With 2018 visible only in the rearview mirror, it’s time to focus on what will make for a successful 2019. It helps to have an idea of what the business climate will be like. We asked some of the experts in Public Relations Boutiques International (PRBI) what marketing and communications trends to expect in the year ahead.
There are international differences, and our sample includes a geographically diverse selection of senior PR pros. However, some things just don’t change no matter where you are.
“Professionals in all industries will continue to pursue opportunities to be considered experts in their fields, whether it’s being quoted by traditional media, writing articles or posting content on LinkedIn,” says Cheryl Bame of Bame Public Relations in Los Angeles, who specializes in PR for professional services firms. “PR practitioners will have to be creative in how to position their clients and maximize exposure to reach all target audiences.”
“In India,” says Tarunjeet Rattan, of Nucleus PR, headquartered in Bangalore, “co-branded content and collaboration initiatives will be the way forward for PR in 2019. With shrinking editorial space, brands across different categories will have to join hands creatively to create a deeper connection and encourage customers to interact with them. A large part of brand engagement and reputation management campaigns will be efforts to create deeper connections with brands via collaboration. These will include co-branded media content. PR teams will lead this initiative for brands.”
This reduction in editorial space has made media relations harder across all industries in the United States, also. Notes Andrew Joseph of Andrew Joseph PR, “The home, design and shelter world is more and more of an uphill battle. Hearst Design Group dissolved this past year and with more magazines running fewer issues throughout the year, it’s a serious impediment. One area where we are finding great success is elevating the relationships our designers have with their manufacturers. It’s a combination of business development, client relations and content creation that dovetails into social media. We have had some of our clients do Instagram takeovers, create content for company newsletters, had work of theirs included in websites and promotional materials. It’s a symbiotic relationship that designers have with showrooms, design centers, and manufacturers. Why not massage that so each can make the other shine?”
Digital media, while playing an ever more vital role in PR, has caused the reduction in editorial space mentioned above by draining advertising dollars from traditional media. That has resulted in huge layoffs of journalists.
“As journalists’ ranks thin relative to PR professionals, earned media – what journalists create at the suggestion of, or with input from communications professionals – has become tougher, with too many PR professionals chasing too few journalists,” comments Wendy Marx, Marx Communications, in Connecticut. “Meanwhile, many PR professionals are all-out focused on earned media, which is declining in importance, to the neglect of other tactics. In place of earned media, expect brand journalism and content marketing to continue to grow.”
Marx adds, “Brands will hire agencies to create content, for their websites, for media outlets, for social media and voice-activated devices like Alexa. Paid and shared media will amplify the content and bring benefit and SEO juice to the brand. PR professionals will need to become more proficient and creative in terms of content ideas and content platforms. And ready to leave their comfort zones and master new skills.”
While the ascendency of digital media is requiring PR professionals to learn new skills, it has also brought much better tools for measuring PR success. “2019 is all about measurement,” says Amanda Foley, at Kiterocket in Seattle (the firm is in Phoenix and San Francisco as well). Foley is also president of PRBI. “There is so much digital data available now, we can demonstrate to clients how PR directly contributes to business impact results and not just marketing metric results, which is far superior to the old way of measuring media clips and impressions. The general brand awareness halo will always count for something, but unless PR agencies can show direct correlation between their work outputs and business results, we will be left behind in favor of other disciplines that can.”
Digital technologies are affecting the way agencies approach the media in Australia, according to Dionne Taylor, Polkadot Communications in Sydney, Australia, and founder of media industry app Story Match. “PR trends that we are seeing here include more automated communication with media in a more tailored fashion. No longer are ‘spray and pray’ approaches to media relations acceptable. Story suggestions that challenge a trend, speak to a new target audience and are backed up by statistical data continue to be well-received by media. However, the method of pitching to them has shifted. Targeted pitches giving both the PR professional and the journalist the chance to interact directly one-on-one allow for greater earned and owned media outcomes and provide the best chance for in-depth coverage of our clients.”
Durée Ross, Durée & Co., in Fort Lauderdale, Fl., agrees with the huge effect that smaller and smaller editorial staffs are having on media relations. “For 2019, I believe we as publicists are going to have to get even more strategic on the content generation side. With fewer editors and reporters on the masthead, we need to work harder and smarter to get our clients the editorial coverage they are expecting us to secure on their behalf. From serving as contributors to drafting bylined articles—even looking at sponsored content, partnerships and digital handshakes—we will have to become more strategic and work harder to identify, draft and create the content that will end up as editorial coverage that can then be re-purposed for other marketing, digital, SEO and social media purposes.”
One trend mentioned by Paul Furiga at WordWrite Communications in Pittsburgh, Penn. may sound more appropriate to the tech industry than to communications: “Artificial intelligence seems like science fiction, but it’s not. In PR, the emergence of ‘chatbots’ answering basic PR questions on corporate websites and the use of bots to write basic PR materials using pre-approved messaging and algorithms will continue to grow in 2019.”
The ways and means of communication are always changing, from cave drawings and smoke signals; to the printing press, radio and TV; to email, texting and social media. Public relations trends shift to make the most of the latest in communications, and savvy businesses will stay abreast of these trends.