The role of a PR agency is evolving like never before and it’s important to keeps our eyes ahead for the developing trends. All of these PR trends demonstrate a critical point – digital is an important factor within all of them. This can have an impact on PR for a company that didn’t exist 8 or even 4 years ago. It’s important to ensure that we (and our clients) are ready for these changes.
PR will continue to see a convergence from a marketing perspective, especially when it comes to social media and how businesses share and consume information. This movement of companies marrying their social media with their PR Company rather than the marketing department helps to create effective messaging alignment throughout their communications.
Companies will begin to request more and more analysis from PR companies. This has been discussed for a while, but it seems that it is defiantly on the way in. Measurement can no longer be ignored. With so many new options for measuring the impact of public relations and with the integration of marketing, the connection with the company’s bottom line has never been stronger. PR Pros need to garner this skill, and fast.
Standard press releases will evolve. As news becomes more frequent, and the public demands it faster, journalists have less time to read traditional press releases. This new style of press-release will become shorter, with attention-grabbing information, packed with strong visuals.
Reclaiming of influence will continue to happen but at a faster pace. Until recently, everyone online thought themselves an influencer, with the result that no-one was an expert. But brands with true value are fighting back and low-quality influencers are losing out to those providing quality rather than quantity.
All of these developments happening within PR will create a talent race. Those who have embraced the new trends will find themselves blogging, doing content creation, content marketing, managing paid media campaigns, managing social media and mobile media channels, working with display advertising, working extensively with brand journalists, and generally going where the audiences are. For those who learn these skills and are great at marketing and PR, the sky’s the limit.
Even with all these changes it’s important that PR Pros don’t scrap all the “old ways” just yet, if they’re working continue using them, but slowly add new strategies, analyze them, and then develop what produces the best results.
