By Pete Winter

Creating a Unified PR Strategy

Brand awareness, a cohesive brand identity, increased web traffic and revenue can all be accomplished when your PR strategy is aligned with your content marketing – here’s how!

Ensuring your content marketing and PR is aligned is important because:

It creates a unified voice for your company.
Both disciplines need each other to create an impact.
It works – the average website conversion for companies with defined processes is more than twice that of companies without.

Making the unified voice a reality is easy if you follow these four steps…

Step 1: Create a vision statement

A vision statement should outline what your company wants to be. Having a shared vision will:

Help employees set goals to advance your company.
Motivate and empower employees.
Inspire your customers.

Start the process by asking yourself these questions:

“What do we do – and for whom?”

“How do we excel?”

“What do our customers and other stakeholders value most about our company?”

“How do we measure our success?”

“What is our ideal future?”

Step 2: Create a content plan

56% of marketers are doing content marketing without a plan – don’t be one of them!

To create a content plan you need to:

Identify your personas.
Understand what content gaps are missing.
Create content ideas and an editorial calendar.
Have a publishing process, which ensures content is of a consistent quality and on-tone.
Understand how to distribute your content.

Step 3: Plan your PR strategy

You’ve got your vision statement, some unique content to promote, but now what? Well you need a PR strategy, which should include:

A summary of the challenges you’re facing and what you want to achieve from the campaign.
How you will achieve the goals including the tactics you will use.
What types of people you want to target.
The publications, websites and social media platforms that you will target during the campaign.
An action plan for who does what and when.