PR and Content Marketing: 8 Awesome Tactics You Need to Know

PR and Content Marketing- 8 Awesome Tactics You Need to Know

 (Editor's note: To ensure you have the latest information, we have updated this popular post)

Both content marketing and public relations can alone make the difference between meh and stellar results. But combine the two and you can hit it out of the park. Let's consider why PR and content marketing are a good combination, and how you can use the two effectively to bolster your strategy.

But first, let's consider what some pessimists say about using PR to create content and consider the facts underlying this discussion.

Public Relations: Friend or Foe of Content Marketing?

Public relations and content marketing have worked together for years now, empowering companies to reach their various goals.

However, some critics of this union have claimed that PR and content marketing have vastly different goals. They say that the quality of content suffers when it is produced by a PR person.

PR and Content Marketing (1)How do they come to this conclusion?

Ann Gynn of The Content Marketing Institute addressed this very issue in a recent blog post. The overall theme of her post is that PR is limited to awareness, while content marketing does all the heavy lifting in terms of getting leads. She even goes so far as to say that "Your content marketing dies a little each time you only used PR-centered metrics."

Is this true? Not one bit!

Why do I say this?

When we take a closer look at her argument, we find a major hole: her definition of PR.

PR today, especially on the B2B side, is so much more than awareness. It spans all stages of the sales funnel, from awareness, to leads, to conversion. Gynn severely underestimates the role that PR plays within a company, as well as within content marketing.

Before we even heard the term "content marketing," it was PR that handled content strategy. From the very beginning, PR has strategically used content marketing (though we may have called it PR) to boost a company's reputation and encourage sales. This has intrinsically linked these two fields and made PR professionals uniquely qualified to rock at content marketing.