What Can PR Do for Your Business?
Public relations is a promotional strategy that uses quality content and other tactics to manage the public perception of your business. At its core, it aims to build brand awareness, reputation, and customer trust, establishing your business as an authority in your industry. In this article, we explain the benefits of PR to your company and the mistakes to avoid when launching your first PR campaign.
What are the Benefits of PR for Business?
PR is a cost-effective promotional strategy that offers unlimited results. An effective public relations campaign can generate many backlinks, and website visits, improve ranking in search engine results, position your business as a reputable partner, and boost sales. However, if you are planning your first digital PR campaign, here’s a list of benefits you can derive from public relations in your promotional mix.
Build Brand Awareness and Credibility
As the name implies, PR focuses on content or tactics that help you connect with the public and your target audience. Daily, the competition for customers’ attention is getting more challenging, with more brands entering the marketplace. It’s crucial to establish a brand connection that helps you stand out. Activities like brand storytelling that detail the emotional why behind your business drive and goals are great touchpoints to implement.
With this approach, your target audience can understand and relate emotionally to your business which helps with audience relationship and trust building. When this content gets picked up by reputable publications, whether naturally or through paid media coverage, it helps to establish your business credibility. Customers naturally look up to influencers, experts, or reputable news outlets for verifiable and credible information which serves your business and builds your reputation.
Establish the Brand as a Topical Authority
There’s much more to PR than press releases. While that might be the first option that comes to mind, other activities like guest blogging and thought leadership builds on the traffic a press release creates. However, by publishing expert insights, data, reports, maps, surveys, and blogs on specific niche topics, you gain more visibility for your business. Subsequently, consistently showing up as a reliable source for expert, fresh, and valuable information will get your business noticed, establishing it as a go-to topical authority. This will also help improve your domain ratings and generate quality backlinks from other reputable sites.
Improve Business SEO Performance
At its core; public relations aims to introduce your business to the public and trigger some conversation around your product or the business. When you deploy a PR campaign, the benefits exceed brand awareness.
Generally, brand awareness means more visibility, leading to more website visits, generating backlinks, community engagement, and authority building. These factors contribute to search engine optimization (SEO) efforts and help increase your ranking. Furthermore, when you get PR backlinks from reputable sites, they pass authority to you, boosting the website’s domain rating. Subsequently, Google will use these parameters to measure your website relevance in search engine results pages (SERPs) and assign a rating that boosts general SEO performance.
Boost Customer Acquisition and Sales
Trust and visibility are essential elements of the sales process. If your business is visible to the right audience but has poor reputation management, it will result in a low trust rating. Furthermore, the target audience wants to associate with a reputable institution, and public relations help to manage the business perception in the public eye. Investing in an effective public relations campaign in-house or outsourcing to a PR service agency will boost your customer acquisition and sales.
Attract New Investors and Partners
A CB Insights report revealed that 38% of startup founders identified the inability to raise new capital as a source of failure. However, accessing funding is essential to keep the business running, but this can be difficult if you have no brand visibility or have not built a good business profile. You can get media coverage for your business solutions through PR activities. Like press releases, whether it’s revolutionary technology or a simple lifestyle brand. This serves as a sales pitch to invite investors to join your business. Furthermore, it also helps you manage your online business reputation, which is vital to investors and partners in terms of your brand credibility.
6 Mistakes to Avoid in Implementing PR for Small Businesses
As a business owner, implementing a PR strategy offers unlimited opportunities for growth and audience building. However, many companies want fast and easy results. This leads to mistakes that cost them money and time, hurting the business growth. Here’s a list of six mistakes to avoid.
- Implementing PR for business without a well-defined strategy.
- Failing to identify your target audience.
- Setting unrealistic campaign goals, KPIs, and targets.
- Creating complex communication materials that don’t deliver value or clearly show the business’s unique offer.
- Creating campaigns that don’t align with your brand’s expertise and topical focus.
- Relying solely on seasonal hooks to get public attention.
Getting Started with PR for Small Businesses
Public relations is as important to business today as it was in the traditional marketing era. However, with the rapid growth of digital communications outlets and media, there’s an unlimited approach shared between traditional PR and digital PR strategy you can implement. Although launching your brand PR campaign can be daunting. You can achieve the best results with the right tools and team. At RPR, we help businesses generate tangible results that support business goals with expert-led public relations services. Schedule a call to learn more about how we can grow your business.