so when you want to market somewhere, you’ve often earned the authority and credibility to do so for free. Let’s use speaking as an example. Wouldn’t you rather become a keynote speaker because of your industry leadership and earn an invitation from an event organizer than pay $30,000 for the speaking gig?
Even if you do pay to sponsor something, you’ll walk into a negotiation with more bargaining chips if you’ve already built up the brands and influence of your key employees. And building the influence of your key employees also leads to more influencer marketing opportunities. When one of your leaders contributes to a publication or speaks at an event and she mentions other relevant influencers, it’s a natural way to earn — not buy — those relationships.
2. PR is shifting to contributor marketing.
When I started writing for publications five years ago, there were significantly fewer contributors than there are today. Signs indicate that the number of contributors will continue to increase. This shifts PR pitches to contributor pitches. To give you insight into where we’re heading, I’ll be straight about how I personally look at pitches:
- Don’t send me a traditional press release unless you don’t want me to read it.
- Time is extremely important. I’m a contributor, but I’m also running a company — and that’s the same position a lot of other contributors are in. Make our lives as easy as you can. If there are mistakes and errors in your pitches, I won’t accept your pitches any longer. In other words, “ain’t nobody got time for that.”
- Contributors are smaller-scale publication editors, so don’t think you can pull a fast one on us by sneaking promotional content into an article that doesn’t align with our voices. We have an obligation to our readers to develop good content, and we’re not going to make an exception just because you were charming in an email.
- We love when you can help us engage our audience. If your first article pitch receives good comments, shares, views, time spent on site, finish rates, etc., then we’ll be hungry for more pitches. Do everything you can to encourage all of the above.
3. Books have earned a place on the “good PR” checklist.
For a long time, I wasn’t on the book bandwagon. I thought, “Why would I spend months writing one 50,000-word book when I can write 62 800-word articles for a variety of online publications?” The choice seemed like a no-brainer to me.
But it doesn’t have to be one or the other, and that’s where I was wrong. Over the past six months, my team and I have developed a bank of content ideas using already-published content and original insights to craft a book, and I’m now working with McGraw-Hill to publish in April 2017.
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Books allow you to go into much more detail than you ever could with online content, and they achieve a few very important goals in PR:
- Books can overcome trust barriers and help attract other PR opportunities to you and your company. In fact, I was once turned down for a major keynote speaking opportunity because the organizer wanted to distribute books to the audience, and I didn’t have one. On the other hand, my friend and client John Ruhlin authored “Giftology” and was able to leverage it into multiple PR opportunities on TV that have drawn other outlets to him consistently.
- Books can be used as assets to send to brand advocates and other important people you have relationships with, like investors, conference organizers, and contributors.
- A book can position your company as a knowledge-driven environment, not just a sales-driven one. I call this an “expert environment,” which shows people you value and champion knowledge.
4. We’re more capable of measuring PR.
The ability to effectively measure PR is one of the biggest changes to the industry, thanks to the rise in technology, which you can read more about below. Remember when Gary Vaynerchuk said that you can’t measure the ROI of your mother? He made a great point. PR firm turnover has been massive in the past and will continue to be for those who don’t embrace measurement. But things are evolving, and now we have a much better idea of the reach, engagement, and concrete results that come from our PR investments.
This doesn’t mean PR is the easiest thing to track. I’ll be the first to admit it’s not. That’s where your understanding of how PR content can be leveraged comes into play. Can your content be used outside of your marketing and PR departments to help, say, recruiting? How can you measure that?
How many candidates learned of your company through your content? Are you asking new hires about their previous engagement with your content and how it affected their decisions? There are lots of ways you can gain an understanding of your PR content’s effectiveness, and you can use a customizable analytics template to track and measure your successes. And you can still find qualitative returns, even if it’s not through hard numbers.
For example, we started tracking the influencers who share our clients’ content on social. We measure what their reach is based on their followers. Sure, not all of their followers will read the content they share, but it does give us insight into whether the content we’re helping them create is attracting the right audiences with the right influence. We can then even increase the chances that certain pieces will go viral by engaging those influencers in the future.
5. PR and SEO strategies will become closer friends.
Five years ago, PR and SEO would have existed in entirely different departments, with SEO right in the middle of your digital marketing team’s efforts and PR a core part of your communications department. But as SEO continues to evolve and Google continues to reward high-quality content on high-quality sites, the two practices are becoming even better friends.
Typically, two of the key functions of the PR department are publishing first-rate thought leadership content from key employees and ensuring press is written about the company — together, they make up one of the major factors affecting search results.
Therefore, it’s vital that your PR and SEO teams understand each other’s goals and can align their work so the content coming from your company is high-quality and optimized for search.
“Optimized for search” doesn’t mean “stuffed with links and keywords.” That’s not how it works these days, and there’s a balance when it comes to building the right links and adhering to publication guidelines.
Publications used to be very touchy about links and SEO, and some still are — but others are realizing that optimized content is a great source of traffic to their sites. However, you do have to remember two major things: Your content must be engaging to their audiences, and you should do all that you can to optimize your articles on their sites.
So if you contribute to a few smaller publications about a similar topic, link back to an article of yours on another publication when it makes sense. Publication editors know which articles continue to get traffic, and they value the content success that results from their audiences’ online searches.
6. Traditional PR strategies and pricing structures are evolving.
More and more PR firms are popping up with evolved pricing structures, which is understandable. Before we started Influence & Co., PR retainers could range from $20,000 to $200,000, and I’m still trying to figure out what those firms did to justify their value.
Deliverables are a must now, and the old “We’ll pitch you consistently” promise as a deliverable just isn’t going to cut it. I’d rather pay for one pitch for one article that actually gets published than a million pitches that don’t see the light of day or bring in any opportunities.
What matters now is true, consistent publication, not just the effort. It would be great if PR teams got a fee for effort, like I did for my report card as a kid, but most clients are set on seeing actual results from PR. And with ROI becoming easier to measure, this need will only become more widespread.
Mutually beneficial relationships between you and your PR firm — with crystal-clear expectations — are important. I recommend a blueprint from the start that identifies every deliverable, cost, timeline, and expectation on both sides. Plans like these will become more important as companies shift away from the “You’re our PR firm, and this is how much we pay you each month” mindset. Granted, there will be some exceptions (like a PR crisis), but overall, companies are shifting to a clear deliverable model.
The second part of my series on PR trends to help you prepare for 2017 is now published. You can stay up-to-date with my latest trends articles by signing up for notifications when my next piece goes live or by following me on Twitter.
John Hall is the CEO of Influence & Co., a company that specializes in expertise extraction and knowledge management that is used to fuel marketing efforts.
