Want To Integrate Content Marketing & SEO Into Your PR? Start Here.

During a PRSA Twitter chat recently, I was asked if content marketing and SEO were key to the future of public relations.

My answer? ABSOLUTELY! Public relations isn’t just about breaking news and press releases – it’s about building bridges and relationships between our brand and the public.

Our role is to give clients maximum visibility and these allow us to explode that visibility better and faster. After all, what is more openly public than social media? Sharing thought leadership content?

It’s fabulous!! It lets us build relationships with our public audiences directly, instead of using just mass outreach tactics that belong in the traditional PR space. Now we can do both traditional AND new.

But it doesn’t just stop at content marketing and search – social media has to be included in the mix.

Digital PR – the combination of content marketing, search and social with traditional PR – allows us to take our stories right out of the newsroom and directly to the street… but the neighborhoods happen to be online, instead of outside your front door. The faster you can integrate these four things successfully, the faster you can build visibility and influence for your brand.

3 Down & Dirty Ways To Integrate Content Marketing & SEO Into Your PR:

1. Content marketing can be as simple as re-purposing one item in many ways. It doesn’t have to be complicated. One press release can become a blog post, a Slideshare presentation, a podcast, a byline article. Transform one item into many! Content marketing helps us obtain more placements, but we must manage time carefully. It is VERY time consuming. Head over to this Digital Relevance post by @StevenShattuck for some great inspiration: “Master the Art of Re-purposing Content.”
2. Constantly push to improve your writing skills – storytelling, fluidity, quality and context. It bumps up your placement successes exponentially. It also helps you build a loyal following for your content. What brand doesn’t want that? If you want to learn more about storytelling, check out two of my favorite blogs – http://rockandrollzen.com/ and http://www.getstoried.com/.
3. Focus on ONE keyword phrase that you want to be highly visible with for your brand or company – then integrate it EVERYWHERE. I do this with my top keyword, “digital PR.” Identify that one phrase for your brand that is of crucial importance, then integrate it everywhere you can. Writing a company milestone press release? Put it in the headline and first sentence. Slideshare deck of your last speaking opportunity? Wrap it into the title and first slide. Facebook Page “about” description and LinkedIn Company page? Yup. Put it there, too. This helps you be more targeted and more dominant for that one phrase while focusing on one target audience. Make it as specific as possible. To learn more about how to do basic SEO, read this blog post: http://rockthestatusquo.com/seo-for-pr-best-practices/

These three things are WONDERFUL starting points. Give them a try, then let me know what happens.