Social media, email marketing, and pay-per-click advertising are all forms of marketing brands are happy to implement, but what about PR?
Businesses often underestimate the power of PR, but it’s actually a pivotal component to organisations meeting their goals.
So, how does PR actually contribute to a brand’s success? Here are five reasons why this marketing activity shouldn’t be underestimated:
1. Authority and awareness
A business will strengthen its brand awareness and online visibility through targeted PR campaigns and by maintaining a continuous stream of brand mentions and links in high authority and relevant media publications.
Media publications serve as a bridge between businesses, and the consumer, which means undergoing activity to generate coverage in these publications will be extremely valuable in communicating a business’s message, products, or service. Ultimately, the more brand mentions, the more a target audience will become aware of the business. The more backlinks achieved, the more traffic will be generated to an organisation’s website.
As well as this, carrying out PR activity is a great way to put a company’s experts in front of key audiences. Consumers really value when selling goes beyond simply trying to push a product or service. By using industry experts from your businesses to tell stories, give advice, and share their thoughts on current affairs, audiences are more likely to trust the brand.
If a brand can bridge the gap between data and hard facts and transform this information into something the reader will resonate with and connect to on a deeper level, you’re on to a winner. Providing audiences with a meaningful story will increase engagement and position a brand as a thought leader in your industry.
Increased backlinks = Increase in traffic, and therefore leads and conversions.
Increased brand mentions = Increase in brand awareness and authority.
Both together = SUCCESS.
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2. New leads
As mentioned, not only does undergoing PR activity support a business’s authority and awareness among target audiences, but it can support traffic to a brand’s site, which can contribute to an increase in leads and conversions. That’s right; businesses shouldn’t underestimate PR because it’s much more than just getting coverage in the papers, it contributes to tangible results.
If a brand is creating content that provides real value to potential customers and it’s founded in an equally trustworthy media publication, they’re much more likely to click through to the site to find out more about the topic/product/service.
3. Trust and credibility
When a brand is perceived as trustworthy and credible, it will help amplify its messaging further. Think about it – journalists receive hundreds of emails a day with press releases, all pitching why they should cover a brand’s recent piece of content and why it’s valuable. If the journalist chooses your brand’s story over others, it’s already clear they think your brand can offer value to their readers.
Subsequently, when you’ve landed that all-important coverage, readers of that publication will know your brand is the real deal because their favourite publication has trusted and chosen YOUR brand’s content to be included.
If a brand can maintain a good relationship with journalists that find interest in the content you’re sharing with them, the more your brand will be shared, the more target audiences will have visibility of the brand, and the more trust will be created.
4. Website traffic and visibility
Digital PR is much more than just increasing brand awareness and authority. It’s about links. Over the years, PR has really evolved. It’s no longer just about getting coverage in local print publications. Some consider Digital PR as ‘link building’.
Linking coverage is one of the biggest pulls for brands engaging in PR. Link building is an SEO strategy that focuses on building inbound links to pages on your website. By building high-quality links, Google will perceive your site and content as trustworthy, making them more likely to rank your content higher in the search engine results pages (SERPs).
It’s worth saying that sometimes, those in the PR industry don’t like putting link building in the same bracket as Digital PR. Even though the process of Digital PR involves generating links to a site, strictly link building has often been associated with buying links, which technically breaks Google’s Webmaster Guidelines. If Google’s site crawlers identify a paid link on your site, you could have your site removed from its index; this is a considerable risk.
Therefore, this is why engaging in SEO-driven digital PR activity that instead focuses on compelling and valuable stories is the authentic and genuine way to increase online visibility and drive growth.
5. Supporting other marketing activity
Another reason brands shouldn’t underestimate PR is because of how it compliments other marketing activities. Other marketing activities which mainly aim to increase sales and promote the product or service do very little in terms of adding value to a customer. However, PR aids these marketing activities by providing educational, inspirational, and compelling content. It’s less about the hard sell of a product/service and more about nurturing prospective customers and building trust.
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If you’re interested in discovering more about how we can help you achieve your ambitions through implementing a PR strategy, get in touch!