Why PRs love a Penguin

Not the biscuit, although it is a popular choice of snack for some. At the moment we’re more interested in Google Penguin 2.0.  Econsultancy says it’s all about authority or as the PR industry calls it industry influence and thought leadership.  In theory, cracking down on advertorials and paid for links puts PR back at the top of the tree for delivering SEO.   It’s an evolution rather than a revolution, but Google wants its users to get meaningful results from search not irrelevant tat resulting from organisations paying far flung countries to click on their site for a few seconds.

It does mean that marcomms has to evolve its approach in order to engage with prospects.  However, taking a traditional media relations focused PR campaign and your outbound marketing programme and converting them into an influence-based inbound marketing programme  isn’t difficult, especially if you’ve got a good thought-leadership PR campaign on the go and its backed up with quality content.

There are really three elements involved.  The first is building up your profile across traditional and social media.  The second is ensuring that the really influential authors i.e. journalists and bloggers are maximising your profile.  The third is wringing every last drop of value out of any content that you want to be associated with, whether it is your own, general industry stories, other web properties, or from a key influencer or social network.  You do need to add value to this content, re-sharing is not enough. It also needs to be high quality and engaging.

For the PR industry it is still about creating influence for our clients; in other words doing the same as we’ve always done; but bigger, better and broader.  Penguin 2.0 means that the influencers are becoming more influential and the majority are still journalists/analysts but bloggers, tweeters, and curators of content are also important.  And having a good story remains the best way to engage.

For the marketing team there is more pressure to integrate marketing as well as a significant shift in priorities and where budget is spent.  It is a decision worth making - according to Econsultancy the average cost to generate a lead through inbound marketing is less than half the average for outbound marketing.

Penguin is only interested in the best fish so think quality content and insightful comment!