Future PR Skills 2008: Creating Integrated Marketing and Communications Strategy

When I say "Future PR Skills" I am really talking about the ones we need today to be successful going into the future.

Three words: Integrated, marketing and strategy
"Next public relations" (where the discipline is going next) can not just be a focus on "communications." It most certainly cannot be that narrow practice of "media relations."

The walls between marketing and communications are dissolving. A new marcom organizational standard is already appearing where multiple disciplines, most notably public relations and advertising are rolling up to the same leader inside brands. This is happening because of the complex interdependence of all of the channels on each other. Even in the emerging world we work in everyday - word of mouth marketing - WOM programs are greatly impacted by paid advertising "air cover" and media relations. Being the social media team, we see another interesting phenomena within some clients - a bit of a land grab for 'control" over social media initiatives within the organization. These efforts are doomed to failure - not the failure of the social media efforts necessarily, but the failure of establishing internal ownership of social media-based marketing.

Time would be better spent sharpening our skills on designing and running integrated marcom programs that include all disciplines. Is PR really ready for this leadership role?

Integration
True integration - where all efforts are compimentary - are not all that common yet. It takes a leadership role to say "here's why PR should take the lead on this campaign and here's how we can coordinate with advertising..." or "this is really all about generating word of mouth, let's start with a strong engagement (i.e. digital influence) program online and then layer in advertising, public relations and even CRM to drive WOM upwards...." Someday in the future, leaderless collaboration may take hold as an effective way to build strong integrated programs but not yet.

Marketing
PR professionals of tomorrow (or later today) need to be "better than average" or even "great" at the fundamentals of advertising and marketing. How to sell, how to assess the ROI of marcom efforts, how paid advertising works - these are all skills the PR leader. The moment you say - "oh no, I am about earned media and advocacy..." you abdicate the inevitable - a world where these the performance of a traditional public relations effort is greatly impacted by paid advertisng and marketing strategies and tactics. The weakest part of the PR pros marketing utility belt is measurment discipline. But that's a whole other post. suffice it to say that the PR pro is much stronger if s/he can talk click throughs, open rates, GRPs, and sales data with the best of them.

Strategy
To this day, I will request a strategic brief from not-so-junior PR pros and get a mish mash of tactics back. The framework for building and articulating strategy remains strong and uncomplicated. Here are the tried an true I-beams of this architecture:

Business objectives - this usually has something to do with sales or reputation - although the purpose of reputation is to allow you to reach a business objective; still, building reputation, good-will in the bank is a legitimate business objective. (One suggestion: understand the business model of your client/company and understand what business they are really in)

Communication goal - what is that measureable activity that will demonstrate progress towards your business objective. Sure there are engagements where you can measure impact on sales. Many times that is not possible due to the complexity of a program. "Raising awareness" is a communication goal. So is increasing the relevance of a product (deeper in the funnel) or activating more word of mouth (that is a proxy for advocates). All of these things can be measured.

Strategy - this is the overarching "how" you will move the needle on the communication goals. It can be a big strategy fueled by inspirational manifestos and such (we do that a lot) or it can be simpler, even dull. It really should be fueled by some type of insight.

These are the building blocks towards strategy that includes research and insight into the people you are trying to engage, knowledge of the business and more. I have attached a Strategic Brief that I often use and have found helpful. Researching and filling out one of these babies with the first week or two of an engagement has been time well-spent every time we have done it.

Download strategic_brief_v1_2noo.doc

Where social media purists often fall down
Many social media purists resist the discipline of strategy and marketing as if the fundmentals of strategy were the problem. They may resist or they may just not know how to create it. Tactics like blogger outreach, viral video online and the dreaded facebook application come tumbling out. Strategy and how you get there is as fundamental and necessary as architectural plans to building. i would argue that this is one of the "The Many Challenges of the Social Media industry" that Jeremiah points out in his recent post.

Some additional resources: