When PR & Digital Marketing Combines, Your Business Rises Sky-high?

Haven’t we all heard that PR is not marketing, and Digital Marketing is not PR? True that! But what sets them apart? Both have similar goals- the enhancement of brand's overall visibility which will impact its revenue. It’s, of course, the medium or practices of the two that keep them distinct and distant. While PR works on earned media to get unpaid press & media coverage, digital marketing uses all three- earned, owned, and paid media to sell the products and services. To be more succinct, PR practices are useful in brand building and brand positioning; the Digital Marketing practices are effective in obtaining the business leads.

If you own a startup business or a mid-size, why not combine both PR & Digital Marketing to get best of both worlds for your business as well as customers? Suppose you are going to organize a mega-event of new entrepreneurs which will be attended by all industry newbies or veterans for storming ideas & strategies. To make this event a success, you will need more attendees and the press coverage in a newspaper or online media.

Will digital marketing be able to give it you all? By running paid campaigns on social media or creating a specific landing page for this event calling for participants won’t be much effective unless journalists talk about it. Press releases written by journalists for this event when published in newspapers or online media portals will subject your event to large audience base. Perhaps, your event is very industry-specific, but it may interest the influencers in other industries also. Won’t it add 5 stars to your event?

Let’s take another example; you wrote an outstanding PR pitch to journalists for covering the same event. As it has become a universal truth now that journalists are extremely busy reporters who do not have time to respond to all pitches, yours may go overlooked. However, journalists are active on social media channels such as LinkedIn and Twitter. Using the hashtag #journorequest, they post requirements for stories or case studies they like to feature. If your social media executive is very active on Twitter, he can easily grab the deal for you. All you need to do is track (not spy) the journalists’ social media activities and you might bump on an easy to cater requirement.

Another thing in common between the two divisions, that is, Public Relations and digital marketing is that both involve guest blogging. In digital marketing, guest blogging is done for link acquisition purposes whereas the article submission to online media is done for profile screening. The first one increases the inbound links to improve search engine rankings of a brand website, and the latter increases the visibility of the brand itself. Hence, the PR & DM efforts combined will double your business success.