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!
