Look at every possibility to promote your business through various mediums. While entrepreneurs make big investments in advertising for publicizing business products and services, they often ignore a crucial factor, that is, public relations. Many are not aware of the role of PR in helping your business grow. It forms an important part of your content marketing strategy that adds more credibility to your business.
If you have a small business, the best way to create awareness is through PR campaigns. Before getting into the details of how public relations help to promote small business, let’s first try to understand how PR works against advertising and why they differ.
Also Read: 10 Excellent Ways to Promote your Blog Post without Paying a Dime
What is PR and How it differs from Advertising?
PR is a lot more different from advertising, and is more traditional. Companies try to talk about their products and services through advertisements. Nonetheless, it comes in paid form and attempts to convey the story of your company’s products in the most subtle manner. No wonder, advertisements are compelling and impactful to drive consumers to your company.
While companies directly endorse their products and service through advertisements, public relation depends upon third party endorsements. PR programs are long term and are meant to creating general awareness of the products and services of your company. It should be noted that the visibility created through PR campaigns enables to make your business look more established. The biggest advantage is that PR is a lot more affordable than advertisements.
During the course of PR campaigns, it plays significantly in accelerating growth and proliferating sales. Did you know that there are different kinds of PRs and campaigns that can boost visibility of your business? Here, have a look:
- Special events – Often, businesses host special events, such as, offering discounts or celebrating consumer appreciation day or hiring a brand. The objective of holding these events is to target a limited circle of individuals who first come to learn about the new proposal by your company and then distribute the news to others outside the circle. If done creatively and effectively, it can create huge impact on the consumers.
- Media tours – if you own a small business, then create awareness of your business in a very short span of time by strategically arranging a media tour. While, this might involve a bigger budget but the results are amazing.
- Newsletters- Before creating newsletters, a business owner should collect email addresses for existing and potential customers, and also create a data base. With newsletters, you can create an effective way of keeping individuals updated about your company and keep them in a loop to tell them about your company’s achievements, plans and events. Make sure that the tone of the letter is funny and engaging.
- Media Relations- As part of traditional PR strategy, you should use the media to communicate about your brand with the mass. It works as the process of spreading information about your products and services through the internet, TV, radio and newspapers.
Also read: 5 Tips To Get Real Product Review And Customer Testimonials
You can follow the tips below to make PR work for your business.
- Do not risk your chances of letting someone else set up the brand identity of your business. The right way to do it is through using the different social mediums like Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin, etc., and appointing a spokesperson in your industry and local market who has the experience in public relations. He will definitely help to boost your brand’s image above your rivals. Besides, the process will help to enhance credibility of your company and bring out a proper image of your brand.
- Did you know that creating a good news story helps to enhance the credibility of your brand three to four times? This content marketing strategy is, indeed, more effective than advertising. Since advertising is about paid self-promotion, sometimes potential customers become skeptical about your product. However, since PR is endorsed by a third party and involves very little or no money, it impact the minds more.
- Many small businesses aim to use 10 to 20 percent of their advertising budget into public relations. This leads to brand recognition and improved customer recruitment. This means looking for the biggest return on the money invested in PR.
- Building good rapport with reporters is part of the basic public relation content marketing In the long run, the reporters will become your trusted source. They will write good things about your company, products, services and brand. It is most important to build a strong media network so that when you try to disseminate any news related to your company, you can do so successfully without spending on advertisements. You can do it through PR campaigns.
The one highlighting point if that the several social mediums work in support of your brand. Use the internet thoroughly to promote your business. Hire experts who are proficient in carrying out this job successfully.
- Release press releases across the web on search engines, and through major news sites, blogs and websites. Jot down an effective and engaging press release for your business, event or announcement. Also add videos and audios to the press release and distribute the main idea of the PR through different mediums.
- You must have heard of the DIY PR service, ‘Handle your own PR’. It is an effective tool to create a media list and obtain free publicity for your small business. There are computer software and tools aimed at creating instrumental press releases.
- Hire professional writers to write quality guest posts on major blog sites. Search the best blog sites where you can connect with other bloggers so that they can learn about your brand and content. Also research for guest blogging opportunities or post advertisements in the forums for free of cost.
- Remember, even the best of PR campaigns manage to yield results overnight. Therefore, you should plan for a specific time period, say six months or a year for which the campaign will continue. Definitely, your PR efforts will pay in the long run and improve visibility of your brand, eventually.
Indeed, public relation is the key to a successful business. More so, small businesses can benefit from this content marketing strategy by hiring a PR agency and promoting their products and services in a more perpetual and trustworthy manner. Maximize benefits of self-launched PR campaigns through above mentioned tips.