5 best ways a powerful PR can build your business as shared by web design agencies, branding agencies, and creative agencies.
With the increased urge of consumers in terms of products and expectations in the eCommerce space, businesses are working tremendously hard to make their online and offline presence beam like a star. And, to make your brand presence strong, public relationship building is a powerful tool.
No matter the size of your business, whether a niche apparel or website design company, every organization’s success, in a direct or indirect way, relies on reputation. And, to build, maintain and manage those reputations, you need PR.
Before reaching the roots and understanding the power of brand PR for building the business, let’s understand the general concept of Public Relation.
What is Public Relation?
After a lot of comprehensive discussions, in 2012, The Public Relations Society of America defined PR as a “strategic communication process that builds mutually beneficial relationships between organizations and their publics”. Public relation is about influencing, building, and maintaining a positive relationship with the stakeholders, marked audience, and across all media channels with the pure intention to build a fine optimistic brand image in their eyes. It’s the top-drawer level of communication that a company uses with its audience and across all media channels.
Having read the above, a question might pop up to you about branding – what branding agencies do, and PR being exactly the same. Your question is to the point, but the answer is no. The where-to-reach location is the same, but the direction is different. Your branding focuses on the brand’s visual element to build a strong and memorable brand identity like logo, typography, color palette, and so on, while PR builds a strong brand identity by focusing on communication and reputation.
Why is Public Relations Important?
One thing that can make or break down your business is your reputation. It’s only a matter of multiple shares and reposts that can light the fire that stains the reputation for a never-ending time.
On a daily basis, a business communicates with customers, targeted audience, partners, journalists, philanthropists, politicians, the general public, artists, etc. PR defines how your company talks with these individuals. For the audience, a negative brand identity welcomes a negative perception of the company that results in low conversions, a low percentage of the performance of marketing efforts, a higher number of unsubscriptions, a high bounce rate, etc. ultimately, low success. On the other hand, a positive brand identity brings your business a lot of opportunities to grow bigger and better in positive terms.
This is what PR is for, building and maintaining reputation.
Let’s get to know these 5 ways powerful Public relations can do for building your business
PR develops your unique brand identity
Your audience is going to make an impression of your business on the basis of the displayed and conveyed brand’s identity, how you communicate with your audience, and the values. PR helps you to develop a positive impression of your brand which boosts audience trust and pushes them to invest.
A good PR takes advantage of your uniqueness (better than the creative agencies) which makes you stand apart from the competitors and ensures it is well-conveyed. In doing so, PR promotes you to understand and gather precise data about your unique selling point which is the key point to success. Based on the data gathering, PR strategies are made to convey the USPs.
PR builds credibility
Apart from advertisements holding a rational possibility of being untrue or fake statements and promises to sell the product, PR is more about what others say about and not what you say about your business. This builds strong trust as we always believe the word of mouth more than an ad running on tv. This sort of connection and trust between the brand and the consumer becomes the base of long-term business relations.
Moreover, it’s always a challenge to get your brand presented on popular media channels as they do a detailed checking about the brand before presenting it on their channel. Their channel is popular because of sharing well-calculated and factual information that audiences admire. It’s an achievement for a good PR to get their brand telecasted on popular channels, which builds brand credibility with the audience and benefits in the long term.
PR got your back under uncontrollable circumstances
In today’s era, it’s fair to say that talk or gossip travels faster than the air. Having said that, sometimes the company gets in trouble without any fault or for no real reason. At some point, every business has been going under constant criticism from the audience for one or the other reason. Such an unwanted situation can jeopardize your diamond-polished market goodwill and forget about new customers, even existing customers would turn their faces.
PR is prepared beforehand and formulates a plan or strategy to tackle unwanted situations. It provides a planned structure of communication tricks, messaging, relation building, and actions that help company leaders to minimize the damage to the best level. With the right communication and actions, a brand can not only surpass such a situation but emerge as a strong, powerful, and collected brand.
New leads
Though PR is not a direct sale tool, it’s the armor that consists of great strength in conveying positive information about the company to its targeted audience that results in new interests and customers. PR creates and gets the direct path to flow the direct message to the marked audience with the purpose to influence them to make a move toward your brand.
Having discussed the marketing campaigns having a possibility of feel-false statements, people saturate 3rd party information more adversely to make up a decision. Now, as your brand gets telecasted on a popular channel, it is viewed by thousands of potential customers and prospects. PR is necessary to develop as well as sustain the business in the long run.
Active communication with the audience
A well-executed PR can create a platform for two-way dialogues between the company and its audience. This opens up the chance for the company to get feedback on products, on how they feel about your service or product, what enhancement they would love, what things to optimize to make it better, challenges, etc. This is a great way of improvising your product as well as recognizing the audience that you care about them.
This can be executed well by jumping to social media and conversing with your audience about their feedback, brand innovations, and so on. A great benefit of this is, your audience feels valuable and you also get an idea of your audience’s preferences.
On the way to the last line
Can you create a brand without knowing about the public’s viewpoint? No. That is why a well-planned PR strategy is necessary and effective in business growth and takes your business to the next heights. If you consider PR only when you need to increase sales or are in a web of uncontrollable situations, you are making a big mistake.
Regardless of the market graph, if your business is well-reputed and has good exposure to the prospects, your business will flourish no matter what. To build such exposure to the audience and maintain a true sense of credibility, PR should be the cornerstone of your company’s marketing strategy. If you consider PR only when you need to increase sales or are in a web of uncontrollable situations, you are making a big mistake. To go bigger, better and for the long term, PR is the high priority topic.
Author Bio: Brijesh Jakharia
Brijesh Jakharia co-founded SPINX Digital in 2005 and takes great pride in crafting web and mobile marketing solutions for mid-market businesses to enterprises. Marketing is his passion, and the thrill to build a brand from the ground up has helped him craft successful brand stories for world-class clients. While not at work, he loves to spend his time on research and reading digital marketing stories.
