Professionals striving for relevance in the world of public relations constantly need to stay up to date with all industry trends as well as current events – it’s practically in the job description.

The news cycle is now moving faster than ever before, mostly thanks to various digital platforms. Aside from regular news stories, a great way for public relations professionals to keep up with the happenings around them is to listen to podcasts that are relevant to the job. With podcasts, there’s the benefit of hearing other industry professionals sum up events and tactics in podcasts – and here are some of the best of them.

Rebranding is a challenging and exciting point in a brand’s lifetime. It signals the beginning of a new chapter for the brand, but if not properly handled, can lead to damaging effects. Customers might believe the brand has simply gone out of business, or may not trust the new brand, as new management may be included with the rebranding process possibly resulting in changes to their favorite products. A rebrand is when a brand changes core elements of their messaging, imagery or core assets that made up the old brand, and introduces new or refreshed core elements.

Most companies focus their rebranding efforts on winning over customers, the media, and the public at large. However, companies should begin their rebranding efforts internally. Don’t allow employees – even contracted janitors – to find out about the change in the news. Prepare everyone involved with the company to ensure the process is smooth and is supported by employees and partners.

Two-way communication between organizations and their constituencies is the definition of today’s Public Relations. Today, PR requires listening to constituencies, analyzing, and interpreting their views and behaviors. That said, powerful trends have sparked changes in PR and communications, disrupting lives, media, and business in a few years.

So what are the three powerful trends that you should keep an eye out on as a PR and Communication professional in 2020?

While “branding” a product is all about promoting a term, symbol or a product name, public relations (PR) experts view their job as also pitching something with marketing and advertising efforts. In fact, the internationally known “Coca-Cola” brand owes part of its success to an aggressive public relations campaign that has made drinking Coke akin to apple pie, baseball and other American “brands.” There is a view that proper branding mixed with good PR can result in both higher sales and customer loyalty for a product or service.

Some people think branding is an afterthought, unimportant, or largely irrelevant to the grand scheme of marketing. Those people are wrong. Demonstrably, inescapably wrong in both the substance and context of their ideas on the subject. While it is certainly true that the importance of branding can be overstated – it is, after all, not the only important metric for success in branding – the plain fact is, too many marketers don’t put enough thought, energy, effort, or resources into their brand.

Over the last few years, technology has been advancing quickly, with one of the fastest developments being in the blockchain industry. However, that doesn’t just mean cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin and Ethereum are here. That’s because there’s been a new development in this niche, called NFT, or Non-Fungible Token.

Although NFTs have been around for at least a couple of years, their popularity really came into the mainstream in the last year, and they are now considered a very popular investment. NFTs are unique digital collectible pieces that can’t be exchanged for anything other than currency, and there are no two NFTs that are alike. They’re created using blockchain technology and they’re identified as cryptographic assets.

With pets over the world, pet brands really have to work hard if they want to stand out from the crowd, as they have to compete with each other and the countless similar products from other brands.

That’s why their campaigns have to be developed with an authentic emotional connection that’s going to grab the target audience’s attention and break through the noise.

Companies and politicians aren’t the only people who need PR to help them build a reputation for themselves in today’s competitive marketplace. PR can also be a powerful tool for authors who want to share their words of wisdom with the world. Through the right PR promotion campaign, an author can not only attract the attention of their target audience, but also potentially get the attention of other media groups and publications that want to feature the title.

Here are just some of the steps that an author might need to take when they’re thinking of marketing their book with the help of a PR strategy.