The Trifecta of Digital Marketing: Combine These 3 Crucial Elements for a Better ROI

The process of promoting your company is something that has many facets.

There's marketing. There's advertising. And there's PR.

Today, there are three things that are essential for this: SEO, content marketing, and PR (public relations).

In many companies, especially midsize to large organizations, these three pillars of marketing can become kind of silo'd off from one another.

This can also happen in small businesses that work with outside contractors extensively.

Your SEO guy handles search marketing.

You've got writers, designers, and video editors working on putting together amazing content your target audience will love.

And then maybe you've got some kind of PR department in the mix as well.

These three important areas of marketing cannot exist in their own isolated vacuums.

Instead, they work best when they're woven together, reaching a synergy that creates a whole that's greater than the sum of its parts.

A recent article from Search Engine Watch explains how to start thinking about making this synergy work for you.

The digital brand trifecta

A consistent theme throughout the ages, branding – the practice of crafting measured messaging around a product to guide public perception – has always been a pillar for marketing communications.

Simply put, a strong and positive brand image drives customer awareness, recognition and action.

The most effective brands, while simple at the surface, conjure complex responses; consider that 90 percent of purchase decisions are made subconsciously.

Evoking the right perception of a brand can make an enormous difference in conversions and revenue – this is where public relations plays a role by subtly inserting brand messaging into external sources that consumers today are more likely to consume and engage with than pushed advertising.

The expansion of the digital world and rise of the separate disciplines SEO and content marketing as a means of reaching consumers through targeted content has resulted in the consolidation of the roles of SEO and content.

The role of public relations has emerged from this phenomenon quite naturally; while content marketing and SEO traditionally focus on on-site content, public relations is the impetus for third party content that drives brand messaging and digital traffic.

Customers today hold brands to high standards: 60 percent of millennials say they expect to have a consistent experience with organizations across the various platforms.

Customers expect to be able to interact with brands whenever they want and wherever they want.

To meet these needs, organizations themselves need to understand how to integrate their various disciplines to create a uniform voice.

You can read more about how PR, SEO, and content marketing can reach a synergy, over at Search Engine Watch.