Why AI is an opportunity for PR professionals to focus more on consulting their clients while being efficient
What benefits Artificial Intelligence has that will impact communications on a strategic level
Artificial Intelligence (AI) is a widely discussed trend across many industries. Trends are evolving faster than we can adapt to those changes. C-suite leaders are discussing and testing how AI will fit into their business and will bring better results.
Communications and marketing industry is also trying to see how AI improving their business. On one side are the company’s employees and its team workflow. On the other side are brand’s consumers for whom communications agencies are creating and delivering brand’s messages.
Last month MSLGroup and Publicis.Sapient published a survey that confirms that communications professionals around the globe see an opportunity to use AI because they believe they will be more efficient. They believe AI functionalities will support several communications and HR functions.
AI won’t take away communications jobs, but only as long as communicators keep upskilling.
What AI benefits are to the communication business
Content-based on consumer behaviour. Listening tools help professionals watch out for trends important to their client’s business. Being able to receive news right-away, in real time, enables professionals to know how consumers are reacting to brands messages, what media is taking on the news story, etc. Because AI will help communicators have a more precise analysis of consumers and market insights, they will be able to create more meaningful brand messages.
Algorithms allow you to read data about consumers’ behaviour. Consumers are the most valuable group to any brand. Based on this data, PR professionals can get strong insights that they can use in building a brand’s communication strategic plan and messages. For example, Netflix uses analytics to select movies, create content, and make business decisions.
Always-on content. Real-time alerts are highly valuable for crisis communications prevention and management stages. Even more, watching conversations in real time allows PR professionals to have an always-on conversation plan or in other words, to use newsjacking, to use the popularity of a news story and/or current event in your brand’s messages to increase the brand’s marketing success. How to use newsjacking you can read in David Meerman Scott’s book Newsjacking: How to Inject Your Ideas into a Breaking News Story and Generate Tons of Media Coverage.
An old but gold case is Oreo’s tweet “You can still dunk in the dark” when the power during Super Bowl went down.
Predictive content. According to MSL and Publicis.Sapient’s survey predictive analysis is the “next communications frontier.” AI-drive analytics are based on past performance and other valuable data. PR professionals only need to analyze it, draw conclusions, make a plan, take decisions that can “transform them from reactive situation managers to proactive futurists ready to capitalize on opportunities.”
Tailoring communications. AI allows PR professionals to identify more precisely brand’s target audience across multiple platforms where consumers spend their time. This make easier communicators to know what messages at what time and where to reach the consumer groups.
AI functionalities also help to track and identify the consumer’s (or buyer’s) journey. This will help to know the consumer’s exact needs, understand why and where they look for content. This is an ability for brands to have more customized content and have two-way communications with their consumers.
Tailoring news publishing. AI can serve a great help to journalists as well. Its functionalities can save time to journalists and media outlets for customization of one news for different audience based on their preferences, location, interests, etc. The Associated Press, The New York Times, for example, already use the innovation to publish news based on data insights.
The Associated Press has “Automated Insights, which uses machine learning and natural-language processing to automate text for sports updates and quarterly earnings stories augmented with real-time trending information…”
The publisher also focuses on producing more video content with AI in different formats from live reports to short news video clips.
Automated content management. Creating and managing content in an entire communication plan is possible with AI. Not only for moderation, but also for predicting what content is needed during the consumer’s journey and when. More ideas you can definitely get from the inbound methodology.
Insightful analysis and actionable results. One thing is sure, AI will help PR professionals save time, because the functionalities will optimize their time spent on daily tasks that usually consume a lot of hours. For example, less time for monitoring news (publications, trends, hot topics, etc.) — everything will come to you as a summary and feed with news/ publications. The algorithm also will evaluate the sentiment of the story/publication; it will measure the volume, the type of media, reach, engagement and moreover, it could compare the results to competitors’ results. Having that, PR pros will have more time to analyze the reports and the insights, to think of improving the communication approach, to build better strategies, to think of more creative approaches for positioning their client’s brands.
Even more, having more accurate insights, it will give more actionable results (an opportunity to plan the next steps) and this will lead to more effectiveness for the brand. According to MSL and Publicis.Sapient’s survey to get more effective and actionable results from a communication campaign, the process has to happen in two ways. “Listening” to engage a larger set of data including external information, which might be missed with a simple research. PR professionals can focus more on the results that would have more business impact for their clients.
“As listening tools allow for a more precise understanding of what is happening in the marketplace, marketers will be better able to quickly and appropriately adjust messages. They’ll identify well performing platforms and content assets and redirect investments to leverage those that deliver.”
More time for consulting clients. AI tools have other benefits for time-saving. For example, preparing press releases, news stories, web content, etc. Here we talk about text written based on data and insights you get from the analysis. This way, PR pros will have more time to think more on the strategic communications, on the business side of their work and how it impacts the overall brand or company’s performance and positioning. PR professionals can become stronger counsellors and their client’s best advisors.
In this sense, AI presents the opportunity to upgrade the quality of the profession by shifting time to more strategic functions.
What AI cannot do in PR
Of course, there are a few things that AI cannot do for PR business. Public relations is about people’s relations — clients, relations with media, influencers, stakeholders, government officials, consumers, etc. It is about answering people’s needs with the help of communication messages and other forms of content. That’s why emotions are an important part. PR professionals know that using emotional content is a win-approach for brands because it connects on a deeper level with consumers.
As artificial intelligence evolves, we can expect that it will begin to learn empathy and sympathy, but it won’t be able to gain the emotional intelligence of a human.
PR practitioners are known for being great storytellers because we use empathy, emotions and combine it with creativity. Of course, AI will not replace humans; it will augment human roles and make them smarter and more agile.
In the end, I want to share a list with AI tools for communications and marketing professionals that I found very useful. The tools can help you organize, plan and create communication campaigns and measure performance.
