Public Relations & Social Marketing Insight

The competition between public relations agencies and inbound marketing agencies is heavily one-sided. What can PR professionals do to step up their game?

Most agencies (advertising, social, search, design, digital) realize that inbound marketing isn’t just some concept waiting to get trumped by the next fad. It’s actually a comprehensive, forward-thinking type of marketing that puts the power in the consumers’ hands. I know this can be scary for some, and that may explain why not everyone is as excited about inbound marketing as they should be.PR agencies have all the makings of successful inbound marketers (in fact, some could argue that public relations professionals were the original inbound marketers), but for some reason they just don’t seem to get it.

Rather than integrating their practices to keep up with the competition, they are choosing to stay in the background and focus on less competitive areas like crisis communications, social monitoring and CSR.For the past few years people have actually been saying that PR as we know it is dead. Rather than adjusting to the new world of journalism, many PR agencies are content to sit on the sidelines and wither away while other firms take their business. Which makes no sense, because public relations is the industry most similar to inbound marketing....

Two huge public-relations firms are going into the advertising business -- focusing on areas that are natural extensions of PR....

In general, public-relations firms have been quicker to adapt to the changing social-media landscape. It's not just the big players like Edelman and Weber Shandwick. Independent firms such as Shift Communications and Digital Influence Group saw social media, and in turn content marketing, as a natural extension of their mission.

It's important to note that public-relations firms aren't banging down doors to break into the traditional advertising world of print and television, at least not yet. Rather, they're smartly taking advantage of opportunities that have come their way. For example, the concept of native advertising -- embedding paid content in an editorial environment so that it is barely distinguishable from the journalistic information around it -- is conceptually the same as placing press releases that look like independent journalism.

It's a natural fit for public-relations firms. These firms come to this new world with advantages. They understand the publishing business and have a long tradition of collaborating with publishers to create content. And they get that content marketing is not only about creating interesting material; it is equally about managing the distribution of content through all of the social channels. With the major social platforms like Facebook and Twitter introducing paid-media opportunities, the public-relations firms simply are climbing on board.