The PR Article – Salvation or Threat for Your Business?

This article comes from the blog archive – figures and examples reflect the year it was published.

The question is often how to get your content, brand or product onto other websites. If we set aside display and PPC formats and talk purely about content marketing, the first thing that often springs to mind is the PR article. So is that the way to go?

From the point of view of most publishers and agencies, a PR article is an advertising format containing text defined (or approved) by the client, along with other elements – pictures, videos, infographics and so on – which the publisher places on its own website in order to acquaint its readers and visitors with the client’s services and products.

It seems like a great thing. At first glance, at least. But like everything in this world, it has its bright and dark sides.

The Advantages of a PR Article Are Obvious:

• You have full control over the content.
• You place links to your website directly in the article.
• You usually book a specific publication date, so you can time the PR article to coincide with some special promotion.

What Nobody Talks About

However, all the advantages of PR articles can very easily turn into disadvantages. Not to mention other problems.

• You don’t have enough information about the target group of the medium in question. So you may not hit its audience’s taste. And all too often you won’t. The result is an uninteresting chunk of text that, apart from you, only a handful of readers on that website will ever read.
• If you place links to your website in articles in order to build backlinks, fine. If you do it with the aim of directly and immediately increasing your traffic and, heaven forbid, scoring the odd conversion, you’re probably in for a disappointment.
• A common problem is placing the same article on different websites. That really is extremely unfortunate. Different media have different readers and a different language in which they speak to them. Your one-size-fits-all text will therefore stick out like a sore thumb.
• Neither readers nor editorial teams like PR articles. In view of the above, publishers often treat PR articles a little like an unloved stepchild. True, they are one of the things publishers sell, and it ought to be in their interest to keep the client satisfied. But paradoxically, what’s going on here is a fierce inner struggle. Often the effort to please the reader and not lose them – for the sake of sustainable traffic as a valuable commodity – outweighs any pro-client interest. And so, after its first day online, your PR article sinks deep into the archive and into oblivion, and you can’t for a moment count on it ever resurfacing in a list of recommended or related texts.

How to Get Out of This

It might seem that I’m running PR articles down. That’s not true. It’s just that years of practice have taught me that things can be done, or they can be done well. And when you’re already willing to invest a not inconsiderable amount of money in promotion through content and its distribution, it makes sense, in my view, not to opt for the path of least resistance, but to grit your teeth and put in that little bit more work to get to the result you want. As I see it, there are currently three routes that work.

Native PR – You’ve probably come across this term already. It’s become a bit of a buzzword and the hit of the past year at least. Unlike the classic PR article model described above, this is advertising copy prepared directly by the editorial team of the publisher where the article is to be placed. The advantages are obvious – the editor knows how to write the text in a way that engages their own audience and thus achieve a far better reach. What’s more, with material like this the mental barrier of it being a text that doesn’t belong to us comes down, and so the chance of it being included in the standard content life cycle on the target website goes up. The only problem this format brings with it is capacity. Speaking from experience, I can say that the volume of material today’s editorial teams have to produce is such that the room left for the creative work of native PR pieces really is minimal, if there is any at all.

If this is exactly the problem you’ve run into, you can stick with classic PR articles. Yes, you can do the editorial team’s work for them, but try to ask for a consultation at the very least and always tailor the article to the medium in question. It’s fiddly work, but you’ll achieve a greater effect, and the medium itself will usually be a good deal friendlier towards content you supply in this way.

And the third way of dealing with this issue is investing in your own content – your own blog or magazine – and working on distributing links to individual websites through network solutions. In this case you can be sure that you have the content under control and that you’re always bringing readers who are interested in the subject straight to you.