Rise and shine PR pros! Grab your coffee (or tea) and meet Amanda Milligan. Prowly #PRChat is back to give you another short interview to read over your favorite morning drink. This time we're talking about the connection between digital PR and marketing to check if your PR activities can support marketing actions and how exactly you can do it.
Today the mic goes to one and only Amanda Milligan - a growth and content marketing specialist and Marketing Director at Stacker. With over 200 content marketing campaigns under her belt, she led the strategy for over 20 clients and helped her company earn over 1 million organic monthly visits. Besides her daily tasks, she's spreading link-building and content knowledge on her Twitter and as a webinar guest (psst! you can still watch some of them on YouTube). She also used to host the Cashing In On Content Marketing podcast and appeared in a bunch of others on her own.
Keep reading for her take on the link between digital PR and marketing.
Do you use any software tools in your day-to-day work?
Probably more than I even realize! Off the top of my head, I use Zoom, Airtable, Loom, MailChimp, Figma, Umso, and Mixmax.
How are marketing and PR related?
There's a ton of overlap regarding brand awareness and authority. PR pros are concerned with people knowing about a brand and associating it with certain qualities, and top-of-the-funnel marketing has many of the same concerns.
How are SEO and PR related?
SEO includes many elements, but the crucial one is off-page authority. In part, Google assesses a site's trustworthiness by understanding how other companies, people, publishers, etc., talk about it and refer to it. This is why SEOs and brands prioritize earning media coverage and links, which then tend to overlap with PR initiatives, as well.
What is the most gratifying part of your job?
Talking to a prospect and finding out they heard about our brand because of a marketing or PR initiative! There's something particularly exciting about actually interacting with folks who saw your content rather than only seeing the metrics.
What's something you or your team have recently achieved that you're really proud of?
I recently spoke at MozCon, which was an incredible experience. I've never presented in front of a group that big and filled with such talented marketing professionals! And it was an honor to share insights I learned from the greater Stacker team; they're truly innovating in the areas of media and marketing, and it made me even more proud to be part of this company.
What's a resource/tool/channel PR professionals aren't using correctly or to its fullest?
Everyone should check out #PRLunchHour on Twitter every Friday. It's a great community of PR pros always down to support and help one another while covering relevant PR-related news of the week.
What should every PR practitioner start doing?
Some may already do this, but I'd say - pay attention to every pitch email you receive. I get pitched constantly for stuff, and I examine what made me open the email (even though it's rare) and what the body text said that either annoyed me or caught my attention. If you don't get pitched a lot, ask leaders at your organization to forward you some examples!
Do you think storytelling is necessary for PR?
Probably not 100% of the time, but in general, yes. PR is essentially the outward telling of your brand story. Even if it's as specific as your product or service, the story of how these things help a customer or user tends to be crucial to external communications and PR.
