New public relations and communications trends are constantly developing, and changing the way we work. It’s important to stay on top of these trends and cultivate an understanding of which are feasible for reaching your target audiences at a given point in time. With 2020 just around the corner, here are our predictions for what the coming year holds—or should hold—for PR professionals:
2020 PR Trends to Know—Our Predictions
The Role PR Will Play in a Larger Marketing Campaign
The value the industry is now beginning to place on PR’s strategic role within the context of larger marketing campaigns—rather than just valuing PR for the end results—comprises a larger trend that we predict we’ll see more of in 2020. Positioning PR at the beginning of the idea process will allow your PR team to act as strategic thinkers, rather than a team that only serves to write press releases.
Collaboration: PR + Marketing Working Together
Another trend set to continue in 2020: PR professionals and marketers actually working together and sharing knowledge, rather than remaining in siloes. Collaboration continues to be more important than ever, and PR efforts should align with a strong content marketing strategy, given that securing meaningful earned coverage also requires an investment in content creation. A message may be pitched by a PR professional in story format, but it also needs to be shared on the right social channels for broader reach. Public relations professionals need to be able to demonstrate the reach of their placements and prove what messaging is working.
Connecting with Consumer Emotion
PR strategy should be driven to some degree by the goal of evoking emotion, which means incorporating a “human element” in order to be more meaningful to readers. Media professionals need to be able to trust PR pros to not only present them with content that is relevant, but also to not waste their time with an overdose of information or irrelevant messaging. More than ever, agencies and internal PR professionals will have to demonstrate a deep understanding of their clients’ businesses, consider emotional tie-ins, and leverage creativity and production in order to support PR strategies.
Podcasts!
Podcasts look to be following the same trajectory as blogs (just 10 years later). Podcasts provide another means of self-publishing content—and there are some doing it really well! There’s no highly accessible way to clearly measure success in this endeavor currently, and we’re seeing lots of experimentation in format and content, from editorial to branded, episodic content. So what’s the trend we expect to see (aside from additional excellent podcasts for us to add to our lists)? We expect to see many more PR professionals taking advantage of the medium, given that interviews on a podcast platform can accumulate major impressions and downloads, similar to a placement via an online article.
What trends do you expect to see in 2020? Leave us a comment below or reach out to us on Twitter @TheCoreBlog!
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