Every business relies on its public image, but how you go about building up that image is a matter of personal preference. Yet, there are a number of common methods that work well in creating a strong, positive public relations campaign. By taking these suggestions and infusing them with your own sense of style, you can build your brand more successfully.
Start with a Strong Strategy
Before you can begin making your mark, you have to know what you’re trying to achieve with your PR campaign. Your only interest may be to access a new market or you may want to improve sales in your local region. Whatever your goal, you will have to determine what factors you will use to measure your progress. Making use of those factors and a system of gathering data analytics, you can see how well your campaign is performing.
Identify Your Audience
It’s also essential to identify the audience you’re trying to reach with your message. If you’re uncertain, communications on Behrman or another PR specialist may help you understand how to target the right audiences. In one example, a business may be targeting families. If so, messages addressed to parents might be better received than messages targeting single, career-minded professionals.
What’s the Best Medium to Use?
While social media marketing is the rage in today’s marketing world, that doesn’t necessarily mean that’s the best way to get results. If your audience is primarily made up of housewives, television or radio advertising might be the best ways to reach them. Any PR message you wish to send should use the medium most often accessed by your target audience.
Encourage Interaction
The most successful campaigns are those that offer ways for the audience to interact. This makes the campaign seem more like entertainment than a marketing tactic. Try to make the activity easy to understand and fun, so people will want to interact with your site or page. Contests are one popular method, but you can also increase engagement by creating unique and shareable content. When your followers are sharing your posts, they’re acting as your own team of PR reps.
Everything Should Link Back to You
No matter what approach you take with your PR campaign, it’s important that all of your PR messages lead back to you, your company, or your products. If you own a cosmetics company and post an article about skin care tips, be sure you’re linking back to your own products. Otherwise, you’re just wasting time and money on a fruitless campaign. In addition to driving up sales, this will help consumers connect those types of products to your specific company. In the previous example, linking to your line of skin care products will help consumers connect your brand to the cosmetics industry.
Offer Something of Value
While the point of your PR campaign is to make your business more visible, pushing too hard will have disastrous effects. Today’s consumers hate the hard sell and often turn away from a blatant sales pitch. Instead, give your audiences something of value, such as those skin care tips. This way you’re offering valuable information at little or no cost to yourself, while also establishing yourself or your brand as an authority.
When you develop a strategy for your next PR campaign, it may help to think of it more as building a relationship with the public. As in any relationship, each one of you benefits from the experience. In this way, brand building and public relations are often interconnected. These suggestions and tips will help your customers feel valued and that may be the best way to build positive public relations.
The article has the contribution of Douglas Pitassi who is a small business blogger and freelance writer.
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