For our connective3 digital PR team strategic creativity is more than just a buzzword (or two), it’s the principle upon which we approach every campaign for our clients. It is, in my belief, what has been missing from the digital PR industry, and it’s the practice that my team strive to work towards 24/7.
Before I explain what I mean by strategic creativity let me firstly explain how we came to work in this way.
PR deserves more
I started my career back in 2012, when the phrase Digital PR didn’t yet exist. A time where to non-marketers a penguin was a harmless bird, but to those who worked in SEO it meant something different entirely. Back then agencies, or good ones at least, were few and far between and the competition for good link builders was minimal.
Fast forward to 2019 and the agency landscape is overcrowded and filled with hundreds of agencies who can build decent links. To stand out, link building agencies and teams promote their creative work and their extrovert side in the hope that brands buy into their weird and wacky ways of working.
The truth however is that creativity is not enough. In order to really grow as a brand and build hundreds of links (and to build relevant links) you need a combination of planned, proactive and reactive PR running simultaneously to deliver a links ‘always on’ approach. At connective3 we call this strategic creativity – a mixture of creative and technical link building.
Working in a newly founded agency, I have been given the chance to build a PR team at connective3 starting from the ground up. From my previous experience however, one thing that I have learnt is that a team full of creatives often leads to difficulty, you need to hire a mixture of strategic thinkers and creatives to see real results.
For example, whilst a creative may think of an incredible idea which gets picked up by the media, in the background they may be neglecting some of the less sexy PR tactics. These often-forgotten tactics, such as building links to trade news, local store listings or working with client teams to promote their internal activity such as charity initiatives and recruitment, can be some of the most effective tools in a PR’s arsenal.
When you combine these two skills sets together you not only gain more links, but also a deliver a more varied and relevant set of links.
At connective3 we run this approach for all of our clients, and as someone with years of experience in PR I can confidently say that this works! The benefit of this is that whilst waiting for the creative for a larger link campaign, our clients can see hundreds of links delivered as the time between creative builds is filled with link activity.
As a team we have experience delivering this succesfully across all sectors, even in the most challenging markets. If you want to find out more, or how we can help your brand become famous head to our digital PR page or contact us at [email protected]
