PR professionals often feel their ROI measurement is weaker than other marketing channels. However, many business expenses (like boardroom TVs) face no ROI scrutiny. A well-measured PR campaign that tracks digital impact can demonstrate value more effectively than an average advertising campaign, challenging this internal bias.

Trust is now built through credible personalities, not just branded content. Channels like podcasts and newsletters succeed because they are personality-driven. HubSpot's CEO advises businesses to identify and empower internal figures with high authority to represent the brand.

Stop viewing brand as a top-of-funnel activity. For elite companies, brand isn't a precursor to selling; it is the selling. It creates inbound demand that bypasses traditional conversion tactics like search ads or affiliate marketing, making it the most powerful and sustainable growth engine.

As AI devalues simple clicks, marketing focus must shift to building a strong brand that algorithms recognize as authoritative. High-quality, well-structured owned content (like blogs and reports) becomes more critical for discoverability than traditional performance marketing tactics.

AI models heavily weigh earned media from credible publications when determining brand authority. With 61% of AI brand mentions coming from editorial sources, PR is no longer just a brand-building exercise but a critical technical lever for GEO, directly influencing discoverability.

Google's AI-driven search increasingly values brand authority, making traditional silos that separate brand/PR (reputation) from digital/SEO (traffic) obsolete. To succeed, companies must adopt an integrated strategy where content, PR, search, and social work together to build a unified brand presence across the entire customer funnel.

Instead of paying a continuous high retainer for PR, brands should deploy it in focused 'sprints' around specific story-worthy moments. This includes new product launches, funding announcements, or major partnerships, maximizing impact and ROI for the brand.

Counterintuitively, dedicating budget to campaigns optimized for engagements, follows, and shares can be a powerful brand-building tool. This approach reaches more people less expensively than conversion campaigns, building an audience and 'searing memories' that lead to future demand, complementing direct response efforts.

The traditional "big idea" campaign model is broken. A modern approach starts in the mid-funnel with organic social content. Content that resonates with the algorithm and audience on merit then becomes the brief for both lower-funnel performance ads and upper-funnel brand campaigns, de-risking the entire process.