Content has always been at the heart of PR, with a strategic intent to raise awareness about a company or product.  ‘Content’ marketing isn’t new; it has been around for a while but its rapidly gaining momentum with the rise of new media technologies.

At a time when 90 per cent of customers start their search for products and services online, traditional PR agencies are making the move to offer the complete package of digital marketing services.

If you are one of these agencies, or even a business reading this post, it’s important to transfer your strategic approach to online.

Many organisations fail to see the strategic side of social media, and instead see it as just another channel to push content to. But there’s so much more to it than this …

My secret tips

You start with the company website. When re-designing your website, focus on content first. Ask yourself what pains and problems your customers have, and then answer these in a series of press releases, blog posts and even high-value content downloads such as eBooks.

With your website acting as your content hub, break your content down into bitable chunks for your digital channels. This could be in the form of tweets, discussions for relevant forums or even engaging questions. Remembering to link back to your content hub, whether it be your website, blog or dominated channel such as YouTube or Slideshare.

That’s the content done, but as a PR agency wanting to offer the full digital marketing service, you need to go one step further. A great example of this would be Twitter:

Branding Twitter accounts, scheduling tweets to go out at specific times of days, producing monthly reports as well as offering monthly spring-cleans of irrelevant followers etc.

It’s important to remember that your content services should include a good mix of content. PR, blog posts, mentions, retweets, events and offers. Don’t be afraid to mention other people’s content, it shows you’re open and that you’re a thought leader in your industry.