Having a multi-faceted approach to PR and marketing can help you become more visible and trusted in your marketplace and help you reach your ideal customers.
What is Public Relations? PR is often confused for its adjacent industries of marketing and branding. Public relations is about getting your name, or business name, out into the public. Common strategies include media placements, news articles, press releases, and media interviews on television, podcasts or radio. One of the most common places people confuse public relation is with social media marketing.
Think about it this way: PR is other people talking about you, where as marketing is talking about yourself. The pieces should work together, PR, branding and marketing, but they are separate specialties.
How do you start a public relations strategy?
#1 Start with your foundational branding
You can see these specialties converge immediately. You need to know who your ideal customer is, where they are, what price point you’re selling your product at, and you need to look and sound the part through your visuals and messaging so that you can be pitched effectively. When these pieces are done properly, you have higher chance of being picked up by whatever outlet you’re pitching to.
#2 Goal setting
What is your big hairy audacious goal? Do you want a celebrity endorsement? Do you want to be featured in Forbes? Or do you want to land a high net-worth client? Whatever your big goal is will help dictate what types of strategies we use.
#3 Research, research, research.
In PR, we figure out everything relating to your customer that we can. Where does this celebrity hang out? Who’s in their inner circle? What products do they like? Where do they live? And more. The more you can find out about the person or place you’re trying to connect with the more relevant you can make yourself. You also be a few steps ahead on building the relationship by knowing what interests or activities you have in common.
#4 Strategy.
We figure out a multitude of ways to get you to that goal. The strategy in itself is a multi-step process and can take different forms depending on your business and what we learn from the research. It can start by finding the right publications or media placements to get you closer to the inner circle while building your credibility. It can include warm outreach to your network or cold outreach to key people.
Public relations is very much a credibility game. Things that you do for public relations may not directly get you business but, it builds your reputation in a way above and beyond branding or marketing. Yes, public relations is an investment, but when done properly, your ROI will absolutely be higher than what you put in.
Think about how much that dream client would put in your pocket. What is it worth to you to land your dream client, and clients similar to them?
As with any business strategy, there are costs associated with public relations. The biggest cost is paying your publicist to do the research and placements. There are some small additional costs to be aware of depending on the strategy. Some examples include press releases, which cost money to be released to different news agencies, or gifting – this would be where you would send a product to a celebrity or influencer, and it would cost you your cost of the product with the goal that they will promote it and you will sell more.
There is an upfront cost to PR. It can take time to get some traction on your strategy and dozens of pitches to get a handful of placements. Expect to pay for two to four months worth of public relations before you start seeing that return.
The last cost to consider is that if you haven’t done your foundational branding, you will have to put that in place which can be a cost all on its own.
When you put a strong public relations strategy in place, you can expect to start seeing your business and your name in the news whether that is in local, national or international media in a variety of forms. Imagine what that would do for your business what kind of credibility that would bring. How much easier would it be to promote yourself having the NBC or Forbes logo on your website or telling someone when you network that you were published on Entrepreneur.com. Imagine bringing a client to your office and having the publications you’ve been featured in sitting on your desk. Show people that you are the expert in your industry, you’ve been interviewed, quoted and featured in a number of different places and that people are talking about you and amazing work you do. PR is an under-utilized strategy for small to medium enterprises. Through research, branding and strategy, you can level up your business, get high net worth clients and build your reputation in your market. Get the exposure and credibility that your competitors are not. Imagine what opportunities your business will get from mass media releases in the form of press releases, podcasts or media placements. Become an omnipresent force in your industry that makes you hard to ignore for those clients that you always wanted.