6 excellent reasons to use PR to grow your business
Many businesses are unaware of it, but PR is crucial to grow your business. It is often pushed into the background and this can be a grave mistake. This is because most of people don’t truly understand what PR is.
PR is the discipline aimed at communicating the right messages to your different audiences: stakeholders, customers and third-party influencers such as journalists and bloggers.
Whether it is through social media, press releases or through your website content, a part of your marketing efforts should be focused on it. Still not convinced? Read our six excellent reasons to use PR.
1. It’s a great way to grow your business notoriety and recognition
To grow your business, you need to confirm some things; first that your target audience hears about you, and secondly that they have a positive idea of your company and of your product or service. This is what public relations is here for; building your brand profile.
By producing content on your website, by using social media to distribute this content, by sending your stories to the journalists, by engaging with the right influencers and by reacting on industry-related news, you build a positive brand image and you position yourself as an expert in your sector. This is an excellent way to increase your notoriety and to reach prospects.
2. PR is worth three times the value of an ad
Promoting your business is one of the main parts of your marketing strategy. You probably know that there are many ways to do this, whether it’s through traditional advertising, display advertising, Adwords campaigns, event sponsorship, partnerships or more. The list is long, but make sure not to forget public relations.
Indeed, experts estimate that the value of a piece of coverage is worth at least three times the value of an ad. Why? Because your product is talked about by a third party person and not by yourself. Because of the overabundance of ads, consumers trust them a lot less. However over 80% of them still trust personal recommendations, so when a journalist or a blogger mentions your business, people are more likely to check it out.
3. It’s cost effective
As opposed to advertising or other promotion channels, PR is very affordable, so very interesting for a small business. If you decide to manage it yourself the costs can be minimal.
Of course, you can decide to call on an agency, but you will have to spend a relatively large budget on it, but be aware that DIY PR is completely manageable. Online affordable platforms exist, such as JournoLink that provide a press release distribution service, databases of journalists, and PR toolkits to help you manage it yourself.
4. It doesn’t require specific skills
Many small businesses don’t do PR because they think they don’t have the right skills to do it in-house and that only PR agencies can get results. Actually, journalists really like when they are contacted directly by businesses, especially small ones.
Remember that journalists always value the human story behind news. PR is all about telling stories and developing relationships with the right people, which can be done in-house, especially with the help of online PR platforms and social media.
5. PR can improve your web traffic and SEO
When you get covered by a media website or by a blog they raise the profile of your business. Most of the time, they will include a link to your website to enable their readers to check it out, meaning that you should see your website traffic increase. Make sure to promote the piece of coverage on your social media as well to make the most of it.
PR will also improve your search engine optimisation (SEO), as one of the things that search engine bots look at is the number and the quality of links leading to your website.
6. PR helps you increase your revenue
Ultimately, PR is a great revenue generation tool for all the reasons above. It helps increase your web traffic, increase your brand recognition and notoriety, build your brand profile and promote your product(s) or service(s) to the right audience.
