‘Programmatic’ is the marriage of two words: programme and automatic. It means to use or relate to computer games or software. Once you place ‘PR’ behind it, the result is essentially using software to execute PR.
Similarly, to all other industries, public relations is evolving with the growing influence of artificial intelligence. It has allowed us to be more specific in the audiences we target. It collides the worlds of paid and earned media together.
Programmatic PR uses programmatic audience targeting technology (websites, social media) to push different content formats (articles, infographics etc) towards relevant audiences in specific locations.
What is programmatic PR?
Programmatic PR uses the target audience’s preferred platforms to push content and messaging. The content is positioned and tailored for the specific platform to ensure it connects to audiences effectively.
Just like websites, social media has become a part of our everyday lives, PR agencies have recognised that social platforms are a powerful way to gain earned media and to organically reach thousands of your target audience.
Advantages of programmatic PR
There are many advantages to the adoption of programmatic PR, as well as simply gaining coverage for a brand. One key advantage is the ability to be able to link to the brand’s website, its social media channels or various other types of digital content to encourage the audience to visit them.
Whilst also using these as lead generation tools, these clicks can be tracked and used to inform future PR and marketing efforts. In turn, providing you with the opportunity to continue a conversation with them and establish effective and efficient brand awareness and lead generation process.
Whilst PR is used to enhance and build reputations, programmatic PR does this but has various additional SEO benefits including more traffic to the linked website and a higher chance of being discovered by your target audience.
This synergy of links and content can help establish invaluable data and analytics, providing insight into your audience’s behaviour, thought process and needs – helping to determine how to better connect with them.
The future of programmatic PR
The Covid-19 pandemic has ensured that we haven’t been able to network in person and instead we’ve had to completely rely on digital outreach to build connections with our audience more than ever.
A 2015 study by Oxford University and Deloitte reported that by 2035, around one-third of marketing jobs will be undertaken by robots. Due to the important role that human judgement and consultancy have within public relations, some may argue that PR is protected from this extinction, especially with the adoption of programmatic PR and/or programmatic ads.
Find out more about our PR services or contact us for more information on how programmatic PR could be the future.
