Swimming the Channels: How to stay afloat across media relations, email marketing, and social media

There might’ve been a time that public relations, analyst relations, email marketing, and social media sat in totally diffuse and siloed departments. For our purposes, this is prehistory. It’s been years since this has been even an edge case - let alone the dominant model. Anywhere you look now, a PR job description at the very least has a provision about social content creation in it, and probably ‘assistance with diverse marketing activities’ or some such.

It’s a sign that the industry might not be as stuck in its ways as we thought. A recent survey from McKinsey showed that B2B buyers are averaging ten channels along the purchasing journey. Fascinating stuff, and something much of the B2B comms. industry intuited years ago.

What hasn’t changed is the simple fact that each of these channels can be tricky to get your head around: Journalist layoffs and changes to consumer trends have upended media relations as we know it in the space of just half a decade; email marketing is declared dead almost on a weekly basis, and every time experiences a miraculous resurrection; the social media algorithms are a black box to even the most experienced gurus, and frequently change their favoured content like mad feudal kings.

Whether you’re an industry veteran or a fresh-faced newbie, these are treacherous waters to navigate. Here are a few top tips to stay afloat.

Integrated =/= Identical

Step one: make it more complicated for yourself. I’m serious. I understand that you’re on a deadline, and you might think you can copy and paste that email copy more or less verbatim into your LinkedIn post. It might be tempting to tweak a pronoun or two in your marketing email and hope some alchemical process turns it into a suitable pitch for a journalist.

Firstly, the journalist is a different type of customer to the one you’re reaching at the other end – but they’re still a customer. They need your content to do something different for them. A journalist wants a story; your mailing list wants something useful; your LinkedIn audience wants something interesting enough to stop them scrolling for six seconds.

Email marketing is less intuitive. A strong subject line and hook, but what do people want from email content? For an increasing number of people, a well-written marketing email with genuinely useful content is a brief refuge from the noise of LinkedIn or their internal Slack channels. There’s also a chance that they’re the only one at their company subscribed, so unlike an op-ed in a national newspaper or a viral LinkedIn post, you’re giving this individual something none of their colleagues have. You need to be thinking about how to deliver an insight that’ll give them an edge in their weekly meetings, and make them look good in front of their bosses.

This isn’t to say you need to reinvent the wheel every time. The central idea, research and messaging should travel across channels – in fact, inconsistent messaging is one of the number one turn-offs for potential buyers. It’s the execution that should be flexible. Find the threads that tie everything together, and treat every revision as a chance to find the hook for another channel: a stat buried halfway through your press release might be the hook for your social post, while the broader argument becomes an email subject line. Don’t make everything look the same, but make sure it’s all pulling in the same direction.

The robot’s a lifejacket; you still gotta swim

I don’t know if you know this, but AI isn’t just disrupting B2B communications — it’s quietly transforming the way our very eyeballs engage with the written word.

Now, you might’ve read that sentence and vomited all over your keyboard (I certainly did while writing it: apologies, to our CTO, I’ll need a new laptop). The AI accent has spread like the bubonic plague, and nobody is immune. However, railing against it is about as effective as donning one of those beaky masks and waving lavender around in the hope it’ll go away. It won’t, and unlike the black death, it’s got its upsides for us marketing and comms types.

Yes, even if you lean Luddite on LLM-generated content, you cannot sail the seven seas without learning how to use the tech effectively. One undisputable fact is that AI can conduct research faster than you. While you’re scanning the headlines manually every morning for that next newsjack opportunity, journalists are already drafting their copy, and influencers are drawing up their LinkedIn posts. Any tool that speeds up that hunt is invaluable – especially when it has client knowledge built-in to help show you the most relevant stories right away.

AI should start your content too, as long as it doesn’t finish it. In situations where time is of the essence – which let’s face it, is pretty much always – an LLM trained on client-specific data will be able to put together writing in a suitable format that gets to the heart of the matter in seconds. Fact-checking and tweaking for flow don’t take nearly as long.

And lastly, there’s some evidence to suggest that the “slop” you’ve been grumbling about is actually… not so bad? Research published earlier this summer from Oxford University and the AI Safety Institute showed that AI-generated fundraising material was three times more effective than experienced, professional canvassers at raising donations.

The fact is that people don’t engage with marketing content in the same way they do a novel. To put it bluntly, people aren’t thick – every day, folks in the B2B sphere are getting more familiar with the tells of AI content. Would we prefer to read something a bit more human? Maybe – then again humans make weird choices an AI wouldn’t (mixing boating, swimming and plague metaphors throughout a blog, for example). The key is that if the idea behind something is strong enough, and there’s a real human insight or narrative behind it, then it’s increasingly clear that the low-friction style your favourite LLMs have picked up can short-circuit something in even a sceptical brain.

Run a tight ship

Depending on your persuasion, you’ll have either found that last section comforting, terrifying or depressing. So how about a palate cleanser, with something boring?

That’s right, you lucky dogs, we’re rounding this out with organisational tips! Because managing your work across social, email marketing, and media relations can be an absolute nightmare. Worse still, you can’t just fire things off into the void. You have KPIs to hit, which means measuring the impact of your work and reporting it to your bosses or clients in a way that pleases them. If you’re in an agency working across channels with multiple clients with different tastes and requirements, this can start to consume your time extremely quickly.

Enough. It’s time we had a unified platform across your comms. Agentcy is the first platform that brings social, media relations, research and reporting together. Getting stats on coverage or social media engagement used to be laborious, requiring multiple platforms. What’s worse is the feeling that once you’ve fired them over to your boss or your client, they might not even read or understand what they’re looking at. Instead of just a big (or small) number, Agentcy shows you exactly how your work is landing with different audiences across channels, and offers advice on how to improve. More value for your clients or managers, and less time spent on a Friday afternoon up to your elbows in a spreadsheet.

Land, ho!

So, I’m afraid there’s no clear treasure map – no failsafe way of operating at maximum efficiency across channels. But there are strategies and platforms you can use to make your life easier, and your outputs more effective. Treat every channel on its own terms, use AI to get you moving rather than steer the whole ship, and keep the operation joined up behind the scenes.

If you’re interested in a platform that helps you do all of this and a whole lot more – including along with message building, content drafting, AI intelligence and competitor analysis – then drop us a line about getting started on Agentcy with a personalised demo HERE.