The future of communication: PR challenges for the coming years

Faced with the issues mentioned above, the first great challenge arises. Although today 67% of PR service offerings include social media management and content marketing, only 38% provide impact measurements and analyze the management of these strategies.

This is a wasted opportunity, since the relevant information is at our fingertips. Therefore, one of the great PR challenges is to understand the magnitude of what it means for every action on the internet to be measurable, and to acknowledge that the scope and impact of what we propose on a daily basis is easier than in traditional media.

The report’s conclusions note that only 48% of communications and marketing professionals use any of the tools available for active listening on social networks and, even more discouragingly, 80% of brands’ positions are driven not by social network analysis, but by coverage in traditional media.

In this context, it is obvious that the PR industry needs to urgently rethink its metrics, analysis and action scenarios. While the most agile, efficient and immediately relevant conversations are generated on the web and on social media, marketing and communications professionals continue to gauge relevance and impact first and foremost in the conventional media sphere. The record needs to be changed, as soon as possible!

A few months ago, during a conference on content marketing in Bogotá, one of the speakers, the CEO of a consulting firm specializing in digital marketing, stated without hesitation that the main competition of traditional PR companies today are agencies dedicated to influencer marketing.

“It is time for PR to reinvent itself and see content and influence marketing as its main ally,” said the speaker. In Latin America, 82% of PR professionals agree, but the concern is that, worldwide, only 67% of industry professionals consider influencer marketing to be part of a comprehensive PR offer.

But, just like with traditional PR strategies that target media executives and opinion-formers, another PR challenge is to encourage consultants to approach influencers, understand them and see them as allies who can provide value. What are you waiting for?

Content creation – now more than ever – is a matter of method and criteria. Putting together a press release to deliver a story to journalists or speak to key audiences, as a brand, should not stop at simply recording an event.

One of the major PR challenges is knowing how to choose, for our narrative, keywords that deftly segment the target market, limit the competition and make us easily traceable on Internet search engines and social networks.

We should also take care to include multimedia content in our communications: videos, images, gifts, infographics, and even related links. This content gives our message a greater chance of achieving visits and traffic organically. The rest is “SEO 101”: a striking title, use of keywords and their synonyms, a specific summary, and an accurate development and conclusion. The challenge is to make all this useful in both the offline and online world simultaneously.

In these times when the ‘scoop’ is an outdated and devalued concept, information evolves at an incredible pace, and being part of the news or conversation of the moment is getting easier and easier. PR professionals must adopt the management of social listening tools that allow the brands they advise to know the needs and wants of their users and fans first-hand .

Among other things, efficient active listening allows brands to potentiate the use of a technique that is currently used by just 15% of professionals in the industry, known as ‘newsjacking’ – a ‘hijacking of the news’ that consists of exploiting breaking news to deliver exposure and coverage for a brand.

First of all, you have to be very attentive to everything that happens in our environment, and latch on to a news story – for example, a concert by a famous artist, the final of a sporting championship, a political appearance or, simply, a relevant fact.

Next, create and publish relevant content that echoes the news and also includes a brand message: an idea, a point of view on said news, a piece of information about your products or services, etc. The creation and publication of this content requires not just dexterity but also a certain dash of ingenuity, so that it may later go viral on online and offline platforms with ease. If communications professionals prioritize this PR challenge, they can turn it into a veritable media exposure machine.

Industry analysts agree with the report by Talkwalker and YouGov that the coming years will be incredible for PR. The fear that marketing and PR would merge has dissipated, instead becoming a new opportunity.

In addition, these PR challenge are intended to make strategists reinvent themselves, as the role of the PR professional will never be the same thanks to the growing interest of brands and companies in the digital sphere.

In the years to come we will incorporate with greater efficiency and adaptive capacity the tools necessary for our goals of creating opinion, establishing criteria, generating interest or generating a preference for the brands we advise. Let’s not forget the standout example of TikTok: a genuine revolution, and certainly not the last of its kind.