Content marketing is never more important than it is today. Google reigns supreme, and getting that golden page one search position is still a top goal. Investing in a content strategy is often limited to key words, blog posts, or even landing pages. But what if you were able to take that messaging and get more value from it?
Too often, we look at content marketing through the narrow lens of SEO and SERP. As a content writer, it’s often easy for me to fall into the same patterns. On the other hand, as a writer, I also value consistency and clarity.
Creating consistent messaging needs to extend beyond just the organization’s website. If you’re investing time and money into a messaging-focused content strategy, you should be extracting the most value possible.
As you build out your marketing strategy, you also need to consider where your content and messaging fit into your PR program as well.
Brand Awareness Beyond the Blog
Content strategies follow your buyer across all parts of the journey. From awareness to education to decision-making, content is fundamental. In the last few years, marketers needed to re-assess their content strategies primarily because in-person events were canceled. With digital buyer journeys, consistency with content and messaging is now the key to making your brand known and valued.
The key here is to find a way to expand your brand awareness program beyond your own website by aligning your content strategy and your PR program.
Webinar Fatigue
Marketers all know – the webinar just ain’t what it used to be. People may be signing up for them, but everyone is pretty tired of sitting in front of a screen of faces that look like something from The Brady Bunch.
Marketers clearly understand this, as they’ve started using interactive polls or shorter webinars. The research around “Zoom Fatigue” supports these decisions, with a publication from April 2021 noting that:
- No best practices for video conferencing interactions exist
- Promoting group interactions helps increase interest
- Breaking longer content into shorter chunks keeps people engaged
This is an area where you can take your current content strategy and extract greater value through PR. Your content strategy focuses on telling customers how you solve their problems.
Instead of looking at just your corporate blog or webinars as a way to get organic reach, incorporate the online interviews or podcasts your PR team gets for your internal people. Even better, this is content marketing that offers third-party validation of your internal team as experts on a topic that maps to your product or services complete with a built-in viewer or listenership.
The Corporate Conference
Part of your content strategy might be having blog posts leading up to a corporate conference. From a marketing perspective, these are often a way to generate brand awareness and thought leadership as well as appeal to current customers.
This is where the webinar fatigue is undermining you again. People may not be traveling as much or carefully choosing what events they’re willing to attend. They’re also not likely to engage online as much as they did back in 2020.
As a marketer, this is another opportunity for you to extend the value of your content marketing strategy by aligning it more directly with your PR outreach. You can take the themes from your corporate conference and use them as part of PR-sourced opportunities. Apply your content strategy value-add and incorporate the keywords that you’re trying to use in organic search so that you optimize that content.
Content Influencer
Your content strategy likely includes using case studies to provide third-party validation over your product or service. These case studies and customer success stories also create a digital word-of-mouth brand awareness.
Of course, getting the logo posted to your site is always difficult when a customer’s legal department starts looking over the content. No matter how much the internal person loves you and your product, nothing can be posted until the attorneys approve it. Often, they don’t.
Realigning your content strategy to prove your senior leadership as recognized influencers through third-party sources can achieve many of the same goals. Instead of telling the story about someone using your product, tell the story of how your senior leadership personifies the product.
If you take a purposeful approach to your content strategy that aligns with your PR strategy, you can establish the emotional connection and trust in your brand. A lot of products and services offer the same outcomes. Often, people – and enterprise buyers are people – make a final decision based on emotion when two products or services are otherwise comparable.
A Further Reaching Content Strategy
Every marketer has been there. We know that PR builds brand awareness, but we struggle with metrics. It’s easier to focus on getting the SERP results for our own blog posts than it is to track someone else’s content. Besides, if it’s not bringing people to the site, then it’s not converting to a demo.
On the other hand, in a digital world, companies need all the reach they can get. Unfortunately, too often, the marketing organization has a disconnect between the people writing their corporate marketing copy and the people working the PR side of the house.
By incorporating your content strategy into your PR thought leadership outreach, you can optimize your strategy without impacting your own site metrics.
Consistent Messaging is Key
First, you need to create consistent messaging. You have a story you want to tell. Most likely, you also have themes that you want to follow for a given fiscal quarter. As you’re building out your content strategy, you can bring in the PR team.
If they know your end goals, they can adjust their pitches. For example, if your theme for a quarter is based on targeting an industry, your PR team can help you pitch stories that will reach that vertical.
The Story is the Same
Content marketers are creatives. We’re rhetoricians. We tell stories by drilling into problems, describing problems, and aligning solutions to those problems by focusing on a company’s value-add. On the corporate blog, we then explain clearly what the company does.
PR content can follow the same general storytelling with one caveat. It needs to be vendor agnostic. However, the byline clearly indicates that the writer is your leadership. It ties directly to your organization.
All the content on your site explains why you think you’re the best at what you do or offer. Most people read marketing content with a whole shaker of salt, not just one grain. PR is the equivalent of “tell me you solve a problem without telling me you solve a problem.” Readers, listeners, or viewers will still know what you do. At the same time, it gives a third-party validation over your approach to solving that problem.
The Key Words Can Be Tracked
If you’re tracking keywords, then you’re looking at all the places where they rank. PR is an excellent way to get your company’s name out there for a keyword you care about on a site with a better domain authority than yours.
This doesn’t mean that you should write the typical SEO-targeted piece with the typical headers. A piece like that might not get chosen by an outlet. Also, it probably wouldn’t look like thought leadership. After all, even as a content writer, I can agree that most SEO-focused pieces tend to be pretty basic and introductory. Thought leadership should be around something that shows a unique perspective.
On the other hand, you can still think about how PR pieces fit into your content strategy. For example, consider the following for a piece targeting the keyword “cloud migration challenges for SMBs”:
- SEO-optimized blog: 10 Cloud Migration Challenges for SMBs
- PR Piece: Solving SMB Cloud Migration Challenges
Now, let’s look at how these can both fit into your overall content strategy:
- If you’re lucky, both show up in search.
- You can link to the PR piece in your blog post.
- The blog post brings in people from search to your site.
- The PR piece reaches out to people in an outlet that they frequent.
People Google Leadership, Too
Finally, content strategies also need to consider that buyers might be searching your leadership team as part of their journey. PR considers this constantly, especially if a leadership member had a media incident.
However, content strategies need to consider this as well. Your leadership may be posting to your corporate blog. This works for marketing and visibility. However, if you do a search for a leadership team member, it’s not likely that the first result will be your website.
Part of your content strategy should include focusing your PR articles on your messaging and goals. When potential buyers search for your leadership, they should be seeing the same story everywhere. This consistency shows that you have an organized, well-focused brand that understands who it is and what it does.
Content Is Royalty
The old saying that “content is king” is truer today than ever before. Marketing departments are spending more time and energy focusing on it. Buyers want that digital experience. They want easy-access to brands and ways to make informed decisions.
If you’re spending the resources on your content strategy, then you should be optimizing it. By separating content and PR strategies, marketers often make choices that create a disconnect. Instead of sending out PR content then reusing it later on the website, content marketers can help direct the PR outreach so that it aligns with the strategy to support it.
About the Author: Karen Walsh is a content marketing professional with 11 years’ experience teaching college writing. She believes that content marketing educates prospects, filling in knowledge gaps as they look to make educated decisions. She builds out content strategies, writes corporate marketing copy, and ghostwrites thought leadership for PR outreach. She focuses on cybersecurity, bringing her 12 years’ experience as an internal auditor and fractional compliance manager to the space.