Most people wouldn’t find too many similarities between content marketing and public relations, however, that’s not always the case. In fact, there are plenty of similarities between public relations and content marketing efforts and plenty of ways that companies can utilize both at the same time to generate positive results.
Public relations
At the core of public relations, each strategy is about engaging, influencing, and developing relationships with key stakeholders of a company across numerous platforms to improve and develop the public perception of a business. There are different types of public relations specialists as well as public relations categories that PR agencies can help companies with such as reputation management, media relations, outreach, corporate communications, social media and management, events, and more. As more and more trends and tools, as well as tech, begins to develop, and become popular with businesses and consumers, the goal of public relations efforts is to help companies adapt to the ever-changing needs of their target audiences, and the times they are living in. In the last few years, most public relations professionals in the public relations industry have had to get a lot better at dealing with digital storytelling, utilizing tools with artificial intelligence, and responding to false news and disinformation. Fortunately, each one of these things has been handled quite well by public relations professionals, which means companies have benefited from utilizing their public relations strategies to help them achieve their goals.
Content marketing
The strategic approach in terms of marketing efforts that are focused on creating and publishing valuable, high-quality, and relevant content in a consistent manner to grab the attention and then keep the attention of a defined audience is what content marketing entails. Most people think that content marketing is a very distinct type of marketing, which is completely different from any other type of marketing effort a company can pursue. While traditional marketing efforts tend to rely on companies self-promoting themselves, content marketing efforts tend to go out of their way to avoid self-promotion. At the core, content marketing is designed to meet the needs of the target audience of a company. The goal of creating content for a company is to help a business establish its knowledge, expertise, and experience with the target audience to develop trusting relationships with potential customers.
This type of relationship can help companies improve their reputation and credibility, which can nurture potential customers for a longer period of time to eventually get them to convert by influencing their purchasing decisions. There are different types of content that companies can use to accomplish all of this, such as video content, blog posts, email, newsletters, e-books, and the best content marketing strategies rely on each type of format that’s going to meet the needs of the customers at every stage of the buying journey. That means companies can create blog posts that will provide answers to some of the more important questions potential customers might have about the solutions, and then create video content for more detailed industry trends, or delve into case studies from the business. Additionally, to better promote the content and generate a higher reach, companies also have to utilize search engine optimization, social media promotion, and more, and the type of promotion and content a company invests in tends to be determined by the goals that the company is trying to reach.
