What is Public Relations?
Great question! Public relations is the strategic communication standard that your organization has put into place to ensure the consistency of your brand, customer relations, vendor partnerships, and business objectives. What you are saying and not saying is business will speak loudly to your target audience. Ensuring your employees, your partners, and your customers receive consistent communication from your company is critical to the overall goal of executing your mission statement. It’s also critical to ensuring you maintain regionally and nationally accepted Human Resources standards in both legal situations and corporate situations. It’s most critical when faced with inquiries from the media and when your company has been involved in a legal action.
Potential customers, vendors, and business partners alike will vet your company and its level of executing a great public relations campaign. While the small details might not mean much to you, it may be a huge impact to your company. A customer will notice if there’s a typo, an incorrect price posted, or mismatched promotional material. This might result in the customer deciding to move in a different direction due to your company’s lack of attention to detail. In this day and age, customers are looking for companies to be on their game and something like a business using an “@aol.com” email or a “@gmail.com” email versus your domain name like “@theadleaf.com” will leave customers feeling like you’re not as trustworthy as your competitors. It will leave your customers feeling like you you lack legitimacy and integrity.
Developing and executing a well-designed public relations campaign is one of the first steps towards effectively developing your brand and increasing your company’s brand awareness. A high-quality campaign will also help to protect your company in times of strife and times of where your company is struggling with an exterior issue. As a business owner, you’re battling long hours, sleepless nights, financial restraint, and lack of time with your family. The last thing you want to experience is your company being slandered or exposed through an employee who thought it was a great idea to share a social media of something behind the scenes that the general public might not understand. You and your family’s livelihood depends on you maintaining a positive image in the media. You wouldn’t want to hear that someone in your company was treating a customer or potentially vendor disrespectfully or engaging in inappropriate communication with an external force that could potentially implicate your company in a negative legal situation. Having a bulletproof public relations campaign will support you and ensure these situations don’t occur.
We believe that through a strong public relations campaign, your business will experience increases in the following ways:
Increases in Business Through new Clients/Customers
At times, people within your business may feel that reaching out to new clients is simply something they need to do to check the box and meet their quota. However, how do you set yourself apart from the competition when you know your clients are viewing repetitive advertisements all day long? Setting up a public relations campaign will allow you to bring out creative new ways to attract consumers with your original content. Changing the way you put your company’s name out there can be the major difference between a client ignoring your name entirely or actually choosing to do business with you.
Building Connections
One of the best ways to effectively grow a business or even maintain one is to have connections with specific people, whether it’s consumers, investors, or other business owners. If you’re looking to increase the awareness of your company, there are several mediums to choose from such as television commercials, magazines, podcasts, news interviews, and more. The key is to remember that your goal is to build trust within your target audience and not simply sell your service or product. By doing this, you are not only building connections with local media outlets, but also the consumers and others as needed.
Increases Credibility and Positive Images of Your Business
If you’re looking to attract the attention of more consumers, larger companies, or other acquisitions, having high credibility and a positive image of your business is necessary. Being featured in the press and social media can spread your name across the community and the Internet to people you wouldn’t have been able to reach otherwise. The more positive the content is that you’re apart of producing, the better it will support the cause of your company. Conversely, an effective public relations campaign can help to shed light on any negativity that has affected your brand. A strong public relations campaign will allow you to maintain a positive image both in the public and internally within your company, which will benefit your employees’ productivity long-term.
Improve Your Company’s Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
You may not know this, but a public relations campaign can actually go hand in hand with search engine optimization (SEO). When consumers search for your company online, they may not be able to find your website at all due to it being hidden by a dozen other websites or publications in the same industry with similar keywords. With a public relations campaign, a digital approach can be better for your online presence which will trickle into your community presence as well. This will assist with helping push your website to the top of search result pages, which then result in a better image for your company overall.
Reach Your Target Market Easily
When it comes to certain targeted audiences, it can be difficult to reach them depending on the scope of your industry. A strong public relations campaign allows widespread exposure to the public, no matter what platform you may want to implement said campaign on. For example, if your company is aiming to target teenagers, your campaign should involve a strategy that focuses on specific social media outlets. If your target audience is a young adult audience, then you might want to consider pursuing being featured on a podcast or a local television program. Your target audience ultimately determines what media outlets you should focus your efforts on.
If you’re interested in building an effective public relations campaign but you’re not sure where to start, give us a call at 321-255-0900 or email us at info@theadleaf.com. We’ll work with you to determine your desired outcome and provide expert recommendations based on our years of experience in the field.
