Increasing ROI by Aligning PR and Marketing

With COVID variants lingering and uncertainty about future variants, some industry events will either be virtual, hybrid or have low attendance. Marketing departments need new ways to connect and educate prospects and build a qualified pipeline. Creating strategic alignment between your PR and content marketing goals can increase ROI from both while filling the gap in-person events have left.

Sonia Awan, principal, Outbloom PR
The Webinar is Webi-no
A quick look at your favorite search engine for webinar fatigue lists stories of people Zoomed OutTM and suggestions for combating webinar fatigue.

Although you might not find statistics to support this, anecdotal evidence and conversations among marketers indicate that some people are tired of webinars.

Research from April 2021 focused the idea of webinar fatigue less around marketing and more about meetings. Despite this, several key takeaways still apply to corporate marketing webinars:

No best practices for interactions exist
Promoting group interactions
Breaking longer content into shorter chunks

Karen Walsh, Founder/CEO, Allegro Solutions

Although many marketers are using interactive polls or engaging in shorter webinars, they still find people aren’t registering for webinars as they did pre-pandemic.

Often, a well-crafted PR strategy can include online interviews or podcasts where your internal people are viewed as experts on a topic that maps to your product or services. They already have a built-in viewer or listenership.
The Main Event is… Virtually Non-existent
Even with vaccines, lingering fallout from Covid presents problems for in-person events. Looking ahead, if your marketing strategy revolves around events, you’re going to need to find a suitable replacement.

That fancy booth and swag strategy may no longer be relevant.