Public relations reveal your brand’s voice and identity in the market, media, and consumers. Public relations campaigns are the most valuable communication tool for entrepreneurs and small businesses to tell their brand’s story.
Do you know Public image contributes about 63% to your business revenue? It is great exposure for the entrepreneurs to tell what they are trying to promote or sell!
What are Public Relations?
“The main objective of PR is to gain media & public attention.” If executed with a result-oriented approach can help you meet your business goals. Unfortunately, most entrepreneurs and startups are not taking advantage of public relations due to the cost or budget constraints.
Public relations campaigns regulate the constant flow of valuable information between your business and consumers. For example, sharing news items, and common topics of public interest without any direct payment. The focus is to make a positive impact on your new or old business among the audience.
It includes managing:
- Shareholder inquiries
- Media Requests
- Public affairs
- Financial Resources & Risks
- Identifying issues & latest trends
- Social Media Communication and others
Types of Public Relations
Just give it a thought, if your company has Public Relations are crucial to boosting your business growth, and revenue. Public relations have been divided into 7 different categories:
- Media Relations: It involves forming mutually beneficial relationships with the media organizations by consistently sharing quality content about your company story or new products
- Investor Relations: Keep your investor informed about every single company affair. It includes managing investor events, legal department, accounting department, media queries, public complaints, releasing financial reports, etc.
- Government Relations: To fulfill the corporate responsibilities, policies for employee protection, consumer protection to represent the authenticity and positive image of your company to the government.
- Community Relations: Handling the niche communities with good communication skills through company blogs helps get positive and negative feedback. Here PR manages to coordinate business events, highlighting the business benefits, new affairs, etc.
- Internal Relations: It includes employees counseling, introducing new policies, mutual responsibilities, marketing strategies, and work hierarchy to launch the new products and business events.
- Crisis Communications: It includes building strong relations with the media and stakeholders to handle the company’s reputation, financial crisis.
- Marketing Communications: It supports social media marketing activities regarding new service or product launches, generating leads, handling special ad campaigns.
Top #5 Public Relation Tools & Activities:
- Press Releases: It contains the summary and important information about your new product or service launch. The press release is a basic building block to gain media attention.
- Fact Sheets: It is a short document containing concise and detailed information about products like origin, feature, cost, etc. without any editing.
- Video News Releases: Also referred to as infomercials, video news releases usually run for a maximum of 90 s to highlight the special features of your product
- Business Events: The strategy is to draw attention by organizing news conferences, web seminars, contests, sponsorships, and partnerships.
- Publications: Both the consumers and companies use the published material to track the competitors, and growth it includes blogs, articles, brochures, and annual reports.
FAQS about Public Relations (PR)
How do Public relations help a business?
PR focuses on increasing your brand visibility, credibility, and awareness by sharing true information with consumers. It not only helps to promote your products and services but also helps cultivate healthy relationships with the public.
What is PR in entrepreneurship?
As the name suggests, Public relations tells how the audience reacts and feels about your brand, products, or company. It helps establish a positive image of your company, and the right exposure to tell the audience about your products & services.
What are the examples of PR?
PR is an effective marketing tool that used paid and unpaid media services to gain attention and build long-term relationships with consumers. Some of the best examples are:
- Sponsorships or partnerships.
- Newsletters
- Advertorials
- Social media
What are the benefits of hiring a PR agency?
- Builds trust by increasing your brand authenticity.
- A cost-effective approach to reach a wider audience
- PR campaigns can attract news outlets.
- Direct communication medium to advertise your services.
Final Words
Public Relations campaigns focus to not only promote your brand values but also make sure to hit the targeted audience. It helps maintain your brand image, and form healthy community relations. It is an opportunistic platform for entrepreneurs that can earn you free media services.
The best examples of PR stunts; google donated to Ebola victims, Facebook promoting the rights of the LGBTQ community, and coco-cola was in news for promoting obesity issues. All such strategic actions helped these organizations to earn the trust of consumers.
In a nutshell, Internet-based PR is important for startups and entrepreneurs to stay ahead of the competition small businesses.