The majority of business owners have probably heard of public relations, but they might not necessarily understand what it is or what the benefits of it are.
Public relations (or PR) is used to essentially promote a business or person through a variety of channels – often through the media. It can be done through creative stories (at Radioactive PR our bread and butter is digital, creative PR – learn more here), features, interviews, reactive statements and so on.
The main reason for PR is to get a business in front of people (key stakeholders) that the company wants to reach (to get them to buy their product / service or to even just be at the receiving end of a message), in order for them to achieve their objectives (e.g. sales, sign-ups etc.).
However, there are many other reasons why public relations is important to an organisation, such as:
- For brand awareness. Raising awareness is particularly important for a new business, a business looking to grow or for a person who hasn’t had much media exposure before (and wants to raise their profile). This awareness is achieved with a range of PR activities from creative PR, profile pieces, opinion pieces, and so on. More visibility means more brand awareness!
- To increase credibility. Getting a brand or person in front of as many people as possible, whether that’s through a popular news outlet, a speaker platform at a highly-regarded event or through an influencer, will increase credibility of what’s being featured – as long as it’s positive! Third-party endorsement goes a long way and that’s essentially what PR is about.
- To improve reputation. Closely linked with the two previous points is reputation. Many people associate PR with improving a person or company’s reputation and that is a large, but broader, part of it. Improving reputation might be anything, at the larger scale, like handling any crisis situations, or at the smaller scale, building a good base of profile pieces and business opinion features in credible media. Even by the PR person using certain words to describe a company can help to engineer a desired reputation.
- To improve SEO for a client’s website. A lot of what we do is PR for SEO – or what we might refer to as digital, creative PR. We do this by getting as much coverage as we can to include links back to our clients’ website. You can see an example of a recent campaign here, but you can find more examples of our work on our website. By building links to a site, will improve its SEO and therefore its position on Google (its ranking), meaning that it will appear sooner when its target audience is searching for relevant keywords.
- To increase leads. If public relations is done well, it will increase the amount of leads a company receives. This is because PR has enabled the brand or person to get in front of its target audience through a range of channels and by helping to direct people to its website.
PR can be an incredibly important tool to many organisations, but it needs to be delivered in the right way by an agency who has a proven track record of generating great results.
If you’d like to know more about how we can help you, then please drop our PR agency a line.