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Building a successful business requires more than just having great-quality products and superb customer service. While both of these elements are definitely important, knowing how to connect with your audience in a way that’s authentic and trustworthy is also critical.
For many businesses, striking a balance between marketing outreach and brand reputation management is crucial. Engaging in public relations (PR) and social media marketing is often the best way to approach this.
However, while both formats involve connecting with different audiences and sharing information about the business, their general use cases can be quite distinct. Still, knowing how to synergize these initiatives can be an impactful way to not only extend the reach of brand messaging but also add more credibility to it.
What Exactly is Public Relations?
Public relations involves companies taking various actions to articulate different aspects of their businesses to a wide range of audiences. These formal communications can cover products and services, essential mergers and acquisitions, general business growth discussions, or any other information relevant to customers, employees, and shareholders.
PR efforts are a crucial way for businesses to establish more trust with their followers. They offer a great opportunity to showcase how the business achieves certain core values while also demonstrating expertise within this industry. In many cases, PR initiatives help to support the building of new partnerships or improve branding success when entering into new markets.
Another important aspect of PR work is ensuring messaging stays consistent across all platforms. This means taking careful steps to build out a professional brand profile and regularly managing and maintaining it as the company grows.
PR Strategies Most Businesses Use
- Press Releases – A common PR strategy that most businesses regularly use is to publish a press release. These are formal announcements made about the business, often involving the release of new products, when establishing new partnerships, or if there has been a recent expansion into new channels or markets.
- Industry Collaborations – PR efforts often involve partnering with well-known industry experts or influential digital publication sources such as Forrester or Gartner. Working with these partners helps brands to get important messages out to a wider range of viewers while also adding more credibility to what they’re sharing.
- Public Speaking Engagements – Being a guest speaker at a tradeshow or conference is another form of PR brands can use to connect with audiences more directly. These are great opportunities to showcase industry expertise while establishing important thought leadership with customers and other professional organizations.
What Exactly is Social Media Marketing?
Social Media Marketing involves the use of social media platforms and other online channels to help spread brand messaging to a larger group of people. Its primary function is to help promote branded products and services while engaging with individuals in the places they most frequently visit, such as platforms like X, Instagram, or Facebook.
Most businesses today maintain some form of social media presence and leverage the added brand visibility it provides. They are a great way to connect directly with customers and can also provide various marketing levers for restaurants, retailers, and other local businesses to promote their products and services.
Common Social Media Marketing Strategies
- Joining Online Social Groups – A common way to engage more meaningfully on social media while having opportunities to market branded products is by joining different social groups. This is typically done on professional networking sites like LinkedIn and is a great way to get connected with potential future clients.
- Developing Highly Shareable Content – Businesses typically leverage social media to help distribute the content they’ve created and published in other places, such as a company website or a guest blogging site. This is an effective way to maintain a consistent online footprint while also making it easier for their audience to find helpful articles, blogs, or whitepapers on different topics.
- Launching Paid Advertising Campaigns – Most brands today leverage the various paid advertising tools that many social media platforms now offer. These tools allow businesses to get more visibility and engagement on the content they post while also letting them target highly specific user groups and demographics.
Why Synergizing Your PR and Social Media Marketing Efforts is Advantageous
Helps to Get More Content Views
Instead of putting time and resources into content that audiences aren’t likely to read or remember, blending PR and social media marketing helps to add more value to it. For example, while many PR announcements may not always be interesting enough for everyone to enjoy or absorb, you can leverage the features on many social platforms to incorporate highly engaging visuals like infographics, video clips, or photos into your posts.
Social media channels are also a great place to test what kind of visuals or messaging formats resonate most with an audience. PR teams can then take these insights to improve how they deliver company updates moving forward.
Increased Brand Reach
For most businesses today, social media has become critical to their growth strategies. With literally billions of people spending substantial time on their favorite social media sites every day, it creates the perfect environment for pushing out updates about branded products and services.
However, the real effectiveness comes when both informal and formal outreach campaigns support this outreach. When your social media activity aligns with PR initiatives, the information you’re communicating often receives more attention, significantly enhancing its reach and credibility.
Supports Proactive Reputation Management
By fully integrating your PR campaigns with social media marketing tactics, you can start gaining helpful feedback surrounding your brand that can be used to improve your business strategies moving forward.
For example, taking a more proactive role in online discussions or allowing comments when sending out new press releases helps you to identify whether the messaging you’re delivering is positively or negatively received. You can then respond in real-time to this feedback and show your audience that their opinions on your business direction really matter to the organization.
Get More Out of Your Outreach Efforts
Although PR initiatives and social media marketing each offer value on their own, the key to successful brand building often relies on finding ways to blend the efforts together. By synergizing them, you can help make sure that you are getting the best ROI for your marketing efforts while instilling more trust and credibility in the messaging you’re delivering.
Author Information
Author Name:
Chris Bretschger
Author Bio:
Chris Bretschger, Managing Partner at Bastion Agency, is a seasoned marketer with over 20 years of experience in integrated marketing. He has developed brand strategies, managed media campaigns, and built analytics tools for clients like Mazda, Adidas, Jenny Craig, and Kia. When not leading Bastion, Chris enjoys superyacht regatta racing on the open seas.
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