An Active Example of Integrated Marketing Communications

In many small businesses, establishing consistent integrated marketing communications across all business activity is relatively easy. One person is responsible for both marketing and public relations, so their daily efforts include responsibilities in both areas. But as businesses get larger, especially in the B2B sector, PR and marketing become increasingly separated. Unfortunately, this type of separation can significantly impede your success. For an optimal return on investment (ROI) on all of your communication-related efforts, developing a strong and consistent integrated marketing communications platform is absolutely crucial.

SETTING THE STAGE

Let's start with a couple of definitions you probably already know. The Public Relations Society of America defines PR as the “strategic communication process that builds mutually beneficial relationships between organizations and their publics.”

Meanwhile, the American Marketing Association defines marketing as "the activity, set of institutions, and processes for creating, communicating, delivering, and exchanging offerings that have value for customers, clients, partners, and society at large.”

Looking at these two definitions side by side, the close relationship is clear. Both are concerned with communicating information to the public, which is made up of more than just potential customers or media outlets. And that's why a fluid synthesis of these concepts is absolutely critical to your company's brand, image on the market, and relationships with its current and prospective customers.

INTEGRATING PUBLIC RELATIONS AND MARKETING THROUGH SOCIAL MEDIA

What is the primary purpose of social media in business? Just as marketing experts will go to bat emphasizing its importance in promoting and selling goods, public-relations gurus stress how valuable the medium can be for engaging and building relationships with various demographics. The truth, of course, is right in the middle.

As we move into a more social-media-centric world, where even the industrial sector can take advantage of the many networks available, using this channel simply for selling and promoting your products can actually be detrimental to your marketing success. That's why many experts now recommend de-emphasizing promotional content while putting a larger emphasis on engaging, relationship-building content.

Simply put, social media has democratized the business-customer relationship. Your customers now expect to be heard and are not afraid to communicate their feelings about your brand and product to their peers and industry contacts. That's why using social media to build relationships with all of your stakeholders, from media members to potential customers, is a perfect way to integrate your marketing and PR efforts.

USING CONTENT MARKETING FOR PR AND MARKETING INTEGRATION

If you shouldn't share too many direct advertisements on your social media outlets, what types of posts should you emphasize to make sure that you do build these positive company-to-customer relationships? The answer: posts that relate to your audience and build their trust in your brand over time.

This content may be about your product, but it could also be about your industry as a whole. It's part of the "content marketing" philosophy, which has greatly increased in popularity among marketers in recent years. In fact, a majority of B2B marketers now firmly believe in the positive ROI of content marketing. How do you get that content? By reusing (and adjusting) your company updates and press releases for digital marketing.

INTEGRATING MARKETING AND PR: AN EXAMPLE

Here’s a specific example: a business just began manufacturing a new product, opening up possibilities for an entire new batch of customers. Traditionally, your marketing department would develop an advertising campaign to promote the new product, while the PR department would begin work on press releases to get story placements in industry publications.

But here's what the effort could look like in a company that emphasizes relationships by integrating marketing and PR: the PR department turns its press release into a blog post, adjusting the language to be more web friendly, so that the marketing department can post it on social media. The marketing department then works on a video that gives an in-depth, backstage look at the thought process behind creating the new product, with interviews from engineers and machinists responsible for day-to-day tasks. That video, in turn, can be used both as content for social media and as an additional selling point for the press release. Marketing and PR work in concert to establish a coherent, unified strategy that aims to build stakeholder relationships.

Seasoned B2B marketers know that in today's environment, the simple definition of marketing as promotions and PR as media relations are simply not enough anymore. A world in which it costs 10 times less to encourage current customers to repeat their purchase than it does to convince someone to become a first-time customer requires strategic relationship building with your customers to increase their loyalty and encourage additional sales. That's why marketing and public relations should inextricably linked, working together to maximize ROI.