By Felicia Knight
There are many skills that public relations professionals bring to the table that will never become obsolete: the ability to tell a story, to write and think creatively, to listen, and to anticipate. These are abilities borne of experience and will continue to serve clients well into the future.
As the marketplace evolves, however, new skills are needed. They can’t be ignored and they all begin with digital. Here are three that smart PR firms are using to keep their clients visible.
SEO. Search engine optimization. You’ve heard about it for years and wondered if it’s real or some kind of Internet voodoo, right? Well, it’s real and it’s crucial to your business’s success. Search engines are out there scraping sites constantly for key words and new content. If you aren’t paying attention to SEO, you may as well take down your website and close your social media channels. Your PR firm should be able to help you maximize your SEO. (The Knight Canney Group works with Kirk Communications for all our client’s SEO needs.)
Analytics. Especially in social media. If your client wants a social media strategy, you need to be able to explain why one social media channel is a better match for their audience than another. There are free analytics available for most social media channels as well as more detailed metrics via paid media monitoring services such as Cision and Meltwater, but regardless of source, your PR firm needs to know how to understand and interpret those data.
Content creation. Earned media content is still a staple of most PR campaigns, but more and more clients are asking for content creation to populate websites and social media channels. Whether it’s blogs, info-graphics, videos, or photos (all of which feed nicely into SEO, by the way), PR firms are going to need to be adept and nimble at creating engaging, sharable content. If your public relations professionals can’t help you with content creation, look elsewhere.
Public relations campaigns are becoming ever more complex, multi-faceted enterprises. If your PR firm doesn’t have the skills to keep you moving forward, you need to find one that does!