When you have a question no one seems to know the answer to, what’s the first thing you do? If your answer involves turning to Google, then you’re not unlike the 250 or so reporters the agency Wasabi Publicity recently surveyed.
According to the survey, the top ways reporters find sources and stories are:
1. Google
2. Pitches
3. Breaking news
4. Social Media
5. Press releases
The survey matches my own experience and I believe represents a substantial evolution to the classic corporate media relations program. The results are precisely why PR should embrace content marketing.
What Does Content Marketing have to do with PR?
Several years ago, I was pitching a story to a reporter that I thought was tailored, timely and a good fit for both the journalist and publication. Despite my experience, intuition and persistence, I simply couldn’t get a response.
Yet I knew it was a good story – a story with legs. So after several attempts, I re-worked my pitch into a blog post and published it on the company blog. The post gained traction in social media, which was in part the desired effect, but then something else happened: it earned links and mentions from several other news outlets.
I had a special epiphany that day: the soft and subtle pitch of content marketing created media relations opportunities beyond the conventions of crisis communications and newsjacking. Content marketing needed to be a pillar of PR because it integrates the five ways reporters find sources and stories identified in this survey – and more.
Building Trust and Credibility through Content
Reporters look for signals of trust and credibility among sources. According to the report:
“Once sources have been identified, the next step is to evaluate which sources are best for coverage. According to the survey respondents, an impressive 77% of them specifically look for a source to be a recognized expert in their field. Traditional thought was that having written a book is a major determining factor here, but the journalists who responded to the survey reported that only 8.6% of them look for book authorship when evaluating a source.”
Google looks for those elements too in ranking content in response to search queries. In many ways, good content marketing — that which is focused on utility, hype-free help, and education — becomes a source for search engines to index and shortcut for reporters evaluating sources.
Is it perfect? No, which is why content marketing is one pillar and not a replacement for PR.
Perhaps that’s what Wasabi CEO Drew Gerber meant when he suggested to Ragan’s PR Daily, that PR professionals should “not forget our relationship-building roots: personal outreach.”
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Photo credit: Flickr, Dennis Skley, News (CC BY-ND 2.0)
