You might think that public relations and content marketing are two departments that do very different things.

Even though each department does different things, it’s important to remember that they can work together to make an unstoppable marketing machine.

All of these methods can be used together to make your marketing efforts stronger across many channels. Read on to find out.

The goal of public relations is to build relationships that are good for both parties, while the goal of content marketing is to build relationships between a brand and its audience. When compared, they both do one very important thing: they both share content.

Public relations and content marketing don’t have to be mutually exclusive

A person who works in public relations is very different from someone who makes content. Neither one is a good substitute for the other. But they can work together to make a marketing machine that can’t be stopped.

PR and content marketing don’t contradict each other. But they are very different kinds of expertise and should be talked about separately.

What content marketing means

Content marketing is a certain way of marketing. It focuses on making and sharing valuable, relevant content that is put out regularly. This consistency helps to bring in and keep a clear target audience. Content marketing gets a customer to do something, like click on a link in an email or download a report.

What does public relations mean?

The Public Relations Society of America, Inc. says that public relations is a strategic communication process that helps an organization and its audience build relationships that are good for both sides.

Public relations and content marketing are better when they work together

Public relations and content marketing are two business strategies that are very different from each other. Both have a huge amount of power to help a brand reach its goals. But they need to work well together to make that marketing powerhouse we talked about earlier.

You won’t always be able to use both public relations and content marketing at the same time, but they can help each other in many ways.

The goals of Public relations and content marketing are the same

The ways to do public relations and content marketing are very different, but they have many of the same goals. When things go well, the goals of both departments are things like:

• Getting your message to a clearly defined audience
• Making and sharing media that grabs the public’s attention
• Bringing more attention to a brand
• Getting new prospects
• Bringing together experts and people with a lot of influence in a field

Public relations and content marketing should work together to help reach these goals. Not only should you make content that is useful and worth sharing, but you should also make a list of possible partners that your brand can work with. These can be businesses that share your values and influential people in your field who can help you reach more people.

Public relations can help you prove what you already have

Marketing teams often forget that your public relations channels can be used to back up the content you already have.

Public relations experts can get in touch with media outlets that the average marketing team can’t. A press release is an official written statement that gives short, specific details about a product, event, or other situation. These statements are used by news outlets to write stories and get them out to the public.

People tend to trust their favorite news sources more than they trust a brand when it comes to getting information. Not only is it important to share information on your site when you’re trying to build brand awareness, but it’s also important to get these news outlets and media influencers to share your news as well. So, the people you’re talking to will think the information you’re giving them is real and important.

So why send out a press release with the same information? After the press release was sent out, more news outlets started running stories that were similar. These sites must link back to the original source to show that they are reliable. This helps eMarketer build its authority on the subject.

With the right content, you can get press

Just like good content can help you get good press, good press can also help you make good content. Say you’re excited about a new product that’s coming out, so you write about it on the blog of your website. Several things may happen from there:

• You use the content of your blog to make a press release.
• Someone calls you to tell you the big news.

Makes a place for people to share ideas

Now, we’ve said that PR and content marketing have a few different goals in common. The main thing that both public relations and content marketing are trying to do is make and spread content, so it would make sense for them to work together to make a place where people can share ideas.

For example, when it comes to making new, shareable content, your public relations and content marketing teams could get together and make something like an idea board or editorial calendar. This is where the two groups could talk about content ideas and figure out where they would work best:

• Content for marketing
• P.R. content
• Things that belong to both

Some great ideas for content could be:

• Social blog editorial calendar
• Infographics
• Announcements about webinars
• eBooks
• Industry reports and more

Once the ideas are written down on an editorial calendar, teams from different departments can choose the ones that are best for them. When there are multiple ways to share information, like in an industry report, teams will need to take turns pulling information from the final piece.

In the example of the eMarketer report from earlier, the content marketing team had to do the research and create the piece. Once the article was done, the public relations team could pick out the parts that were interesting enough to share. The final piece would be a piece of news that is making waves in the industry.

Can help boost your search engine optimization

Lastly, one thing that many brands don’t realize is how important search engine optimization is for both their PR and content marketing. And while marketing teams know that search engines need to be optimized for content that can be shared, not everyone knows that press releases can and should also be optimized.

Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of making sure that a piece of content is optimized not only to be found on search engines like Google and Bing, but also to bring more people to a brand’s website through organic search engine results.

Now, most marketing teams understand how to do this for their landing pages and blog content. But it’s important to remember that press releases have also gone digital.

That means your public relations team needs to use the right keywords in their press releases so that the right people can find them.

In the example press release below, we automatically see that it was optimized for those searching for the keywords digital marketing and marketing.

Public relations specialists are great at putting together the facts. But they might not know everything about SEO optimization. Here, it can help to work with your content marketing team. They know exactly what goes into the optimization process.

Conclusion

Public relations (PR) and content marketing are two very different types of work. While they can both function independently of one another, combing the two can prove extremely beneficial to any brand. Not sure how these two things could help each other. Here are a few examples:

• Both public relations and content marketing aim to do a number of things.
• P.R. can validate current content
• Content marketing can help come up with newsworthy things to say.
• Public relations and content marketing can create a shared idea platform
• Combining the two can help boost your SEO