In the last five years, the rise of influencers, decline of print media and growth of social media users has seen the traditional role of PR completely change.
As an agency, we’ve seen this compounded with more and more clients asking us to take on their social media strategy. In 2020, our social media business increased by a staggering 440% across both retained clients and new. Consequently, LRR created a dedicated team to handle its social media offering. This now spans copywriting, content creation, campaign development, community management and outreach as well as ad campaigns, consultancy plus training.
From working on client PR strategies, we know the brand and products inside and out, have a great grasp on the tone of voice and have clarity on business objectives, targets, and key messaging. We are also incredibly proud of the passion and excitement we have for our brands – something we channel into clients’ social media content.
As the demand for social media management increases, we’ve been flexing our social media skills more and more, ensuring the whole team has an up-to-date understanding of the latest tools, current trends, and distinctions of each channel. After all, social media marketing is constantly evolving – in fact, it’s one of the only jobs you progressively get worse at the longer you do it (quite depressing, really).
At LRR, we’re well versed in content creation and social media strategy for our clients, but in the past couple of years, we’ve been tackling sponsored social campaigns for the likes of Smeg, Victoria + Albert Baths, LPG endermologie and Sharpie. Whilst we’ve always recommended clients have a dedicated boosting budget in place as a minimum, our social offering is wider with the management of much more sophisticated paid social campaigns.
What perhaps is most interesting about learning how to manage these types of campaigns, is how it informs and supports our PR outreach and benefits the understanding of our clients on a wider level.
So, how do ad campaigns on social maximise a client’s PR strategy?
Widens our perspective on a client’s overall marketing plan
Whilst one common objective is brand awareness; quite often the basis of most PR outreach, this isn’t always the case for social ad campaigns. Ad campaigns offer a wide range of goals – lead generation, catalogue sales, app installs and traffic. In most instances, your PR and social aims might be similar, but this isn’t always the case.
For example, with LPG endermologie our main goal is to pique enough interest from salon owners, clinics, and spa managers to encourage them to enquire about purchasing a treatment machine. Through our PR work, we develop a detailed understanding of who LPG’s target customer is, the industry wording and trends to be aware of, which helps shape our social content.
Enables us to use and analyse data from social media
We use social media to identify which products, trends, and content are performing well, and in turn which are generating the most interest and excitement amongst our community. We can then use this information to streamline our PR outreach; focusing on those products we know are performing well on social media and are of interest to consumers.
Through continuous engagement with our clients’ online communities, we can also keep an eye on any trending hashtags or anything that’s going viral, and ensure we leverage this before it goes out of ‘fashion’ just as quickly – whether it’s whipping up a trend alert for the features pages or a colour themed pitch to sell-in to the relevant magazines and titles for that client.
Helps PR to become more trackable
Social media is no longer just about sharing your favourite snack or your new socks, but a powerful marketing tool for brands. The sophistication of these platforms – Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, TikTok etc. – provides a ton of data that can be used to inform your brand’s PR strategy.
We know print PR can be a tricky business to measure because of its lack of traceability. However, a way to increase this is to share the press coverage across a clients’ social profiles. This not only opens a further conversation with the journalist but enables us to track how well an audience is engaging with the content, and if there’s been any hits to a site or product page as a result.
Overall, by managing our clients’ social media and PR strategies concurrently, we have a holistic approach and understanding of our client offerings, goals, and business objectives. With this in mind, it allows us to provide stronger consultancy to our clients about the direction of their brands and get them more bang for their buck.
