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Soulati-'TUDE!

The Future Of PR Is A Marketing Smoothie

10/21/2013 By Jayme Soulati

smoothie.jpgBack in the day, public relations, advertising and marketing were firmly divided in their respective silos and disciplines. We in public relations were often referred to for real in jest as the “bastard step children” of marketing.

Often we’d sit in an integrated meeting of the disciplines and keep our traps shut until we tossed out a bit of value-added strategy into the mix while our peers across the aisle glared nicely.

Today, the blended nature of marketing has public relations professionals up in arms. Some are balking at the integration of PR so cohesively into marketing. In short, these people are having an identity crisis.

They don’t want to be a marketing smoothie. I get it; nor do I, BUT,the nature of marketing today is quite different than the isolated and unintegrated way we worked in the past (as recently as six years ago).

Marketing in its broadest and most inclusive sense now requires every single communications disciple to integrate and blend while learning others’ expertise. For people in public relations, that’s called hybrid PR. For people in marketing, that’s called integrated marketing – the blended whole.

If you don’t do either or both, you die. Purely and simply, you become antiquated.

Change is now; change is always the future. Change makes some people uncomfortable and others squiggle with glee (that’s me). The changes you make as a professional can be methodical or they can be all-in. Regardless of how you change ensure you’re changing to innovate and not merely to keep up with the Joneses.

What’s a Marketing Smoothie?

I know you’ve made a smoothie in your day with all the good, healthy and nutritious ingredients stacked up looking all colorful. Then, what happened? You clicked the “on” button and voila! A blended smoothie chock full of nutritious wholesomeness.

Marketing has become that – a blended beverage with the smarts and nutrition of a plethora of disciplines feeding into and around the other for the benefit of the user, customer, prospect, etc.

Public relations is a powerhouse in that smoothie; it’s the energizer and protein that packs punch. It brings integrated value few other disciplines can brag on. We in public relations do this for every marketing smoothie you’ll ever drink:

• Put the core business goals front and center into strategy
• Build communications strategy against the business with results-driven comprehensive and inclusive programs
• Message map the core outbound and external messages for the C-suite and spokespeople and train them to be on top of such messages
• Build and create content against the business goals (content marketing)
• Optimize that content for on-page performance (search marketing) and toss in a bunch of optimized online news releases every campaign benefits from
• Write the landing pages and title the calls to action to drive traffic to sites and generate leads (digital marketing)
• Write and optimize the online newsletter that ties into the digital strategy using the core messages from the message map (email marketing)
• Create and execute blogger relations, influencer campaigns, thought leadership, industry analyst relations, investor relations, and internal communications, to name several

And, yet, all that goodness listed above is not done alone. Some may believe it is and tell you so, but don’t be fooled. An expert public relations practitioner needs her sisters to fully develop and deliver a solidly trackable and measurable campaign with every single ingredient to create the best-tasting smoothie marketing has to offer.

(This post originally appeared on Steamfeed.)

Related articles
  • The Blurred Line between PR and Marketing
  • PR and Content Marketing: Made For Each Other
  • A Quick Reference Guide to Integrated Marketing
  • How To Message Map E-Book Debut
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Filed Under: Public Relations Tagged With: Content Marketing, Digital strategy, future of PR, hybrid PR, Integrated marketing communications, marketing, Marketing and Advertising, Public Relations

Old PR Plus New PR Equals Hybrid PR

06/04/2013 By Jayme Soulati

 PR HatYou know those hybrid cars that are more expensive because they run on electricity and fuel? Think about public relations…our profession is like a hybrid car, too. We run on different platforms to deliver mileage for a campaign. We blend a variety of marketing disciplines, just like fuel and electricity to produce.

 On Spin Sucks June 3, Gini Dietrich wrote about the PR firm of the future. She’s seeking hybrid PR professionals to work with her team, and here are the criteria she’d like to see in that person:

  •  Media and blogger relations
  • Content development
  •  Content marketing
  •  Workflow development and email marketing
  • On-page search engine optimization
  • Issues management
  • Client service
  • WordPress coding (bonus)

Old PR

 Recently, I wrote a post right here about the blending of PR being its demise. In that post, which turned a few heads, I had a list of traditional PR and it looked like this:

  • Media Relations
  • Spokesperson Training
  • Message Mapping
  • Thought Leadership
  • Blogger Relations
  • Writing
  • Industry Analyst Relations
  •  Investor Relations/Stakeholder Communications
  •  Corporate Communications
  •  Internal/Employee Communications
  •  Events Planning/Execution
  •  Community Outreach

 

Hybrid PR

 Like Gini says, public relations folks need to be a bit of this and a bit of that to succeed in the new and blended frontier. We have to adopt more than just adeptness on the social channels. We have to jump into new and uncomfortable areas to ensure we’re innovating all the time.

 You know what the problem is with public relations professionals? Too many of them want to stay pure and not change.

 Here’s the rub – WE GET TO CHANGE! We’re in a profession that provides us with the gifts to re-invent, adopt new methods and offer a powerful combination of skills, expertise, and knowledge from content marketing, media relations, digital marketing, social media marketing, thought leadership, message mapping, industry analyst relations, investor relations, employee communications, special events, and so very much more.

I appreciate the word hybrid to describe what I offer. No wonder I’ve had such a challenge sharing succinctly about my services.

 Jayme Soulati offers a breadth of public relations services featuring content, social and digital marketing.

 Would that begin to describe what hybrid public relations looks like from your vantage point?

Customers At The Core

Regardless of what you offer, it’s really the customer who dictates what you pull out of the hat. If you’re not familiar yet with The ArcCompany, the Canadian upstart making inroads into huge insight, then you need to read this blog post or go find the truly provoking comments of Amy Tobin especially in her Sunday social justice post.

As you’re thinking of your customers, just for the fun of it, I’m going to end with another Gini list that helps define PR and the tactics that ought to be in use today. This is a list from Arment Dietrich; it’s “Some of the things we do” taken directly from this post, and if that’s not hybrid PR, nothing is!

  • Develop integrated offline and online marketing plans
  • Content development (white papers, videos, podcasts, blogs, eBooks, webinars)
  • Marketing that content we develop
  • Email marketing
  • On-page search engine optimization
  • Social media
  • Google+ authorship and authority
  • Online reputation management
  • Crisis communications planning and management
  • Employee communications
  • Social media policies
  • Media relations
  • Blogger relations
  • Monitor online conversations
  • Develop online audits
  • Community development and growth
  • Influencer relations
  • Word-of-mouth campaigns
  • Analyze data and web analytics

 

Related articles
  • PR: The Next Generation
  • In an age of social media, why PR?
  • Blogging Is Good PR
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Filed Under: Public Relations Tagged With: Analyst relations, Content Marketing, Gini Dietrich, hybrid PR, Media Relations, new pr, old pr, Public Relations, pure PR, Search engine optimization, Thought leader

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