According to a 2012 survey of members from the Public Relations Society of America, “Public relations is a communication process that builds mutually beneficial relationships between organizations and their publics.” Why is it, then, that so many companies engage with PR primarily as a reactive tool to mitigate the effects of bad press? There has always been more to public relations than putting out inconvenient fires. As information channels continue to evolve, businesses can secure a market advantage by proactively investing in public relations, fostering meaningful and lasting relationships with their audience.
PR is a personality-builder for your company, helping you identify and attract the right shareholders and customers based on common values and interests. With such foundational work at stake, it doesn’t make sense to put PR efforts on the backburner until a catastrophe strikes.
Planning your brand’s 2024 PR strategy is not only possible, it’s highly advisable. By planning ahead, you can develop a PR blueprint that will unite your branding and marketing efforts and help you ward off potential disasters.
If you’re thinking of putting off PR planning until later in the year, consider these five reasons to get started on your 2024 strategy today.
1. Build Trust
Your business is more than the products and services you offer. Public relations helps you shape your brand’s story. By sharing brand differentiators and industry insights with the public, you can establish your company’s position as a helpful resource to potential customers and key stakeholders. Taking things a step further, providing information about your business goals and community engagement enables you to show the world what they can expect from your company—building proactive trust that can be critical in securing and retaining customers.
2. Enhance Marketing Efforts
Modern marketing combines informative content (like advertising) with interactive content (like social media engagement) to develop an ongoing conversation with your most important stakeholders. Effective PR campaigns should supplement your marketing efforts, helping you build a strong brand identity and creating buzz around new products and features. Incorporating public relations can help create standardized, mission-oriented language to support critical marketing efforts, like responding to online reviews and critical social media commenters— showing your consumers that you’re invested in their opinions. Producing different types of high-quality written content can also help improve your company’s SEO rankings through increased exposure and backlinks.
By communicating with consumers, investors, employees and the community, businesses can extend their reach to target multiple audiences. These communications set the groundwork for successful lead conversion.
3. Prepare for Disaster
While PR isn’t all about putting out fires, mitigating negative publicity is a crucial part of maintaining a good reputation. If you don’t have a positive reputation with your public before disaster strikes, it will be much harder to establish one after the fact.
Consider the brands you interact with. When a crisis emerges that conflicts with a company’s well-known reputation, you feel surprise, and quite possibly, disbelief. But when the first information you hear about a company is bad news, changing your mind about the business can be much more difficult. Good PR is like insurance against bad publicity. You wouldn’t go out and invest in a car insurance policy after your vehicle was totaled in a wreck. Attempting to repair a reputation that began in pieces will have a similar effect. When you proactively build a strong public reputation, your response to a negative situation will carry more weight.
It’s essential to note that this credibility extends beyond consumers and loyal customers. Establishing your business personality gives you the voice to reassure employees and investors when unexpected situations arise.
4. Attract Investors
Traditional marketing efforts are designed to convince potential customers to purchase your products or services. But many businesses can’t survive and thrive on sales alone. You need capital to grow from a startup to a profitable company, and to generate quality products and services that will help you maintain your reputation. Luckily, strong PR can help you attract investors at any stage of your business journey.
By weaving investor-friendly language into your integrated PR and marketing strategy, you can attract investors to your door instead of going to theirs. While thousands of startups seek funding each year, investors respond to those that offer something truly revolutionary. Show your ability to be a disruptor by sharing what you know and the efforts you’ve made to reach your current position. Build hype around the ways your products and services will alleviate pain points and solve problems in new ways.
While you’re showing potential investors what you have to offer, don’t forget about where you came from and why you chose the path you’re on. Investing in media relations provides an excellent platform for businesses to create a growth story that grabs the attention of investors.
5. Weather Economic Downturns
While not all economic indicators are currently pointing toward a recession, economic uncertainty continues to be a defining issue for the tech industry. Unwelcome factors like supply chain breakdowns and rising inflation can undermine consumer and business confidence and cause everyone to tighten their grip on their wallets.
With tough decisions on the horizon, shortsighted businesses consider cutting their communications budgets. What they fail to consider is that your business’s reputation is more important than ever during a market downturn. With fewer dollars to go around, consumers and investors need more reasons to keep you top of mind and invest their money in you. By investing in market-conscious, flexible PR strategies, you can maintain your relationships with loyal customers, and even develop new ones. When your competitors are shrinking their PR budgets, the right PR investment can give an edge over the competition and help you convert their customers.
Modern consumers demand authenticity and regular communication from the brands they interact with. Taking steps to proactively build and maintain relationships, can help you establish a sense of familiarity which will give you a voice for marketing efforts, diffuse crisis situations and connect with your customers and investors. By planning ahead to cement a solid PR strategy, you’ll be more likely to weather the changes in the coming year with ease.
