R Public Relations Firm
12 Reasons You Should Invest in Public Relations
Recent research reveals that 60% of marketing executives believe digital marketing and public relations (PR) will work together more closely in the future. As a business owner, this is the best time to Invest in Public Relations as it is 90% more successful in influencing consumers than advertising. Still not convinced? Read on to find out how to boost business growth with PR activities.
Why Should Businesses Invest in Public Relations?
Besides the apparent benefits of visibility and brand reputation management, investing in PR offers other advantages. Here's a list of 12 reasons why investing in PR is a good decision.
1. Boost Brand SEO
In today's digital business world, search engine optimization is a fuel that drives long-term growth. Research shows that 68% of online experiences begin with a search engine, while SEO leads have a 14.6% close rate. Good PR strategies combined with content marketing can create buzz for your business online. This content will drive traffic to your website and generate quality backlinks from reputable websites, contributing to better SEO performance and ranking on search engine results pages.
2. Build Brand Awareness
At its core, investing in PR helps build brand awareness. Combining good PR strategies like press releases, newsjacking, and guest blogging will help you establish a digital footprint. Subsequently, this content will help prospects understand your brand, get visibility from reshares, and start building connections with your brand.
3. Humanize Your Brand
With so much vying for consumers' attention, it's easy to lose connection with your target audience. Since most communication is online, you cannot easily measure body language, which creates its own challenge. Using a powerful PR technique like storytelling, you can engage with your audience more personally. Rather than positioning as another brand, PR storytelling helps you show a more human side of your brand. For example, showing empathy by supporting issues relevant to your audience that also align with your brand's value.
4. Implement Cost-effective Strategy
Digital PR campaigns have significant elements of organic marketing, like content marketing and link building. Generally, these methods are less expensive than paid advertising. For example, content marketing costs 6x less than advertising, freeing up your budget for other priorities.
5. Foster Brand Collaboration and Endorsement
Collaboration and endorsement are crucial elements for business growth. However, companies will only work with brands with good reputations. Creating PR campaigns that show your brand favorably in the media can help build your reputation and awareness. It also helps to establish your brand as an authority in the industry.
6. Hire and Retain Top Talent
Recent LinkedIn research revealed that 72% of recruiters agreed that the employer brand significantly impacts hiring top talent. With employee review sites like Glassdoor and other social media platforms, prospective employees can quickly research your brand's value and employee development programs. Investing in PR can be the key to making your brand attractive to the right talent pool.
7. Maximize Your Advertising Strategy
Relying on paid advertising strategies isn't sustainable for a small business with a limited budget. However, including PR in your marketing mix helps you to stretch that budget. PR strategies like gaining earned media, blogging, link building, and thought leadership drives traffic long-term, which is excellent since ads only generate traffic when they are active.
8. Manage the Brand's Reputation
A study by MIT found that false news travels 6x faster than truth. In a world with a 24-hour news cycle, you must constantly monitor and protect your brand reputation. By investing in PR you can more easily monitor brand mentions, communicate company news and quickly respond to false news and crises before they escalate.
9. Attract Quality Leads
Quality lead generation depends on brand awareness and your target audience’s willingness to believe how your products or services will benefit them. Prospects are more likely to work with you if they see your brand as trustworthy. Investing in PR helps your brand go a long way toward achieving this.
10. Gain High-Quality Backlinks
The quality of backlinks you generate is vital to improving SEO performance. PR integrates strategies like guest blogging and social media to get original links from reputable platforms which will help the target audience find you easily.
11. Establish Brand Authority
A survey by Nielsen revealed that 85% of consumers look to content from experts before they make a purchasing decision. Investing in PR helps you build authority and position as an expert by creating thought leadership content and reports. Subsequently, customers will rely on your brand for information which will boost visibility and make the sales process easier.
12. Increase Customer Lifetime Value
Another benefit of investing in PR is improving brand loyalty. When the target audience trusts your brand, they are more likely to purchase your products the first time. But, you need to keep them repeatedly purchasing from you, and a key way to do that is by building a good relationship with them through PR. For example, keeping them up to date with news and information that’s relevant to them.
Next Steps to Invest in Public Relations
The benefits of public relations in business growth are unlimited. You can improve customer loyalty, build trust, boost SEO performance, save advertising costs, and get reputable backlinks. All of these will help to increase sales and growth and help you create a formidable brand. However, to invest in Public Relations, you need the right expertise. At RPR, we help businesses generate tangible results that support business goals with expert-led public relations services. Schedule a call with our professional PR consultants to get started.
7 Tips for Making Good Public Relations Even Better
If you’re interested in leveling up your public relations (PR) efforts, we bring you some tried and true strategies. From humor-infused campaigns that tickle the funny bone to data-driven emotion pairing, strategic distribution, and gamification, here’s how to make your good public relations campaign even better.
1. Add Humor, But Be Creative
Likely, the last thing your target audience wants to see is another PR campaign with a man in a suit talking about your product or event. Integrating humor in your PR campaign content helps to place your audience in a relaxed mode. An Oracle "2022 Happiness Report" revealed that 90% of people are more likely to remember funny ads, and 72% would choose a brand that uses humor over the competition. Although humor can be tricky, the rule of thumb is always to understand your target audience and the topic's sensitivity. Infuse some humor creatively into your content so it delivers the expected results without throwing your customers off your brand. For example, Unilever Dollar Shave infused UK humor to target the UK audience in preparation for its launch.
2. Pair Data with Emotions
Data drives the most effective results, but most businesses aren't taking full advantage of this in their PR campaigns. To improve your PR activities, you must understand the type of content and topics most relevant to the target audience and the platforms in which they engage. With PR tools such as BuzzSumo content analysis reports, you can analyze how your audience reacts to specific discussions on Facebook. This information will help you decide on the best angle for good public relations. However, it's best to consistently create content that touches on relevant issues that align with your brand's values and marketing goals.
3. Distribute Strategically
One common mistake among business owners is confusing reach with effective results. Although the platform's audience size matters, PR content is usually more effective if it’s on a platform that is more relevant to your target audience. For example, Instagram and TikTok are better distribution channels to deliver content for a younger demographic, while LinkedIn is best if you are targeting a business-to-business audience. This approach works in media relations as well. For example, learning a journalist's niche and identifying relevant distribution channels, and adapting your content to fit will generate better publicity for you.
4. Integrate PR tools
Companies must be one step ahead of the competition to achieve good public relations results today. Integrating relevant PR tools will help you gain insights, distribute effectively, organize PR activities, and track results. For example, you can set up Google Alerts to monitor mentions of specific keywords like your brand names or a cause you support. Other PR tools like BuzzSumo and HARO will help improve your campaign efforts.
5. Include Gamification for Better Engagement
Competition is a great way to boost engagement and visibility for your PR campaigns. By including elements of competition like lotteries, raffles, and others, you will give customers more reasons to participate. It also triggers a natural emotional response that helps them recall your brand long after the campaign ends. While most topics might not look "game worthy," you can always add creative PR strategies to make it fun.
For example, a PR campaign about a social issue can ask the target audience to create a 1-minute video about how the issue affects them or suggest a solution. After the campaign ends, the top pitches receive a grant or an opportunity to join your team in addressing the issue. Always remember that the goal of public relations is to first connect with the public. Gamification offers that unique opportunity to do this in a fun manner. The Nike + Run Club app campaign is an excellent example of using gamification in marketing.
6. Integrate Testimonials to Build Trust
Storytelling is an effective PR campaign strategy, and there’s no better way to tell authentic stories than through testimonials. This approach shows your target audience that you understand their problems and there's a solution. Customers trust brands with excellent social proof; if you want to improve PR results, you must find ways to build trust. Testimonials can come in the form of brand stories, customer success stories, employee stories, and more. For example, you can have a customer speak in a video instead of hiring a model to read a script.
7. Partner with a Professional PR Firm
Most times, the challenges with making good public relations even better start with a lack of expertise. For example, not only do you need scroll-stopping content but also technical knowledge of SEO and other relevant non-traditional PR strategies. It’s hard to find that diverse expertise in-house without a full PR team. However, partnering with an agency that offers full-service PR can save cost and time, and help you put your best foot forward. Their wealth of knowledge from working with brands like yours will help them implement effective public relations strategies that boost performance fast.
Get Started Making Good Public Relations Even Better
You need more than a generic approach to create the best PR campaigns and maintain your competitive advantage. Including humor, creativity, integrating PR tools, and partnering with professionals can boost your PR campaign performance. At RPR, we help businesses generate tangible results that support business goals with expert-led public relations services.
Schedule a call with our professional PR consultants today!
Pros and Cons Of Hiring an External PR Agency Versus In-house
Should you hire an external public relations (PR) agency or work with an in-house PR team to handle your public relations? This is the question many business owners need to answer before promoting their brand. As someone who has worked with an in-house team and is currently running a PR agency, I understand both sides of the in-house vs. external PR debate. Each choice has pros and cons. Let's get to the details.
In-house PR Team Pros
Having an in-house PR team as a critical member of your Marketing Department has some advantages over an external PR agency, including the following.
1. Better Brand Familiarity
An in-house PR team knows your brand inside and out since they are part of your organization. They have a deep knowledge of your brand messaging, business goals, customers, and competitors. Although a good external PR agency will learn about your brand, establishing this relationship can take some time.
2. Ease of Contact
Reaching out to any member of your in-house team will take less time than an agency. You’re probably in the same physical workspace, and even if you work remotely, they are available only to you since they are most likely full-time employees. For instance, you can have an impromptu conversation at someone's desk or set up a quick call without scheduling. With an agency, you'll likely communicate via email or phone and book a meeting.
3. Project Dedication
Reputable PR agencies work with many clients, so you might not get the level of attention you want from your campaign manager. However, some agencies like RPR Firm treat every customer like they're the only client they are working with.
In-house PR Team Cons
There are also downsides to hiring an in-house PR team, especially if you’re a startup or lack the financial resources to make this huge financial investment.
1. Need for Ongoing Talent Management
Having an in-house PR team means you must always find, hire, and train new team members. What’s more, hiring a team can be much more expensive than partnering with an agency because of the need for insurance, employee benefits, technology, and other perks. Also, the ever-changing public relations landscape requires many skill sets, like media outreach, content creation, reputation management, etc. You can even break down these smaller categories and specializations. This is why you can’t rely on one person to handle everything; it truly takes a team.
2. Investment in PR Tools & Technology
Whether in-house or an external PR agency, every public relations professional needs tools to communicate, connect with customers, and monitor their campaign progress. Some PR tools, such as Prowly, Meltwater, Muck Rack, Brandwatch, and others, are quite expensive. However, since a typical external PR agency has invested in these tools already, you don't have to shell out extra cash. Besides, having a tool is one thing; knowing how to use these tools to extract valuable insights is a different ball game entirely.
Pros of Hiring an External PR Agency
Hiring an external PR agency comes with many advantages, and we highlight some of them below.
1. Teamwork and Experience
Most external PR agencies have likely seen what works and what doesn't work for a brand like yours from working with different clients across multiple industries. A good external PR team will stay updated with industry trends and the latest technologies to maximize your campaign’s effectiveness. Moreover, an external PR agency will have professionals with different areas of expertise that can unlock unconventional PR opportunities of which you may not be aware. As a result, you can easily change your campaign direction or goals without spending months hiring or training someone.
2. Better Equipped with PR Tools
You need reliable PR tools to make informed decisions about your customers, competitors, and investors. Most premium tools are expensive, but external PR agencies typically use them on a larger scale for daily operations. Hiring an external PR team means you don’t have to incur unnecessary costs on software purchases.
3. Cost-Effective
Hiring, training, and keeping an in-house PR team requires time and money. Although the cost of partnering with an external PR agency depends on your needs, hiring an agency could save you a great deal. Also, many PR agencies offer a la carte services, so you’re not tied to a monthly retainer allowing even more flexibility and cost savings.
Cons of Hiring an External PR Agency
Partnering with an external PR agency comes with downsides as well, including the following.
1. Location
Unlike an in-house team, an external PR agency might not be in the same location as your business. Choosing meeting times can be challenging with different time zones or locations, leading to a lag in communication. However, a good agency has processes to make any time differences work.
2. Simultaneous Work with Multiple Clients
This can be a plus or a minus, depending on the agency. A reputable PR agency will make you feel like you're their only client. Unfortunately, not every agency prioritizes maintaining an outstanding client relationship as we do at RPR Firm. If you're currently working with an agency that doesn’t prioritize your business, it might be time to find a new one.
3. Less Control
External PR agencies tend to work best with some level of freedom, but that doesn’t mean you won't have any input on your PR campaign strategies. However, you need to trust the agency to use its best PR tactics for your campaign. Although, you'll usually be required to approve strategies and other campaign decisions. However, your partnership with a PR agency gives them some liberty to make choices for your business from research and conversations with you and your customers.
If you want complete control over your PR campaign, an in-house team might work better for you, but a responsible external PR agency won't just make decisions and leave you in the dark. They'll have thorough reporting processes to keep you informed and keep themselves accountable. Some agencies might even have their own data reporting platforms with real-time data for their clients.
Should You Hire In-house vs. an External PR Agency?
At the end of the day, the decision to hire an in-house or an external PR agency is dependent on your specific business needs. What works for one brand may not work for the other. A good compromise may be to complement your in-house team effort by collaborating with an experienced external agency.
How To Spread Enthusiasm With PR In An Age Of Crises
In a world filled with global challenges—from hurricanes to war, mass layoffs to economic recession, it’s easy to fall into fear and pessimism. So how do you spread enthusiasm with PR in times of crisis without doing more harm to your brand than good? In this article, we explore different tips that can help.
Tips for Spreading Enthusiasm with PR
It’s easy to be overwhelmed by negative occurrences around us, and it takes a smart brand to spread positivity amid challenges. Here are four tips to spread enthusiasm during crises:
1. Be Attentive to Your Customers
The best strategy is to talk less and listen more during crises. You can gather information about how the problem affects your target audience, possible solutions, and how you can help. Start conversations with your target audience about the effect of the crisis on their daily life via your social media. Also, monitor platforms like blogs, social media pages, forums, and others that talk about the impact of the situations and identify critical issues your brand can solve. Remember, people just want to feel heard, seen, and understood; genuine listening goes a long way.
2. Showcase Resilience through Storytelling
In times of crisis, people want positivity, inspiration, and affirmation that they can overcome any obstacle. They also want to feel understood, and the best way to connect with them is by showing your customers that you understand their pain. Creating a PR campaign highlighting stories of how your brand, an employee, or a client remained resilient in times of crisis and turned things around sets the stage for a conversation. Moreover, it inspires your customers to stay positive, triggering a ripple effect that can spread to larger circles. In turn, you might ask your customers to share their stories. This promotes user-generated content that helps build brand awareness as well.
3. Encourage the Feeling of Togetherness
The most effective PR tactics leverage genuine human connection. Spreading enthusiasm with PR works if customers feel understood and know you stand with them. Identify a critical issue in your local area that affects customers.
Once you have that figured out, you can create campaigns that trigger conversation around "this is the problem, how it affects us, and what we can do to fix it." From this, you can quickly get people to support whatever relief drive you initiate. It's easier to spread enthusiasm when your target audience is on board. People want to support a cause that helps relieve the stress of a crisis, and generating awareness and response is more seamless when we all work together.
4. Create Campaigns Around Brand Values to Show Positivity in the World
Beyond creating PR activities that showcase togetherness and help you listen or drive resilience, your campaign must align with your brand values. Every PR campaign must connect back to what your brand stands for and not just for the traffic or me too PR stunt. Initiating relief campaigns, online and print media content, or any other PR crisis strategy must showcase your brand values.
Infusing your brand values helps consumers connect with you faster and build loyalty. It lets you show that you aren't an "on paper" brand; you match your values with action. In a world riddled with deceit and crises, upholding your brand values helps to spread optimism and enthusiasm for a better future.
Examples of Powerful PR Campaigns that Spread Enthusiasm During Crisis
Many brands have supported consumers and/or upheld their brand values in times of crisis. If you plan to spread enthusiasm with PR, here’s some inspiration for your next campaign.
1. Airbnb for Ukraine
To support victims of the Ukraine invasion, Airbnb started a campaign that offered short-term housing to refugees. This campaign triggered enormous support with individuals booking Airbnb and canceling at the last minute without requesting a refund. This method serves as a donation drive to provide shelter for refugees.
2. Apple, “Creativity Goes On” Campaign
In the heart of the 2020 Covid-19 pandemic, Apple created a PR campaign called "Creativity Goes On" to remind us to remain hopeful. The campaign inspired joy during the lockdown with Apple sharing tools and tips consumers need to stay connected with family. It also showcased creative projects and an educational learning series to help people who may be overwhelmed by the pandemic. The campaign was effective because it created a feeling of being heard and provided solutions to help consumers navigate the trying time.
3. Tescos #EveryLittleHelps
During the lockdown in 2020, many public businesses had to shut down completely, especially in the hospitality industry. So when bars, pubs, and restaurants began opening in mid-April, Tesco did something remarkable. They created a campaign that urged customers to shop from their local pubs instead of Tesco. This campaign showed Tesco's commitment to local communities, thus showcasing its brand values.
Partner with a Professional PR Agency
There will always be crises, but we can amplify the positive instead of the negative. Using PR, companies can create positive messages that build consumer connection and loyalty and showcase brand values. When implemented strategically, you will establish your brand as a reputable entity that listens, understands, and takes action to support its customers at every turn. At RPR, we help brands create effective public relations strategies that boost brand awareness and revenue growth and spread enthusiasm. Book a free consultation to explore our public relations services today.