Public relations is as old as politics and civilization. The question is how growth marketers can use PR to influence the favorability ratings of products & services, especially those offered by startups, eCommerce, and related businesses.

Before we can answer this question, let's first establish what growth marketing is.

The meaning of growth marketing

Growth marketing is an approach to attracting, engaging, and retaining customers. It relies on relentless experimentation and a keen awareness of the changing motives and preferences of prospective customers.

Growth marketing is a budding field that aggregates skill sets across digital marketing disciplines. Unlike traditional marketing which targets the awareness and consideration stages of a funnel, growth marketers target all stages, and this requires a T-shaped marketing stack.

This is why growth marketing involves project management, analytical competencies as well as channel-specific skills in paid media platforms like Facebook, LinkedIn, Google Ads, etc.

However, one of the overlooked approaches to growing the lead count in a sales funnel is the use of earned as opposed to paid media channels, and that's where Public relations becomes a vital element of a growth marketing campaign.

This brings us to the review of a CXL course titled " Messaging Strategy in public relations ". The material outlined the approaches to PR strategy formulation, performance measurement, and pitching techniques, all within the context of a broader growth marketing campaign.

Contents

• What PR is and isn't
• Goal setting and attribution in PR
• Defining your audience
• Writing and editing
• Pitching traditional media
• Pitching bloggers
• Larger digital media strategy

1) Public relations: What it is and isn't ##

Many marketers know the value of PR, however, a common misconception is to think it is paid advertising. Many think that PR is about creating ads and then working with media outlets, a TV station or newspaper, to get visibility for the ads. However, PR is actually earned media. It is about pitching stories to producers, and reporters to get them to write on a company, a client, a product, interview the CEO, and other related business assets. Hence PR isn't attention that is paid for, but rather, it is attention that is earned through the PR practitioner’s supply of information that is of value to media gatekeepers who have access to a target audience.

The results of PR are not the ads we see on TV or in newspapers, rather it is articles we read about companies, their funding rounds, favorable news on stock financial performance or the interviews with their CEOs. In these scenarios, it is usually the behind-the-scenes work of PR professionals that resulted in the relatively organic visibility that accrues to the client’s business entities.

Another misconception about PR is that there can be guarantees around specific results in public sentiment, brand propensity, and related outcomes. While there are circumstances in which PR results can sometimes be guaranteed, there can be no guarantees about the magnitude of the result, or when it will translate into concrete metrics that impact the finances of a client.

There are some characteristics of Good PR that growth marketers should note especially if the PR was never at the foundation of your marketing career. For example, a good PR effort is one where your agency or PR person;

• figures out your messaging
• the identity of your target audience
• The extent of your message - audience fit
• Conducts media training of spokesperson or executives.

There are also two major sides to PR. There's defensive PR and positive PR.

Defensive PR is about crisis management or mitigating the risks associated with unfavorable coverage of the client. Positive PR on the other hand is about generating favorable sentiments which would later feed the awareness and consideration stages of a sales or growth pipeline.

2) Goal setting and Attribution

What are the goals that we can use to measure the success of a PR campaign within the growth marketing context?

Metrics and indices have always been a challenge for PR auditors. However, thanks to the advent of digital analytics, there are now measures that can be correlated with the media visibility that comes from PR. Some of these measures are Sentiment, social mentions, referral medium.

Some other key metrics to consider are;

• Quality of Mention,
• Quality of articles,
• Number of articles.

Since many news publications have an online presence which allows the use of UTM parameters to measure the impact.

Read: B2B Marketing Attribution: Models, Tools, and Processes

3) Defining your Audience

For larger firms and organizations, PR practitioners use research companies to build out the personas that are most likely to pass the qualification parameters for the conversion stages of the sales funnel. Once the audience is defined in terms of interests, location, pain points, a messaging strategy can then be developed in order to initiate a buying journey, sales cycle, or brand enrichment. For a smaller firm that doesn't have the budget for research, the audience definition can still be accomplished uses disparate data sources that have emerged over time. For example, the client can be asked to answer the following questions when an audience is to be defined e.g

• Who is the right audience?
• Who comes in?
• Who do you talk to?
• Who are people already using your product?

Once the audience has been defined, the messaging can then be crafted to address the marketing triggers that align with the motivations of that audience.

Explore: Become great at integrated public relations & SEO ## 4) Writing and Editing in PR

This is arguably the single most important thing in PR. It involves using text to communicate in various ways e.g press releases, OP-ED, Bylined articles

4.1) Anatomy of a press release

It is written much like a news story with an inverted messaging configuration. The messaging hierarchy of a Press release is as follows

Headlines > Most important information > Least important information > Boilerplate (tells people how to reach you). It should also be written in 3rd person.

4.2) Anatomy of an Op-ed

This is going to be the author (the client in this case) opining about a topic in order to get their name in the news. It should not be written as a promotion of your product or company, but should just express and attempt to rationalize your perspective on a topic in order to gain recognition.

4.3) Anatomy of a Bylined article

It is similar to an OP-ED in terms of the objectives but differs in tone and sentiment. For example

• A Bylined article should be written with an unbiased style
• Written in 3rd person
• It should focus on a subject within the authors’ field of expertise - a product or service.

E.g if the client is a cybersecurity service, they could use PR to develop byline articles like " top 5 operating system vulnerabilities you need to know". In summary, a byline article is about educating the audience.

4.4) Anatomy of a blog post These can be written in the first person, opinionated, and with a subjective tone.

Note: Whether it is blog posts, op-ed, or byline articles, the growth process that incorporates PR, needs to be SEO capable in order to get the most value from any outreach effort.

5) Pitching traditional media This is an art form. You need to build a relationship, follow them on social media, comment on their stories, research their content. Then pitch them in a way that allows you to stand out.

Pitches need to be timely, brief, relevant.

Pitch them in the morning, especially before their meetings you can also target individual journalists or writers on social media.

Pitching bloggers is a little different since they consider blogging as a hustle. Hence they'll want to be paid. To bypass this, PR practitioners can offer experiential compensation in form of product samples, service trials, etc.

6) Larger digital media strategy PR is very much part of a holistic marketing approach, and it really is a huge component of your overall marketing because it serves and provides validation, third-party validation that pretty much nothing else will, other than a blogger writing about you and really bloggers writing about your a journalist writing about you.

Oftentimes the blogger has more clout than a journalist does, to be honest. That type of writing and that type of content, whether it's an interview or it's a blog post or guest posts, whatever it is, that's going to provide a lot more value to you in terms of validation than you doing SEO, or you placing an advertisement somewhere. There's all that stuff out there, native advertising and all that, editorials and so forth. Those do work but the savvy or the customer is the less likely there are to work. Just because I'm in the business, I immediately look okay, is this an ad or is this actually a real story? And there's a big difference.

Your Digital Strategy can be different depending on the size of the company. I mean the most important thing, even for a big company, but the most important thing is your website. That's your presence, that's your home, on the internet, your blog should be a big part of that. That's your home on the internet. That's where everything else is pointing in. Your Twitter feed, Facebook, Pinterest, Instagram, Snapchat, all of that stuff's going to be pointing in. It may be a landing page, it may be your blog, it may be, a sales page, maybe a product page.

So the key thing is making sure that that's dialed in and now as you grow and you reach out to more places and more things, you definitely want to have a presence on those social networks that are important, but as you grow you're going to create more content. The bigger you are, you're going to want to create more and more content because you have more eyeballs. You may diversify into different things. Maybe you have maybe, in the beginning, you have one product, but then you might end up, three years later, you have 10 products.

You're also going to want, even as a small company, you want to have original content. The original thought could be simple videos. It could be your iPhone and you just doa quick video kind of thing. The bigger you are, you're going to want to do more professionally and in just more volume.