With the help of public relations, companies can build and maintain a positive public image.
At the core of PR is effective dialogue. PR involves companies gaining exposure to their target audiences by using news items and topics of public interest that don’t require direct payments to promote.
There are thousands of companies all over the world that conduct PR campaigns every day with little-to-no investment.
That means PR is an effective promotional tool for any kind of business, and it’s a tool that can help small businesses level the playing field between themselves and their big market competitors.
To truly achieve success with PR campaigns, companies need a practical set of skills and strategies that are designed to improve a brand’s public reputation.
When done right, PR campaigns can help companies achieve their promotional goals at a fraction of the cost of investments in other types of promotional strategies like marketing or ads.
The key to PR success is the right messaging for potential consumers. Therefore, all PR tasks should communicate a company’s marketing message, and have a newsworthy angle.
5WPR Insights
Credibility
These days, most consumers are quite skeptical of advertising efforts from brands. They generally take all ads with a grain of salt, especially when it comes to believing the claims that brands are making about themselves and their solutions.
However, those same consumers are a lot more likely to believe the things that they read in articles from reliable outlets.
That’s because if someone else has tried a solution and is now endorsing it in a published piece, many people will think those claims are more likely to be true.
Companies can invest in PR efforts to create and nurture relationships with the right journalists.
This will make these journalists more likely to write about those companies and their solutions, which provides more credibility to the claims that the companies are making in their promotional efforts.
Appeal
A company’s public relations efforts need to have an angle.
All the promotional messages sent out to consumers should be intended for customers and the public at large, which is different compared to traditional marketing and advertising efforts because they tend to only appeal to a select target audience.
That target audience constitutes the sales prospects of a business and traditional marketing isn’t intended to reach a bigger audience than them.
Control and Repetition
One thing that makes PR different from general marketing and advertising is the fact that marketing and advertising can be precisely controlled, unlike PR.
Companies doing PR don’t have a lot of control over the format, content, timing, or the size of the messages intended to show up in media outlets.
That’s quite different from marketing and ads, which companies have precise control over. Companies can also make them repeatable. With stories in media outlets, journalists will only write once about a single story.
Meanwhile, companies can repeat their ads as many times as necessary to convert consumers.
Dara Busch is Co-CEO of 5WPR, a leading PR firm.
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