R Public Relations Firm
Benefits of Having a Social Impact Strategy in PR
In today's business landscape, building solid relationships with customers, partners, investors, and other stakeholders is crucial for success. A social impact strategy can help your company achieve this by nurturing relationships with your community and other businesses. In this article, we discuss seven benefits of social impact strategy on your company’s public relations (PR) campaign.
What is a Social Impact Strategy?
Social impact is a focus in business that involves taking on socially responsible activities to serve communities and impact the world. Companies that prioritize social impact do so by contributing to solving a local or global challenge. This could be standing for a cause or addressing pressing needs like environmental issues, gender issues, educational gaps, refugee rights, social justice, etc.
While many brands understand the importance of social impact on business, it’s also critical to learn how to communicate their steps and efforts to improve the world. When perfectly executed, a social impact strategy can benefit your business in a number of ways.
7 Benefits of Social Impact Strategy in PR
PR is primarily about improving your appeal to the public, and demonstrating a positive social impact can help you do that. Here are seven ways your PR strategy can benefit from a robust social impact strategy.
1. Helps Customers Identify With Your Values
Business isn’t just about what you sell but also what you stand for. A 2019 survey showed that 77% of customers love brands that share their values and make efforts to champion them. Thus, a social impact strategy benefits PR because it helps customers identify with your company’s mission. One company that uses a social impact strategy effectively for its PR is Nike. The sports company is known for supporting social causes and showcasing athletes and cultures globally. The brand prioritizes consumers in its storytelling, utilizing Instagram for inspirational images and videos, Facebook for larger campaigns, and Twitter for addressing concerns. Nike's campaigns encouraged social distancing during the pandemic, supported the BLM movement, and empowered girls to pursue their dreams. Their campaigns inspire people to have courage and strive for greatness.
2. Builds Customers’ Trust
Consumers are more skeptical than ever when it comes to marketing ploys from brands trying to earn their business. However, they do tend to be more likely to put their trust in companies that align with their own values. Your social impact strategy allows you to ‘put your money where your mouth is,’ so to speak, through PR published in the media showing the good your company has done. This is earned media, not paid advertising, and is much more credible to consumers, which makes it easier to earn their trust and loyalty.
3. Harnesses the Power of Your Positive Influence
Knowing how your company inspires change in the world can help you fine-tune your branding messages. PR is not only about knowing what to say to the public but also how and when to say it. Your social impact strategy is the means by which you determine this as it’s your plan to affect change—the who, what, when, where, how, and why. With these things identified, it’s much easier to craft effective PR.
4. Attracts Investment Opportunities
Showcasing your company’s efforts to improve the world will help get investors’ attention. The positive recognition will also encourage them to invest in your company and feel confident doing so.
5. Helps Retain the Best Talent
Employees are the backbone of every successful company, and just like consumers, they are more attracted to companies that share their values. A company that enacts change will likely attract top employees who share its values and vision. Having employees that support your social impact will improve their commitment and productivity within your organization.
6. Increases Revenue
While PR is more of a top-of-the-funnel activity than marketing, its ultimate goal is to attract potential customers. However, being able to publicize your social impact means customers who align with your values will be more willing to buy from you.
7. Brand Reputation
One of the primary advantages of being a socially conscious company is that it increases your brand awareness and improves your reputation. Social impact is about helping others and contributing to a better world, so this should be the core of your strategy. If your company cares about making a social impact, you can create a meaningful change that improves other people’s lives. Eventually, creating a visible change will enhance your media recognition and make people see you positively.
Hire a PR Expert
Brands need to cultivate a strong relationship between their social impact strategy and PR strategy, but you’ll require a unique skill set to do this well. It would help if you had PR professionals who could effectively communicate your social impact strategies in a newsworthy way rather than a sales pitch.
At RPR Firm, we have a team of PR professionals with the skills and experience to help you benefit from your social impact by communicating the work you’re doing. Our company has more than 11 years of experience helping brands further their mission to make a change. Schedule a free consultation with us today.
What to Consider if You Are Thinking of Starting a New Business: A PR Agency Perspective
Did you know that 30.6% of businesses fail in the first two years, 49.7% fail after five years, and only 65.5% stay active for up to 10 years? Investopedia identified poor internet presence and marketing as the top reasons for this failure. As a prospective business owner, investing in a solid promotional mix strategy that involves PR campaigns will help you gain public attention, build brand awareness and communicate product relevance effectively. However, consider a few things before setting up your business or investing in a PR campaign. These include target audience, messaging, when to start, strategies to implement, hiring in-house or agency PR services, and tools for successful PR campaigns. Being a professional PR agency, this article will answer these questions to help you get the best results.
Your Target Audience
The target audience is the first building block for a business considering PR strategy in its marketing mix. Every product or service is designed to solve a problem for a specific demographic, and knowing your target audience guides that direction regarding messaging. As such, effective PR for a new business relies heavily on clearly defined target audience personas.
You should understand your target audience like you do a friend. Important information includes what they like, what content distribution channel they frequent, what relevant topics they interact with, and other demographic details. For example, if you have demographics that skew older in your target audience, newspaper, and TV PR campaigns might be more effective than social media platforms like TikTok or online news publications. Note that the who will guide the what, when, and how for a practical PR approach.
Your Messaging and Positioning
In PR, positioning, and messaging refer to how you describe your unique value. Humans are complex beings, and every business niche has at least one or two competitors. If you want to start a business that gets attention online, becomes the talk of the town, and appeals to customers' inner desires, then your messaging and positioning must be ironclad. You must consider all factors, including the customer's voice, prohibited phrases, how they want to be addressed, your brand tone, and, most importantly, your brand story. You will build lasting relationships or a loyal customer base with a story that emphasizes what the target audience wants, their inner desire, pain, and aspirations.
When to Start Running PR Campaigns
The question about when to run your first campaign has no specific answers. Why? Public relations is a tool for creating attention for your products, services, etc., and different businesses have varying business goals. However, as a new business, it's best to start running a campaign just before or immediately after you launch. You want to introduce your business to the market early, so your customers can follow your journey and develop an emotional connection to the brand.
Your PR Strategy
A PR strategy defines the method you adopt to launch a successful campaign. A well-defined strategy is highly organized and highlights all campaign elements. As a new business owner, some of the tactics that make up your PR strategy may include the following:
- Press releases to build brand awareness and generate backlinks.
- Interviews with local TV stations and media outlets to trigger brand conversation and visibility.
- Engage in community and industry events as speakers, panelists, or participants to build PR relationships with important stakeholders and promote products.
- Social media to create buzz and improve brand awareness and customer engagement.
- Partner with influencers to boost brand trust rating and drive sales.
- Publicity stunts to generate attention and get the conversation going about your upcoming product launch.
In-house Versus PR Agency
Hiring professionals matters when starting a new business that integrates PR strategy into your promotional mix. There are a few things to consider regarding in-house versus PR agencies, like budget, expertise, and goals.
A PR agency is usually less capital-intensive than an in-house PR person or team. Besides the cost, hiring an agency offers better results for new businesses as they have more experience in the industry and established relationships with media personnel. While in-house PR might take time to test different approaches, an agency can implement the best tactics immediately and get good results.
PR Management and Measurement Tools
Whether you create your PR campaign in-house or hire a PR agency, it's best to have real-time tools to track campaign performance. Here's a list of the best PR tools to consider.
- Muck Rack
- Anewstip
- HARO
- Brand24
- Google Alerts
- Brandwatch
Getting Started with PR for a New Business
Starting a business that integrates PR strategy into the promotional marketing mix without considering key factors is risky. You must arm yourself with information about significant PR elements, ready to hit the ground running from day one. Consider factors like target audience, brand messaging, positioning, when to start, and the best strategies and tools. Once you have these covered, you are one step closer to creating an effective PR campaign that creates buzz for your business and drives profitable actions. Need help with getting started? Schedule a call with our professional PR team to see how we can help your new business or product with strategic PR activities.
What Can PR Do for Your Business?
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.
