The PR agency 2.0: Communication in the digital age

The public relations work of the past has evolved into a broad spectrum of methods that can be used to support the entire purchasing decision processes of companies and consumers. Quite simply because content is needed at every touch point. And at every single touch point, it’s all about understanding the information needs of the reader or user, making the most of the opportunities and peculiarities of the specific channel to achieve our clients’ objectives, and to effectively convey the brand. All contact points are linked via the use of a consistent theme or overarching story. Depending on the concept, these storylines can extend over a few days or last for many months. 

An important criterion for the length of the contact journey is the duration of the purchase decision process. To be able to influence this in a relevant number of cases, it often has to extend over many months in the capital goods sector, whereas in the B2C sector seasonal promotions are often played out over a few days. In correspondingly complex overviews, we plan the individual content pieces for each point in time and each channel far in advance – dividing an umbrella topic into many different aspects and perspectives. The goal is a rich presence of the brand and theme, nationally, internationally or worldwide. Depending on the objective of the collaboration, the result is rapidly growing awareness or a high number of interested parties and enquiries.

Our strengths:

• Over 40 years of agency experience in public relations and content-based communication
• High-level strategic consulting expertise in marketing environments and in strategic corporate communication
• All work is initiated with clearly defined goals and KPIs, data-based setting up of concepts and planning, ongoing optimisation of measures based on marketing controlling
• Linking PR with media, creative work and all digital channels through interdisciplinary agency teams for significantly higher impact
• Extensive experience with international and worldwide communication, established international journalist contacts
• Creative, state-of-the-art and fresh concepts and ideas on a detailed level
• Experienced experts who advise, guide and support you on a day-to-day basis
• Proactive input and the ability to work independently. Following an orientation phase, only lean resources on the client side are required

In many cases, public relations serve to support marketing and sales objectives. The aim is to strengthen international awareness and presence as well as to generate leads and enquiries.

In collaboration with our clients, we develop detailed targets and KPIs for individual countries, sectors, product areas, channels and media. We translate these into themes and a complex planning matrix that we meticulously work through over the year. Often closely linked to media planning. The focus is primarily on large placements of one-page and multi-page articles or long web texts. We use weekly and monthly controlling to check the agency’s achievement of objectives with the help of numerous analytical tools. For large budgets, we use a data warehouse for this purpose and measure the developing impact in terms of brand awareness and trust, project enquiries and incoming orders on the client side. Our experience shows that, based on this precise approach, we can often double the impact. The days when the benefits of PR and communication could not be measured are long gone.

Key aspects:

• Developing clear goals and KPIs
• Marketing controlling
• Translation with AI
• Marketing in Asia

Internationally, in many market segments we are seeing how the circulation and number of print titles are declining in small or larger steps. We also have to assume that in times of the home office many print titles are not read or are read late. In turn, our agencies place a lot of content in trade media digital portals on a rapidly growing scale and with rapidly growing reach – with positive impact on backlink expansion and client website rankings.

Unfortunately, the further development of the digital channels of many international professional portals is taking place slowly. In contact with important publishers, our agencies constantly bring our ideas and requests into the collaboration with media. More importantly, we cover all the channels relevant to the target groups’ customer journey with suitable topics – networking the channels closely with each other. In our experience, the synergies are huge. There is considerable potential for many companies to achieve many times the impact from the same marketing budgets. 

Currently we are seeing how the technical possibilities for adapting and delivering content – to specific target groups or individually, and in an automated or semi-automated manner – are developing rapidly. The marketing solutions of major CRM software providers such as Salesforce, Adobe and Hubspot now offer modules that make sense and are affordable for large corporations. As a partner and user of such solutions and as a marketing agency, we are developing more and more content for these tools and metrics. Acquiring and using these digital tools require considerable resources and the development of new skills. We build the necessary software landscapes for our clients, provide advice and support in the ongoing application – often in cross-agency-client teamwork.