With competition among businesses more fierce than ever, it’s getting increasingly difficult to stand out from the crowd. This is where public relations (PR) can help. From nurturing existing customers and reaching untapped audiences to boosting brand awareness and increasing sales, there are plenty of advantages to leveraging PR.
While PR can’t possibly achieve all your marketing goals, it is a crucial element of any marketing strategy. Whether you’re looking to utilise digital or traditional PR or a blend of both, here are a few ways PR can benefit your business.
Brand Awareness & Trust
One of the top benefits of PR is brand awareness. From proactive and reactive PR to engaging data-led stories, there are plenty of clever PR tactics and techniques you can use to get your brand in front of the masses. Acquiring brand and product/service mentions and messaging in well-known and credible titles can help enhance brand trust and boost awareness.
Organic Search Performance
A common aim of PR, specifically digital PR, is to acquire backlinks to enhance the organic search performance of your website. In a nutshell, backlinks have always been considered a ranking factor, so having a strong backlink profile can help your website appear higher in search results for relevant keywords and queries.
Earlier this year at a search conference in Bulgaria, Google’s Gary Illyes made a comment about how Google doesn’t really need that many links and how Google has made links less important:
“We need very few links to rank pages… Over the years we’ve made links less important” – Google’s Gary Illyes
After receiving a lot of follow-ups about this statement, he tweeted: “I shouldn’t have said that… I definitely shouldn’t have said that”
So how important are backlinks really? Breaking down the quote, Gary never explicitly said links don’t matter. They’re still a ranking factor but perhaps less important than they used to be. This doesn’t mean links no longer matter because they definitely do.
Additionally, when analysing the performance of any site, more often than not high-performing websites usually have strong backlink profiles made up of a good balance of high and medium authority links – this is not a coincidence. As well as a way to measure authority, links act as signals to help build topical authority and relevancy. Essentially, links are still important in enhancing the organic search performance of your website.
Exposure & Education
Bicycles, speech in film and TV, and laptops. What do these all have in common? They’re things people thought would never catch on. Products that are commonplace to us now were once a big innovation. It took ongoing exposure and education to showcase to the masses why these products could have such a positive impact on their lives and were a necessity.
Education needs to be part of your marketing strategy. You need to inform your target audience why they need your product. What makes you different from competitors?
PR perfectly educates by informing your audience with subtle messaging. Consumers don’t want to feel as though they are being sold too, it needs to feel natural and organic. PR leverages entertaining and topical subjects to completely alter the way your product or service is being perceived. After all, PR, rooted in psychology, was pioneered by Sigmund Freud's nephew, Edward Bernays.
Customer Acquisition
Another valuable PR benefit is customer acquisition. Customers are the bread and butter of a company and without them, you’d be pretty lost. As well as nurturing existing customer relations, PR can reach untapped audiences and drive new customers your way. The more your brand is mentioned in the media, the more likely customers will see you. Simple.
PR drives new customers. Instant new customers are secured when they click through a link to your website or search your brand after seeing a piece of press coverage. Some customers take longer to acquire. While it’s unlikely that a customer will convert at first glance, consistent coverage, exposure and subtle messaging can help persuade customers to shop with your brand.
Customer Loyalty
Positive media coverage plays a pivotal role in driving customer loyalty. Earning coverage in credible titles through positive messaging and stories can help enhance your reputation and position you as a brand worthy of trust. This in turn can lead to increased customer loyalty as well as attracting new customers.
Sales
PR drives sales and revenue. It’s often used as a long-term sales acquisition strategy. People aren’t likely to purchase after seeing a product once. Unless the person knows exactly what they want, they usually need to see the product at least seven times before they buy. The valuable benefits of PR such as increased brand awareness and organic ranking improvements have a powerful effect.
However, PR can also impact short-term sales. Product reviews and round-up inclusions drive instant sales, and future sales when an individual searches for the best products or reviews of your product. PR is a long-term strategy for customer acquisition, loyalty, and indirect sales. Often, the customer journey looks a little like this:
Reading your name in a piece of coverage and thinking that you sound cool.
Spotting your company in some positive PR coverage and deciding to click through to see your website.
Thinking about buying a relevant product/service and remembering you.
Examples of PR
To further highlight the importance of public relations in business, here are a few real-life examples of PR campaigns and projects producing tangible results.
Bolstering Sales
A2D2, a company that connects analogue music devices to smart speaker sound systems, partnered with Lem-uhn to increase brand awareness and drive sales. We drove a 1515.33% rise in sales while all their paid ads were turned off, equating to the company’s biggest sales week yet.
Increasing Brand Awareness
When it came to growing Lay-Z-Spa’s brand awareness we took the job seriously. Within three months, we secured the UK’s leading hot tub brand 504 pieces of press coverage reaching 1.7 billion people.
Acquiring New Customers
A great example of how PR can help acquire new customers is when we worked with Cool Crutches & Sticks to drive brand awareness and customers while making more people aware of the issues facing disabled people and increasing representation. Placing the Co-founders and their customers at the heart, we showcased why the brand was vital to many people. We paired this with topical campaigns and reactive pitching to give a voice to the stories affecting the disabled community. Within six months, we reached 1.4 billion people and increased traffic to the website by 520% following Amelia’s interview with Daily Star.
When working with The Natural Love Company, we secured them a feature in a round-up of the best sex toys. This resulted in driving 544 customers (533 of which were new) to the website and converting 19 transactions, equating to £2,358.89 worth of sales within a month.
Your PR Fit
PR is not a one-size-fits-all. The right partner for you should understand this too. At Lem-uhn, we can help you elevate your PR strategy and achieve a multitude of benefits for your business. Book a free 15-minute PR strategy call to see how we can help you.
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