As a small business PR is an important part of your marketing mix. It’s the most effective and cheapest method in improving your brand’s exposure as a way to drive revenue and challenge many business owner’s beliefs, no, your business is not too small to do it.
Here are five reasons why PR is an essential tool for a small business.
Relationships with media and industry contacts
Getting involved in PR allows your business to build relationships with media and industry contacts that can help boost the publicity of your company. This can be through a number of methods including interviews, direct messaging on Twitter and going to industry events. This can be intimidating, but if done well can be great for your company’s image.
Good relationships with industry contacts also afford you more opportunities to ask for press coverage. Building relationships with the press provides them with what they want, a good story about a new brand, but also allows you to expose your business to a wider audience too.
Credibility
Used effectively, PR allows your business to connect more easily with your target audience. This can be shown through press releases and blog posts, where audiences can see and get a better understanding on what the company stands for.
Audiences are now more active than ever before, so a level of trust in ethics needs to be met. An important question to consider is: ‘How can audiences trust you if they don’t know you?’
When audiences are given more information about the business and are able to see what you’ve done, they can then start to trust the business more.
Third-party endorsements are also a major factor when trying to gain credibility from audiences. People are more likely to trust a business when a familiar name recommends it. Another thing to consider therefore is to also earn the trust of other industry figureheads.
Staying power
With modern technology and the rise of digital users browsing and educating themselves with new content, businesses are now able to reach audiences from around the world.
Press releases are often visible forever so because your articles and releases can still be viewed years after their initial release, you’re able to reach a larger audience.
So the more content you publish, the more people will see it.
Crisis management
When used in the right way PR can help to counter and reverse damage caused by negative coverage. Good PR will involve pre-planning your business’s strategy through.
But with a lack of PR, managing a crisis situation can become much harder. Public opinion is one of the most important aspects that result in the success any business. So if a crisis is not adequately managed, your company’s image can easily be tarnished.
Exposure
The foremost important factor of getting involved in PR is the benefits of additional exposure. The more you use PR to your advantage in showcasing your company’s work and interacting with your audience, the more exposure your company will get.
The digital age means that companies can utilise the internet to connect with a much larger audience than ever before, and they are now able to more easily build a global audience.
When your company uses PR and becomes more active on different channels, more people get to know about you and your brand. This then provides the foundations for an increase in revenue.
Growing your brand profile and exposure is essential to increasing a business notoriety, recognise and, consequently, its sales. PR is one of the best way to do this.
Unfortunately, a large number of small businesses and start-ups don’t do PR as they can’t afford PR agencies.
This is why JournoLink built a tool enabling SMEs to manage their own PR affordably. The platform provides them with a PR toolkit to help you tell your story to the media and take advantage of every opportunity to get your brand in the news. It allows you to send press releases to over 6000 journalists, to receive editorial requests to your inbox, to access a business calendar with key dates and events and provide you with a PR toolkit to help you to enhance your PR strategy. JournoLink offers an affordable op on to the PR market, helping businesses and journalists connect through one platform.
Further reading on PR
