Public relations is a strategic management function used to build mutually beneficial relationships. What does that mean to your business? It means heads in beds, butts in seats, glowing online reviews, likes, and engagement, and most importantly, returning revenue. If you’re only using non-personalized, formulaic marketing from a big online bot company, you will never see the return on your investment. Instead, by adding PR into your communication strategy, you can see immediate improvement with meaningful results. Here are 5 reasons why your business needs PR and not just marketing:
Brand Awareness – You want people to think of you first when they’re making a choice about how to spend their time. Since it’s unlikely your business is the only one of its kind, you have to build brand awareness. Brand awareness is NOT built through paid advertisements, free products, or sales gimmicks. Instead, brand awareness is built through strategic storytelling. It’s for this reason that PR is more effective for brand awareness than advertising both in cost on return on investment.
Earned Media – Consumers and your target audience are inundated with noise both on and offline in the form of advertisements. Everyone is constantly competing for attention, and nearly everyone can “pay to play,” or advertise in some capacity. What sets brands apart is earned media through meaningful placements like feature articles, media interviews, and industry recognition. Earned media builds trust and trust is the cornerstone of a successful business.
Communication Consistency – When you’re only relying on marketing tactics to generate leads, you are limited in what and how you share information. With public relations, you control your own story and how you share it. Blogging, social media content e-newsletters, and your website content are not marketing tactics. These are important opportunities to share the experience you provide with purpose. In order to achieve success, there has to be a communication strategy, otherwise known as PR, to achieve consistency throughout all of your messaging.
Relationship Management – People are more than just their one-time purchase. Through PR, business owners and managers have an opportunity to build and maintain relationships with customers that extend beyond the experience. This is paramount for repeat revenue. But, PR can also help build, maintain, and manage relationships with valuable players like industry experts, community partners, and media gatekeepers.
Smarter Investment – Earned media is less expensive than paid media, period. Advertising costs, so does marketing. With PR, the investment is designed to see earned results, or organic growth. Particularly when you work with me, I train you about PR so that should you want to implement strategies on your own, you have the skills and knowledge to do so. Paying for cookie-cutter marketing expenses will only give you basic results and rarely can you see a true return on your investment through measures like this. Implementing a personalized and strategic plan for all of your media (paid, earned, shared and owned) which is PR, will help you make a smarter and more effective investment into the growth of your business.
Want to learn more about what PR is or how it can work for your business? Schedule a free call with me or sign up for my weekly email, The Guestbook.