Content marketing and PR go hand in hand

About the author

Richard Bailey Hon FCIPR is editor of PR Academy's PR Place Insights. He teaches and assesses undergraduate, postgraduate and professional students.

Today, we’re publishing Part Two of our Guide to Content Marketing, prepared by digital marketing expert Mel Cains.

‘Content marketing is not a quick-win strategy. It requires perseverance, planning, analysis and creativity. You’re in it for the long term, so don’t get disheartened if you don’t see instant results,’ she tells us.

To that extent, it’s an updated version of traditional reliance on media relations in public relations. Media coverage was uncertain; there could be quick wins in terms of coverage, but uncertain results in terms of outcomes (eg sales or enhanced reputation)

What’s different is the data available to gain insight and measure the results of content marketing, and the tools available to create, manage, distribute and measure content.

As Mel Cains notes, in the PESO world, ‘content marketing and PR go hand in hand.’

PR Academy is a case study example: using a content marketing approach, PR Academy’s website traffic is up by over 300% over a two-year period and  sales have grown by 33% year on year.

In Part One, we covered Content Marketing Strategy, talking you through goal setting, understanding your audience, the customer journey and auditing your content and how to measure success.

DOWNLOAD GUIDE: PART 1 STRATEGY

‘Content strategy is a creative process. Making it happen requires organisation and discipline.’ Mel Cains

Part Two, Implementation (published today), covers creation of insight-based content; distribution of content and the use of a content calendar. We share some tools we use to create and distribute content for PR Place Insights.

DOWNLOAD GUIDE: PART 2 IMPLEMENTATION

We also discuss brand guidelines – your brand book – covering logos, colours, straplines, style of imagery, tone of voice: things everyone needs to know to create consistent content.

You can listen to author Mel Cains introducing these Content Marketing Guides in this video: