Insights

How to Align Event Marketing, PR and Communications Across Channels

By Michael Legat, sr. account director

For much of my marketing career, I worked at agencies and organizations where the marketing communications team and PR office sat on opposite sides of the building. (I’d say about 75% of my interactions with PR were small talk around a cake for the monthly birthday celebrations.) When building marketing strategies, press releases — if they were involved at all — were included as placeholders in the strategic planning, dropped on the website and sent to a list of emails as available. The rest of the channel marketing basically pretended that PR didn’t exist. 

In a few other instances however, an account would insist that the press release is now the official campaign message platform, and everything that follows must adhere to its language and serve as an extension of that announcement, regardless of audience or objective. 

In the most superficial sense, this can pass off as “alignment,” but even the most charitable assessment would recognize the imbalance. 

Thankfully, at mdg, I’ve found that cross-channel marketing alignment for our association and event clients isn’t just lip service, and there is no public relations island off the coast here. Better still, we operate strategically and efficiently, avoiding the trappings of either overthinking the processes involved or underthinking the distinctions of each channel. 

Getting the Ownership Right First

Before fixing alignment, it helps to be precise about what each function is responsible for, because a lot of “misalignment” is really just unclear ownership.

  • Event marketing covers everything driving registration, attendance, exhibitor and sponsorship sales, and on-site engagement — email, paid media, social, the website, sponsor materials … and public relations.
  • Public relations, working within the framework of event marketing, covers earned visibility: press releases, media relationships, spokesperson positioning and third-party coverage.
  • Communications strategy is the layer above both — the association’s overall narrative, messaging hierarchy and audience segmentation that event marketing and PR should both be pulling from, rather than each inventing their own.

For all of these to align in a larger channel strategy, the solution isn’t as simple copy and paste a central message across the entire marketing plan, nor is it so complex that you need a network of corkboards, pushpins and yarn to make it all connect.

What it does require is a master calendar and central narrative that synchronizes messaging so each channel is hitting the same notes but playing in the style and key that best fits its respective strengths.

Even with this unified framework, here’s where I’ve seen the tendency to overthink or underthink how to put things in practice.

The Overthink Approach to Cross-Channel Alignment for Public Relations 

Where things can get messy is when organizations and associations create a massive web of processes and stakeholders under the guise of alignment. This can take the form of:

  • Lengthy and cumbersome content review and approval chains
  • Communications calendars that descend into chaos if a single date slips or shifts
  • Developing an impossibly rigid messaging framework that disregards the distinct voices that work best with unique audiences and platforms

When unnecessary hierarchies are established, creativity takes a back seat to uniformity, and you find yourself with a library full of content that tries to say everything and instead tells your audience nothing of interest.

The Underthink Approach to Cross-Channel Alignment

On the other end of the spectrum, the “live and let live” approach for channel marketing can create an illusion that your messaging is fine. Each email and social post on its own might perform as expected, but if your PR spokesperson gets an inquiry prompted by a separate communications campaign and isn’t prepared to respond, that disconnect becomes quickly obvious. Those separate calendars, siloed statuses and disparate reporting dashboards mean any correlation between marketing support and press mentions are guesswork.

And Now the Thinking Person’s Approach 

For marketing, PR and communications strategies to really hum, all three functions must embrace a shared foundation:

  1. A universal calendar. Coordinating and scheduling messaging together in a single calendar is likely the single most important thing we can do to ensure cross-department alignment and have both a consistent story and response to inquiries.
  2. A universal narrative. Not to be confused with universal copy — each channel has a different way of articulating what’s new and important about the event, but it must all flow from a central story.
  3. A universal measurement framework. Reach, share of voice, engagement and, of course, registration and sales are key success metrics for all communications, so why avoid sharing goals and data as a broad organizational reporting structure?

If done intentionally, centralizing these will be easier than having all three departments duplicate work and struggle alone. And the results can speak for themselves: PR announcements and event marketing pushes land in a sequence that reinforce rather than compete with each other. Journalists and attendee and exhibitor prospects can all identify this year’s theme and key updates, and we can answer questions from any without having to find a translator.

If your organization’s event marketing, PR and communications strategies are currently living in three different documents in three different offices, that’s usually the first thing worth fixing. An aligned team will not only make those office birthday cake conversations less awkward, but it will also make your event story cohesive and assured.