3 Major Trends for Public Relations for 2017

 In SEO

This Guest Post on http://alexfurfaro.com is brought to you by Wendy Dessler. Wendy is very insightful about Public Relations and the bond between Content, Audience, and Influencers in the industry. Enjoy her take on the coming PR industry changes for 2017.

Wendy is a super-connector with OutreachMama and Youth Noise NJ who helps businesses find their audience online through outreach, partnerships, and networking. She frequently writes about the latest advancements in digital marketing and focuses her efforts on developing customized blogger outreach plans depending on the industry and competition. You can contact her on Twitter.

 

Are you trying to figure out what the public relations industry has in store in 2017?

Agencies and PR practitioners need to continue focusing on many of the practices that they’ve already worked on. You need to continue building awareness, a strong reputation, and trust in your industry.

But that’s not all, because three major trends are going to take this industry by storm by the end of the year. In order to get ready for them, you have to be aware, so please read on to find out what experienced PR firms will be focusing on this year.

The Content Tsunami Will Increase in 2017

Content was everywhere in 2016. As a matter of fact, there were more than 72 million new stories written during the past year, according to data gathered by Google News. And according to the search company, this was an all-time high.

As a matter of fact, 2016 saw roughly 200,000 stories published each day. Moving into 2017, we actually expect this flood of content to increase.

Why? Content sells that’s why.

Artificial intelligence and machine learning are going to help boost content creation even more. The capabilities of generating text with natural language is going to increase, so machine generated content is going to rule the day eventually, and it’s already starting to have a major impact in 2017.

PR and media relations professionals will need to focus on investigating artificial intelligence. They need to learn how to use this massive increase in content in order to stay relevant in the industry.

Plus, all of this additional content will make it easier for PR firms to achieve better awareness for their clients. Using analytics, algorithms, and data to your advantage is the best way to stay on top of your game.

On the downside, if you fail to utilize artificial intelligence and machine learning technologies, your PR firm is going to decline in influence.

No doubt, you may create a great piece that turns out to be a big hit in the New York Times or the Wall Street Journal, but you have to remember that your story is going to be one of 250,000 to 300,000 that came out that day. So it will not have as powerful an impact as you might think.

Owning Audience Attention

Obviously, if there is going to be a massive content tsunami that continues to grow and spiral out of control, PR firms need to focus on gaining and keeping consumers’ attention.

At this point, since there are so many things for consumers to read and view, and many different types of content has their attention, it makes sense that their attention is going to decline since they are viewing this humongous buffet of news each day.

There is a solution to the attention problem. It’s called an owned audience.

PR firms have to take ownership of their audience now before it completely dries up or becomes totally distracted. You can own an audience by communicating via social media on a one-on-one basis, email marketing, retargeting, re-marketing, and tagging audiences in all of your messages.

Influencer Marketing

In 2017, influencer marketing will be more prevalent than ever. But PR firms are going to have to provide more tangible results, better measurements, and new methodologies for finding, engaging, and scoring with their market’s biggest influencers.

With social media, it’s estimated that the majority of social media sharing, somewhere in the neighborhood of 82%, is happening on WeChat, Kik, What’sApp, Snapchat and other private groups.

So it’s going to be hard to gain influence in these social media communities. Your best bet is to attempt to infiltrate these communities with brand ambassadors working hard to get your marketing message across.

Conclusion

As you can tell, public relations trends are always changing. If you continue to stay focused only on what’s working now, your firm will be irrelevant sooner rather than later.

Start utilizing the latest trends and get well ahead of the competition.

 

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