PR Trends: Top 3 Priorities When Building Your PR Strategy for 2023

PR pros must innovate and rethink how they execute their media relations programs. These aren't just PR trends or good ideas. These are communication imperatives.

Why this matters:

The media landscape is complicated. The news media is shrinking, outlets are converging, and journalists are using new platforms like TikTok to distribute news. The competition for customer attention is fierce, and most companies struggle with standing out.

To be successful in PR, stand out and lead, it’s critical to understand what’s driving these changes and how they can be used to your competitive advantage:

• Use data to inform your media strategy
• Integrate creators into PR
• Innovate how you tell stories

Data-informed media strategy

I can't believe it's 2023, and I'm still saying this but it has to be said. The days of submitting a press release to the wire and hoping for coverage are long over. It’s kind of a 90s thing if you ask me. I know, I know.

Smart and innovative PR pros are using data to inform who they pitch and how they tell their stories. It's what we've been preaching for years–data-driven storytelling. The thing that everyone talks about, yet very few practice. For many, it's just a bullet point on a pitch deck. A buzzword.

Every CEO wants coverage in The New York Times, but it may not be the most impactful media outlet to tell your story. Media analysis can give you the intelligence to identify the most impactful media outlets and insights into how to target them effectively.

The below data is an illustration of the top media outlets that cover the metaverse. Each media outlet is plotted using three data points. Along the X axis is the volume of coverage and accounts for the total number of articles each media outlet published about the topic.

The Y axis is resonance. Sometimes I call this engagement and accounts for all the likes, comments, shares, and links that each media outlet gets when they publish on that topic. The data can show total engagement or average engagement per article. This data point answers the question, “When this outlet writes about this topic, does it resonate with their readership?”

The size of the bubble represents the reach of the outlet related to the existing data set. Notice below that the New York Times has the largest bubble. This means they have the highest reach compared to all the other media publications in this data set. The Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, and The Guardian follow.

Here's an example insight: The Wall Street Journal has published over 100K articles about the metaverse, which gets high engagement. The New York Times doesn't publish as much, and their engagement is low. However, they do have the highest reach among all the media outlets. Harvard Business Review is a small publication and has only published a hand full of articles about the metaverse. But their engagement is the highest.

The purpose of this analysis is to identify the most impactful media outlets topically. While we are looking at an industry topic in this example, the same analysis could be done when analyzing your own media coverage.

Identifying the top media outlets only tells half the story. The next question is, “What about the metaverse are they writing about?”

Below is a text analysis of all the metaverse media coverage. Text analysis is an automated process of extracting and translating information, insights, patterns, and trends from large volumes of unstructured text and data. It gives context to the coverage. Imagine scrolling through 15,000 articles from hundreds of outlets in an Excel document. It’s impossible to provide context or understanding without text analysis.

The cluster analysis on the left identifies the top 6 themes the media writes about related to the metaverse. On the right is a double click into the largest cluster, “Web 3.0 + Crypto + Blockchain”. The beauty of this type of analysis is that you can go deeper and deeper to uncover more insights.

So how is this data relevant to my work in PR?

This data shows impact. It gives you an understanding of media influence. We know that the NY Times is influential in politics, business, and the economy. But they may not be as influential when they write about the metaverse or other topics. If you have a product for the metaverse, the NY Times might not be a high-priority media outlet for you.

Also, when you identify the micro-topics that the media gravitate towards when writing stories, you can align your narrative, messaging, and pitches accordingly.

Integrate creators into PR

The creator economy is now a part of every industry, reshaping how brands think about their digital and PR campaigns. Even B2B and technology brands are prioritizing influencer partnerships. The creator economy will continue to grow and is expected to reach $47.2 billion over the next 10 years.

There are several ways to partner with creators in 2023–paid partnerships, earned influencer engagement, and there's also value in researching creators topically. More on that in a second.

Consumer brands have been the driving force of creator marketing, and their campaigns get a lot of attention from the media. B2B and technology companies have slowly adopted this new practice but aren’t far behind. Many clients I have worked with in the past have been partnering with creators in some capacity for almost 10 years.

It started with earned engagement, and creators (influencers and bloggers back in the day) were treated like journalists. Today, several tech companies collaborate with B2B creators through paid partnerships around industry events, product launches, and financial reporting. Many have adopted an always-on, paid, and organic creator marketing approach.

One of the biggest differences between consumer and B2B brands is topical authority. Topical authority is a data point that helps determine if a creator is a thought leader on a specific topic or industry. For example, some creators have topical authority on high-level themes like technology and digital transformation. Other influencers have more targeted topical authority on automation or AI. This is crucial for B2B tech companies.

For consumer brands who target generational audiences (Gen Z or Millinneals), it's more about channel-specific influence.

Identifying topical authority will help you understand if your buyers pay attention when a creator posts about a topic, records a YouTube video, or is interviewed on a podcast. This type of analysis can be done with one creator, 50 creators, or more.

Below is an example of an influencer profile from 2018 that highlights the topical authority of one influencer, Kirk Borne, Ph.D. . The color-coded boxes on the right show Kirk's topical authority–Data Sience, Artificial Intelligence, and Quantum Computing.

Another use case of integrating creators into PR is through analysis. Taking from the example above where we identified the top media publications writing about the metaverse and the text analysis of what they're saying. You can replicate this approach with B2B creators .

Imagine you've identified the top 100 metaverse creators. Text analysis can help you understand their topical authority with the metaverse and micro-topics driving their narrative. You can use this data to inform your owned content and other storytelling initiatives.

Innovate your storytelling

Yes, there are ways to tell brand stories without pitching the media.

Last September, the New York Times wrote about how Gen Z uses TikTok as a search engine. I needed validation, so I asked both of my daughters (18, 21) how they use TikTok, and this is what they said (almost verbatim because my 18-year-old wasn’t interested and mumbling her responses):

• Uhhh, I don’t know. I just like it, why?
• Literally, everyone uses it, dad
• Find new art projects
• Find new vegetarian recipes
• Food and lunch ideas
• Find new music and events

Take a guess who said what. ??

As a new user of TikTok myself, I follow sports-specific media handles and sports journalists. I'm a visual person. Short form visual content is easier to consume, and I've never been one to love reading a bunch of words. I don't have the attention span to read more than a paragraph before thinking about something else.

I don't use TikTok for a search engine, yet.

It's not just Gen Z or millennials that use TikTok, either. The below data from Statista show that 24.1% of active users are 35 and older. With 755M monthly users in 2022, we’re not talking about small numbers here.

But wait, we’re a B2B company, and our audience isn’t on TikTok.

Two points on this.

First, I’m not advocating launching a TikTok channel.

What I am saying is that you need to get ahead and stay ahead of market trends. The consumption of video content has increased exponentially across all industries and all markets. This has been happening for a long time. Does your PR strategy even include video?

Younger and older generations have migrated to these new apps and channels for years. They are consuming content in different formats. Their search behavior is changing. They are using other channels for discovery. Not just Google.

Forbes , Fast Company , TechCrunch , Fortune , and the Washington Post use TikTok to share the news. If audiences are migrating to new channels, and the media is migrating to new channels, you must also migrate to new channels.

And FWIW, I did a quick search in TikTok and found this:

• #devops (56.4M views)
• #devopsengineer (8.9M views)
• #infosec (121.3M views)
• #futureofwork (24.1M views)
• #digitaltransformation (13.5M views)

So there you have it. The top 3 things you should do this year to

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