Acquiring new customers and generating more leads has gotten increasingly more expensive in the last few years for many businesses.
Fortunately, with the right strategies, companies can more effectively generate leads and convert them into paying customers.
By communicating effectively with the target audience, and figuring out which channels they prefer to communicate through, companies can effectively generate more leads.
PR Overview
Channels
News pieces tend to travel quite fast these days, to the point that even news outlets can’t keep up with the speed.
For companies, that means it’s important to send any press releases or other public relations content to relevant and familiar publications and outlets.
Companies can also find people on social media platforms that provide businesses with news coverage at a faster pace.
When companies use a combination of both fast-moving and familiar options for distributing their content, they can increase both their impact and their reach.
Repurposing content
When companies combine their public relations and content marketing efforts, they can look at repurposing some of the old content they’ve published.
For example, if a business has done research and created an e-book or a white paper about its latest product, all of the content in the book or white paper can then be repurposed to create blog posts, news articles, and video content as well.
With this strategy companies can capture the attention of both the content and PR markets with similar pieces of content that aren’t a carbon copy of each other.
Established relationships
Both what companies know, and who they know are important in promotional efforts for businesses. That’s why it’s important for companies to leverage any relationships and connections they have to drive their promotional efforts.
These could be industry experts, social media influencers, as well as long-term customers that are more than willing to talk about their positive experiences with the business.
For industry experts, companies can create a long-term arrangement where they talk about the business and its solutions in a positive way. For social media influencers, companies can create a partnership where the influencers create a specific number of posts for their social media accounts featuring the business, and for customers, companies can provide them with coupons or discounts that would encourage them to share the company’s content.
Art and science
Generally, public relations teams have been focused on creating written content for businesses. This type of content includes white papers, press releases, and other types of content that contain the science of collecting and interpreting data and statistics.
However, many consumers have started demanding more visual content from the businesses that they interact with.
This gives companies an opportunity to create more attention-grabbing content by pairing the PR and content marketing efforts and creating infographics or presentations. These can be used to both inform and educate the audience in a more visually appealing manner.
Top Examples of PR and Content Marketing Lead Generation
Content marketing and public relations teams need to be in constant communication inside businesses, so they can generate and convert more leads.
Companies can combine both of those approaches to get a lot more loyal customers, generate more interest in the business and its solutions, and expand their audiences.
Ford
Ford has started focusing on more sustainability, which is why the brand decided to commit to $22 billion for vehicle electrification efforts, so the company can achieve carbon neutrality in the next three decades.
This is a very substantial timeline to achieve this ambitious goal, but it fits very well with the current focus the public has on more green initiatives and sustainability efforts.
With the right campaigns focused on environmentally friendly efforts and sustainable approaches, the brand has the potential to reach a lot more environmentally focused customers. In fact, this strategy is especially useful for consumers that might have otherwise completely avoided this popular automaker.
Netflix
The popular streaming platform Netflix provides its employees with paid parental leave. Most employees can take between four and eight months of parental leave, but they also have the option of taking up to a year off.
This puts the streaming platform quite ahead of most other brands and corporations in terms of paid leave options.
Although the parental leave perk for employees is an opportunity to connect with more customers, when the brand combines this information with other details about the achievements that the company has had at a great scale, it can achieve a lot of success.
Combining the detailed information about the parental leave program, and snippets of all of the ongoing successes of the brand, the company can reach both more customers and more potential employees while many other businesses are still struggling with the impact the pandemic had on the workplace.
Wells Fargo
The financial services company Wells Fargo donates up to 1.5% of its revenue to charities every year.
With public relations efforts being focused on sharing details about businesses, and the content marketing focusing on the outcome of various efforts the company has pursued, Wells Fargo can share its charitable efforts in a press release.
However, by making that press release a part of a larger content marketing effort it can show the brand as an empathetic and relatable company that’s putting a lot of effort into connecting with its customers.
Much like plenty of other brands and corporations, Google is another one on the list of corporations that’s been committed to reducing its energy impact, however, the company has had a lot more impactful efforts on corporate social responsibility as well.
This is mainly because of the Google CEO, Sundar Pichai, who is quite outspoken and willing to engage with both world leaders and industry leaders on various topics of equality and social responsibility.
Because of his efforts, Google has managed to leverage its vast data resources to provide relevant public relations insights and statistics, as well as back up all of those claims with actions that are socially conscious and help the business create very compelling content for the target audience.
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