While both digital PR and content marketing share a similar end goal of building brand awareness, they do it in two very different ways. When combined, each of these methods can be used to fuel your online success across multiple channels.
Video Transcription
I'm Laura from Impression, we're a digital marketing agency based in the UK. And I'm going to talk about what I perceive to be the difference between digital PR and content marketing. Now, digital PR is primarily for link-building. More often than not, if someone engages us for digital PR activity, it's to influence and affect their wider SEO goals. So when we're doing digital PR, we're looking to build links back to a website. We're looking at the relevance and the quality of those links, and how well they can affect things like our ranking position, and therefore traffic, and therefore conversions through our site.
Content marketing, on the other hand, is all about creating content within our site, that's going to earn visits. So slightly nuanced changes there, but what I mean is that when we're creating a piece of content marketing, we are doing it with the KPI in mind that we want to capture audience data in some way. Now that might be audience data in the form of cookies, so we can later remarket to them. It might be getting them to follow us on social media, so we can further engage with them and help them through to conversion. It might be getting them to sign up to an email newsletter list. Whatever it might be, content marketing is a fantastic way of getting access to more audience data.
It's also a great, great way of getting your audience to identify their needs to you very clearly. For example, let's say you're a huge, global beauty brand, and you had a specific target on eye care. By creating a hub of content relevant to eye care, where you may be exploring some long-tail guides, you look at video content, you do some nice how to's, things like that. People who are engaged with your eyecare hub are telling you, "I am interested in eyecare." Conversely, the people who go to your makeup hub or the people that go to anti-ageing hub, whatever it might be, they're telling you what they're interested in based on what they're visiting and engaging with on your site.
So digital PR is for links. Content marketing is for audience data capture. What's cool though, is that the two can overlap quite a lot. So when we think about content marketing, let's say I created a huge guide to digital PR and popped it on the Impression site. I might then use digital PR techniques to promote that piece of content. Vice versa, if I'm doing a digital PR campaign, it's quite valid that I would create what I would consider to be a piece of content marketing, as something which can be my link-worthy asset. So it's really the difference between the goals that sets the two apart, with digital PR being related to links and rankings, and content marketing being related to audience capture.
I'd be really interested to hear what everyone else's thoughts are on this because I think both of these disciplines are still in the early stages of their evolution. So shout me on Twitter @LauraLHampton and let me know what you think. Thanks very much.
