For many communicators, December is not only the start of the holiday season but time to begin planning for the coming year and beyond. While budgets for 2019 are finalized or nearly so, most communications shops leave room to maneuver spending plans should the need arise during the year; afterall, budgets are thought of as living documents.
With that in mind we offered budget information in our October issue and now present several pieces of content to help you think about 2019. In addition to our annual predictions feature, which we expanded this year, our Roundtable question asks what communicators believe will be the toughest PR challenge in 2019.
The story below also provides food for thought as 2019 approaches. The firm Red Lorry Yellow Lorry provided this exclusive data to PR News.
It consists of search percentages from Google Trends for various forms of PR: “influencer marketing, media relations, content marketing, social media marketing and employee communications.”
The chart above represents U.S. searches from Jan. 2010 to Nov. 2018. Four of the terms are broken out in the next charts. A look at global searches is seen in the final chart (the U.S. chart is reproduced above it for the sake of comparison). A value of 100 is the peak popularity for a term; a value of 50 means the term is half as popular.
Typically the firm uses data like this along with other tools to advise brands and get "the mood of the market." It compares what “we’re emphasizing vs. the general sentiment out there,” says Meredith Eaton, its North America director. While she admits looking at search terms “is not an exact science,” the data “reflect general interest” in these PR disciplines.
For example, note the relatively low and steady number of searches for employee communications. Is that because communicators shy away from this critical but largely under-appreciated aspect of communications? Or is it because users search instead for related terms, such as “internal communications” or “employee engagement?” You could ask the same question about several of the other terms, such as social media marketing and influencer marketing.
But back to internal communications; its low popularity should be a warning to brands to take it more seriously, particularly since employees, through social media, have prominent voices, says Errol Jayawardene, Red Lorry’s digital head.
Several trends emerge from the data. The first is social media marketing, at least as a search term, dominates. While other articles in this edition cast doubt on the form social media will take in the future, it appears as a marketing tool, social media will not soon disappear. Also clear is that influencer marketing as a search term caught fire in mid-2015 and peaked in Sept. 2017, roughly five years after Facebook acquired Instagram for $1 billion. While growth has slowed, it remains a force, though content marketing and social media marketing dwarf it, Jayawardene says.
You can also see that at the start of 2010, terms such as media relations and social media marketing shared similar search percentages. Social media marketing now is the most popular search term and “media relations” is third and declining, having lost 45 percent of its interest.
As you can see content marketing has shown the most growth year over year. From humble beginnings, starting close to employee communications, content has overtaken employee and topped media relations. While it’s slumped a bit late in 2017 as hype around it receded, Jayawardene doesn’t see it falling off the radar anytime soon.
We asked Eaton and Jayawardene to run comparisons between U.S. search interest and those worldwide. The results are seen above and look similar to the U.S. chart. There are a few differences, though. Worldwide, social media marketing is near its all-time peak; content marketing is at an even higher interest rate globally vs. the U.S. Another difference in the worldwide chart vs. the U.S. chart is that influencer marketing has overtaken employee communications and media relations.
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